The Narrative Docket: Working with young people involved in legal and police systems, by Clement Yee
This 3-part video introduces the Narrative Docket, a narrative practice innovation developed for use when working with adolescents who have been referred to social services typically through the legal and police systems. Its contents comprise of a ‘collective document’ containing accounts of experiences of being involuntarily referred, a ‘Court Trial Metaphor’ layout that acts as a platform facilitating the use of various narrative practices, and a ‘checklist’ that captures the qualities, values, characteristics, expertise, knowledge and skills of the young person which may be less obviously reflected in other psychometric instruments which are required to be administered in the course of programs that involuntarily referred persons find themselves in. The ‘Narrative Docket’ is posited as being of help in facilitating the transition of involuntarily referred persons and their family members from paying various prices of their freedom, towards discovering their prizes of freedom for protection from the clutches of future offending. Narrative ideas underpinning this Docket include collective narrative practice, externalizing of problems, outsider witness, re-authoring as well as counter-documentation.
Clement Yee enjoys work in the field of adolescent mental health and well-being and has been in the employ of the Institute of Mental Health as well as Fei Yue Community Services in the first 9 years of his career life on the small, sunny island of Singapore. His time as a social worker with these organisations involved encountering adolescents grappling with mental illness in the lives of their own and their family members, journeying with adolescents involuntarily referred to time-limited case management programs for having committed an offence, as well as providing counselling and therapy services to college students. He aspires to make good of his life through making helpful contributions to the abilities of others to be resilient and creative in wrestling with problems encountered in day to day living.
