By Ileana Camacho Medrano

Deputy Director of Foreign Relations

of Youth Weaving Ties, AC

Leaving childhood and becoming a teenager is not always so smooth. The stage of the so-called rites of passage is often even more difficult. Knowing when we are no longer young is complicated when we consider the large number of definitions and periods that deal with the transition from one phase of life to another.

I allowed myself to do an exercise for this article, on the social construction of adolescence based on dictionaries that we find on the Internet that contain definitions based on official, scientific or common sense concepts. In them I first found that the four phases of human development are: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age.

Something very interesting is that youth and adolescence are also synonyms for: apprentice, harmful, inexperienced, development, growth, immature, green, etc. among many other definitions that require complementarity. That is, all the denominations presuppose that the young person is not complete, that he is in a stage of becoming, when that is not the case!

Curiously, on the other hand, old and old age appear, among other things, as: mature, maturity, veteran, and the antonym of old age is youth. However, old age and being old is not a privileged situation in human development; the old, according to the definitions, is also crooked, decrepit, outdated, senile, ancient, archaic, ruined, lackluster, spoiled, finished, out of fashion, etc.

Along the same lines, a boy or girl cannot be considered a privilege in the dictionaries consulted, among other things childhood is: infancy, minority, smallness, innocence or minor and a boy or girl has as synonyms: creature, infant, chick, inexperienced, apprentice, novice, reflective, inconsiderate, impulsive, mischievous, hasty, brat, etc. 

When I looked at the term adult, I found that there are not many synonyms and those that exist denote a great difference with the other three phases of development. I found only nine synonyms for adult: grown, grown-up, older, big, accomplished, developed, mature, experienced and young. All of them are antonyms of the other phases and it can be said that being a child, young or old is “not being an adult”.

This little exercise leads us to reflect on the type of society in which we live. Being an adult means “reaching the greatest growth or development.” On the contrary, the other stages of life are in opposition and occupy a marginal and derogatory place. We live in a strongly adult-centric society.

The vision of youth as a transitional stage implicitly denies us recognition as social subjects; this “incompleteness” is highlighted with the term “immaturity”; we are rendered invisible in our contributions and made visible when the social order is disturbed; thus, the vision of youth as a stage-problem is easily given way, which is based on a stigmatizing and reductionist emphasis on youth.

From negative visibility emerge policies with reductionist perspectives to deal with youth risk and transgression. Hence the program "Young people building the future" or the corporate programs developed by government institutions such as the card to enter the subway for free (as long as you do community work) and which lack internal and external evaluations that indicate their effectiveness or efficiency in solving the problems that afflict youth.

This approach remains very strong and gives rise to a widespread perception of youth as a stage of: delinquency, drugs, school dropouts, pregnancies, gangs, etc. According to this paradigm, the problem is the “young person” itself, hence the intervention prioritizes action on him and neglects the context (unemployment, job insecurity, poverty, violence, etc.)

In our country, there is a slight advance regarding programs aimed at youth, however, it is not enough. Young people are still considered mere recipients of public policy, which causes programs and projects aimed at this age group to fail.

Youth problems must be addressed through public action, with the vision that young people are strategic actors in national development and subjects of rights. From our organization we observe four main problems around public policy directed at youth:

1. The government's limited response to youth demands.

2. Lack of reforms to the constitution and secondary laws to promote youth autonomy.

3. Poor management of resources to care for young people; and

4. Social exclusion.

We believe that the main social actors (government, business and civil society) should promote strategies focused on two axes:

1. For youth groups, accepting that within youth there is a heterogeneous mosaic of identities and each group has specific needs; and

2. For young strategic development actors, who must focus on boosting the national economy and exploiting the so-called demographic bonus.

To achieve this, we must place youth on the national agenda. Otherwise, we will remain stagnant as a country and in a few years, we will be mired in a serious problem due to the increase in the elderly population and the fact that we have not invested in our youth when it was needed.

At Juventudes Tejiendo Lazos AC, we have been working hard to raise awareness among youth about building a sustainable life project, where there is opportunity for everyone. We promote training for self-employment, education, culture, art and sport.

We want adults to understand that when young people participate, we seek to do so in instances of face-to-face, concrete and close relationships, in a bond of effectiveness with the effort being made, where the product of our participation is visible or tangible. 

For us, the traditional space for political participation is a space of manipulation at the service of some leader and full of corruption. Partisan politics is not a space that attracts our attention. On the contrary, what is more striking is civil society or collectives and participating in sociocultural or socio-community projects, especially those related to environmental protection, animal care, theatre, dance, art, culture and sport.

Regarding the upcoming elections, there are no serious proposals that motivate youth to support any particular candidate and, from what I see, none of them have the slightest idea of what a transversal public youth policy means.