Afterword

BENEDICTO, JORGE; URTEAGA, MARITZA; ROCCA RIVAROLA, DOLORES

Young People in Complex and Unequal Societies. Doing Youth Studies in Spain and Latin America,

Brill

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2022; p. 472 - 478

(EL LIBRO ENTRÓ EN PRENSA A FINES DE 2021) Afterword Young People and Covid-19: Some Thoughts about a Very Near FutureJorge Benedicto, Maritza Urteaga and Dolores Rocca"It is hard being 20 in 2020. It is. So, I am never going to give life lessons to our young people. Because they are the ones who are actually making a terrible sacrifice. Suspended exams, anguish over the course of their studies, over finding their first job".These words, spoken by the French president Emmanuel Macron in a television interview and posted in his twitter account (October 14th, 2020), are a graphic illustration of the repercussions the pandemic is having in young people’s lives. COVID-19 has altered practically every fundamental element of their life experience, and it threatens to keep doing it in the coming years. The uncertainty and insecurity that were already hallmarks of the new generations before the pandemic have deepened even more, affecting their aspirations and expectations for the future.We can describe young people’s position facing the pandemic as relatively paradoxical. On one hand, it is a group in which the virus has had little incidence, unlike what happened with previous diseases, such as the so-called Spanish Influenza in 1918. Young people have contracted COVID and have infected others, but the virus’s incidence on their health has been generally low. On the other hand, youth has been, as a whole, one of the most affected groups in terms of socio-economic problems caused by the pandemic, the decline in their quality of life and the serious consequences to their mental and emotional well-being.1The Impacts of the Pandemic on Young People’s LivesThe worst impact of this crisis on young people is, without a doubt, in the socio-economic domain. Several months of home confinement, restrictive measures on circulation and social distancing have radically altered economic activity. This translates into the increase of unemployment, the reduction in workers’ income, business closures and the consequent job losses, together with significant restrictions to informal economic activity. All these problems weigh on young people in a special way, making them, as experts have warned, the social group most adversely affected by the situation. The reasons for this higher impact on working young people seem obvious. This group usually has lower quality, poorer and more unstable jobs. And it tends to be concentrated among more precarious economic sectors, with less capacity to resist the consequences of the recession. According to a report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), which analyses the results of a world survey on young people and COVID-19, conducted among 12000 respondents aged 18 to 29 between April and May 2020, one in six young people who were employed before the pandemic lost their jobs. Among those who remained employed, working hours were reduced by almost a quarter. The conclusion is evident: the pandemic has had a heavy toll on young workers, destroying their employment and undermining their career prospects.The report also focuses on another dimension of the pandemic and its effects on the young generation: the closure of educational institutions. Generalized in most countries, at least during the first months of confinement, this measure was followed by the extension of online education, but its effectiveness has been very uneven, due to inequalities in the degree of development of digital technologies in each country and in the access to them in different social environments. The result has been deepened educational inequalities among youth. According to the aforementioned 2020 ILO report, during those initial months, one out of eight young people were left without access to courses, education or training. It is still too soon to evaluate the repercussions of the closure of schools and universities on the educational achievements of this generation. Especially among those who have fewer personal and family resources. But there is no doubt that the situation caused by the pandemic has increased the risk of school drop-out rates because many families cannot afford the cost of online education. For example, in México, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) –Survey for Measuring the Impact of COVID 19 on Education (ECOVID-ED 2020)–, over five million students did not enroll in the 2020–2021 school year for reasons associated with COVID-19: lack of economic resources, having to work or lack of learning conditions through non-classroom education.The worsening of economic, employment and educational opportunities for new generations is already becoming visible in multiple aspects of their everyday life. The immediate consequence is a reduction in their quality of life, exacerbated by the restrictions to personal relationships and to physical contact with friends. All these circumstances have had a negative impact in young people’s subjective well-being. As research has revealed, youth mental and emotional health has significantly deteriorated, in aggregate terms as well as in an especially severe way in some individual cases.This negative prospect, logically, does not have the same intensity for some young people as for others. Whichever aspect we analyze, the impact is unequal and the highest incidence is always among the most vulnerable youth sectors, the least educated, those informally employed and particularly among young women. In the latter case, in addition to the consequences on their economic activity there is the increased care burden of other members their families and, in some cases, a greater risk of suffering gender-based violence. In all cases, what we observe is a considerable deepening in social inequalities and its potential consequences for the personal and collective development process of many young people and for society as a whole.There are differences from one country to another, but coincidences prevail. In most cases, the crisis caused by COVID-19 has resulted in severe deterioration of youth’s socio-structural position, especially among those in an already vulnerable condition. Other factors such as the evolution of the disease itself, how it was managed by the authorities or youth’s specific problems in each country account for national singularities. In Argentina, for example, in addition to aggravating the social and economic conditions of young people with already precarious and informal jobs, the pandemic and isolation measures have led to a rise in police repression and abuse, especially affecting youth. In Spain, the pandemic has intensified some of the problems that young people had been experiencing since the Great Recession that began in 2008. We should add the message that mass media and some institutions have been spreading in society, drawing a negative picture of youth that ranges from infantilization to stigmatization. In Mexico, trends towards deepened structural inequalities among youth population have increased, particularly in terms of consequences of COVID-19 for young women. Not only have there been the effects on their economic activity and in the greater care burden they have had to bear, but gender-based violence in their households also rose during lockdown, isolated at home with their aggressors. The murders and kidnappings of young women have not stopped, with an average of eleven femicides per day, most of the victims being minors. These three examples from the national contexts of this book’s editors are a very small sample of the specific circumstances that the different countries have gone through. At the end of the day, the pandemic has caused new problems, but has also made visible and exacerbated many of the ones previously faced by young people in each context.When analyzing the impact of a crisis, such as the one caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, on the new generations, there is always the risk of turning young people into mere objects of the action of external circumstances beyond their control. Reality, however, is more complex. Apart from being recipients of the negative impacts of the crisis, many young people have also been active agents in trying to mitigate the pandemic’s effects in the most vulnerable population. Through multiple solidarity actions, the creation of networks, participation in community kitchens or grassroots working groups, young people have acquired an evident protagonism in the fight against the virus. It is possible to say that the pandemic become, in some way, an opportunity to show the capacity of many youth groups to work together to improve the quality of life of their communities, weaving networks of solidarity and intergenerational complicity, which have been essential for processes of social transformation.2Some Lines of Youth Research for the Near FutureThis complex situation poses multiple challenges for society in general and especially for public policy-makers. Responding to the specific problems of youth in the aftermath of the pandemic requires innovative approaches that are both intergenerational and involve the active participation of young people. Only in this way will it be possible to set in motion effective reconstruction and social transformation policies that will help to create a more solidary and sustainable future. But the challenge is also posed to applied youth research. The pandemic has transformed in many ways young people’s lives, bringing up new issues and problems, but it has also served to display the importance of many of the issues that have been the subject of analysis throughout this book. The study of contemporary youth in complex, diverse and unequal societies, such as the Ibero-American ones, demands for renewed analytical perspectives in which the emphasis on deficiencies does not hide the strategies and tactics followed by young people to overcome successfully institutional neglect.Among the multiple issues that will be part of the research and intervention on youth in the coming years, we propose below some lines of work that we find particularly relevant in the aftermath of the pandemic, especially from the perspective of Ibero-American youth.The first issue, which demands urgent exploration from an interdisciplinary approach, is that of the emotional and mental health of young people. Youth studies have long been highlighting the important part that emotions and sociability play in young people’s wellbeing, but perhaps the attention paid to these topics has not been enough. The lockdown, with the closure of schools and recreational parks, people working from home, and social distancing, has limited social interaction with friends and acquaintances to social media and apps, disrupting habits and daily routines. We do not yet know if these changes have had significant effects on socialization processes among young people, or the influence they have had on their feelings of subjective well-being as well as their interactions. Depression, anxiety, stress are all symptoms that tell us that something is happening, which is necessary to investigate. And to do so without forgetting the importance of including in such study the genre and inequality perspectives, because lockdown has not been experienced in the same way by men and women, by middle-class youth and by lower-classes or popular sectors.A second line of research is related to the key position that education has in the processes of developing individual and collective capabilities in the new generations. In some Latin American countries, the pandemic has resulted in an increase in the number of school dropouts. The immediate question we must answer is: how can we reintegrate them into the school system? One of the research lines to work on is studying the various practices and strategies that different actors (public institutions, teachers, associations) have used in recent months to successfully deal with school dropouts and keep students in the school community. It is not about generalizing specific experiences that respond, in one way or another, to a given context. It is more a question of delving deeper into the mechanisms that make it possible to design effective intervention plans and the contribution that the different actors can make to them. The pandemic has highlighted the need to explore the positive relationship of emotional security that schools provide to young people on a daily basis, but also how inequality continues to hinder the educational achievements of large sectors of young people.Another set of issues future research should focus on is the medium-term consequences of the pandemic on young people’s civic participation. The invisibilization by mass media of young people’s contribution to helping those most affected socioeconomically by the pandemic, and the discourses of stigmatization and, to a certain extent, criminalization of many daily youth practices have eroded the role of young people in society. This deterioration in youth’s position in the intergenerational distribution of power may be a disincentive for new generations to integrate into existing participation structures, increasing the processes of institutional disaffection that threaten democracies today. This disaffection, though, does not seem to equal depoliticization. The new wave of youth protests and mobilization against inequality and the political class that has recently taken place in countries such as Chile, Peru or Colombia shows the extent to which young people continue to demand a more participatory future, a reduction of inequalities and a new relationship between citizens and politics.From this point, many questions arise, which youth research will have to try to resolve in the coming years. On the one hand, it will be necessary to delve deeper into the consequences of this collective youth unrest, which has exacerbated during the crisis, and into its forms of public expression. On the other hand, this period of COVID-19 has inevitably transformed the processes of collective action, its instruments, the repertoire of actions, the interaction between online and offline. The big question is what repercussions these transformations will have in the near future, both in the internal organizational sphere and in the external manifestation of youth social and political commitments.Closely related to those topics is the necessary exploration of young women’s rebellion against gender-based violence. If before the outbreak of COVID-19, feminist mobilization, in which young women played an indisputable leading role, had become the movement with the greatest power to make demands and transform social relations in many countries, its presence has also been significant during the pandemic. Many young women have made visible their opposition to the current situation, reacting to the proliferation of gender-based violence. Not only did confinement “lock down” women with their aggressors, it also met with the authorities’ incapacity or disinterest in insuring a public safe space free of that violence. The intensification and radicalization of these young women’s demonstrations against the State symbols, their evolution and their impact on daily power structures is an issue youth research must approach and provide an adequate response to.One last subject that we find particularly important in the Latin American case is the growing presence of unaccompanied children and minors in the migrant waves and “caravans” that cross the borders from Central America and the Caribbean, heading towards the United States. Along the way, Mexico ceased to be a transit country and became one that has trapped young Central American migrants in overwhelmed institutions, with repressive and extortive police, organized crime, drug trafficking and a growing xenophobia among the Mexican population exacerbated by the country’s economic crisis and unemployment. The presence of unaccompanied minors is likely to grow in the coming years given the structural violence of increasingly dictatorial and militarized power regimes in the Central American region that expel and/or kill their young population. In these cases, mobility has become a fundamental element in the youth experience of migrants and “returnees”. How this situation will affect these young people’s transition processes and, in general, their development as autonomous individuals is one of the aspects to which youth research should pay preferential attention, especially in the most affected countries.The complexity of the scenario created by the coronavirus pandemic raises many more questions that should attract the attention of youth researchers in the coming years. The relationship of young people with the universe of social media; access to information and ‘fake news’; the emergence during the pandemic and post-pandemic of youth dystopias and the growing popularity of conspiracy theories; the persistence and evolution of some of the issues that concerned and mobilized young people even before the pandemic, such as the fight against climate change. The multiple transformations that the COVID-19 crisis has provoked in the lives of young people will continue to unfold in the near future, prompting new lines of research in youth studies.