Young people's rights: this system can't deliver
By Marina Cameron
Recent media coverage of the plight of today's youth has been so inadequate in identifying solutions that one is left feeling that they were unable to do anything but shake their heads and say "Young people today ... who can understand them?".
Two major themes emerge, both clearly linked to promoting government policy in relation to young people: a reaffirmation of the family as the proper place and the primary provider for young people; and a denial of the idea that young people have rights and can think for themselves.
In this era of neo-liberalism where government austerity is the order of the day, life opportunities for young people are declining. Unemployment affects one in three young Australians, and cuts to education and training programs are leaving more youth with nowhere to turn.
The majority of young people lucky enough to find work are in low-paid, temporary, casual or part-time jobs. The government's recent announcement of a new work for the dole proposal is an indictment on its inability to provide real jobs. Meanwhile, it is also proposing to merge youth unemployment benefits with Austudy and Abstudy, cut rent assistance and impose parental means-testing on all benefits.
Young people bear the brunt of government cutbacks and the ideological offensive that is launched to justify the cuts because they are relatively powerless (being denied a say in the running of society), and because driving down the expectations of each new generation is essential to gaining broad social acceptance of capitalist austerity drives.
Growing drug abuse, violence and suicide among young people are a direct result of the limited and declining life opportunities for youth. This is obscured, however, by the government and media's propaganda which defines these social problems as individual problems.
It's your fault if you don't have a job, or enough qualifications, or too many, they argue; you just didn't work hard enough. And if it's not your fault, it's your parents (an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on February 24 argued that parenting is the key factor in youth crime, for instance).
Suicide is now the second most common cause of death for those aged 15 to 24 in Australia. The suicide rate has increased by 300% in the last 30 years, overtaking other countries such as Britain and the US, yet still the media locates the cause in individuals' faults and problems.
Dr Jean Lennane, a Sydney psychiatrist, pointed out in an article on youth suicide in the January 4 Australian that a major contributor to increasing youth suicide rates is massive funding cuts to mental health services over the last 30 years. Moving patients out of institutions and into "community care" has not helped the mentally ill, she argued, but resulted in reduced services and little support for those trying to care for them.
Many specific services have been closed with mental health facilities simply tacked onto major hospitals. These facilities are geared to short stays and minimal attention. The number of people suiciding while under hospital care, and those suiciding soon after release, is growing.
She adds: "having seen parents and others tossed on the scrap heap, young people enter the world of the expendable and exploitable ... advertising, television programs, movies and pop stars push the image of success, popularity, easy affluence, confidence, slim bodies and perfect teeth."
These are useful observations. However, the closest Lennane comes to addressing the causes of youth suicide is to throw up a number of social changes which may have contributed, including family breakdown; increased alcohol consumption; marijuana use; the legacy of the "heavy-drinking and sexually permissive years of the 1970s and early '80s" resulting in increased "violence and sexual abuse"; a decline in religious observance; and an increased acceptance of euthanasia.
These "explanations" ultimately lay the blame on the individual young person — even if only for participating in broader social changes — and advocate a happy, devout, non-drinking, non-smoking, structured, disciplined, stereotypical family upbringing as the best medicine for young people.
But the stereotypical happy family is not the reality for most. Cutbacks to social spending and the transfer of more of the economic burden back on to individual families is putting huge pressure on this institution — pressures which generate conflict, depression and domestic violence, including child abuse.
The solution is not to try to stuff young people back into a mythical happy family. For young people who face physically or emotionally abusive situations, who may be gay or lesbian, or who just want to live their lives differently from their parents' expectations, this will only make things worse. Nevertheless, economic hardship and government policies are doing just that — forcing young people to remain dependent on their parents for longer, with all the repression of their rights and development as independent human beings that results.
The possibility that young people are able to think for themselves is discounted. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on January 14 on youth homelessness argued that more young people are leaving home because of the "media coverage of teenage runaways and stories of kids who divorce their parents".
Carolyn Powell, a school psychiatrist, argued that "There's more awareness of their rights, but less awareness of their responsibilities — and there's a certain glamour attached to running away". She discounts the possibility that there might be something fundamentally wrong with these young people's home situation and trivialises running away is just another fad.
Even the partial solution of providing more youth services, youth refuges and youth recreation is thrown out the window due to funding cuts. The January 14 article goes so far as to argue that youth refuges actually fuel the problem of young people running away when what is really needed is a good dose of family counselling and a return home.
The only real and lasting solution to these problems is, of course, never mentioned in the capitalist media. That is that young people's rights must be acknowledged and protected. Like all people, young people have the right to live in a safe and happy environment, to a decent job, to quality education, to a decent income, to be free from violence, to choose their own sexuality freely, and to self-respect. But these are rights that the capitalist system simply can't deliver.