Youth's perspective is a concept promoted by youth movements, which seek to make visible the barriers youths face to participate, be taken into account, and exercise their rights due to the scheme of adult-centered oppression on which societies have been built in history. It seeks to insert the realities, problems, needs and opinions of young people into the public agenda from the voices of the youths, to promote intergenerational articulation and eradicate the discourses that legitimize the conditioning of rights.
It identifies adult centrism as a scheme that oppresses young people generating stigmas about who they are and the role they play in societies; a form of age discrimination, known as ageism, that generates asymmetric power relations between the ages, affecting infants, adolescents, and young people by subordinating them to adults who systematically make their needs, problems, experiences invisible; imposing plans, lifestyles; and denying the possibility of weaving bonds of intergenerational solidarity.
In this respect, the youth's perspective opposes adult centrism and does so by changing the way in which young people were historically named. Now they speak of them in the plural "youths", recognizing in young people diverse identities, orientations, contexts, and sociocultural expressions.
Youth perspective rejects the visions and stereotypes that have been historically built on youths, make visible a problem of structural discrimination due to their age and builds a new vision from where they position themselves as subjects of rights (it implies that all their human rights must be recognized, respected and guaranteed, without being conditioned on their age); key development actors (they are not a vulnerable population, but fundamental actors for the development of countries); the present (it is not a stage of preparation for adult life, it is a way of being a person today, valid and respectable); with progressive autonomy (with the ability to decide on their life plans and assume responsibilities gradually, so the responsibility of the State, society and family is to generate the necessary conditions for them to do so).
Methodology
The youths perspective allows the identification, development and promotion of social practices and legal and institutional mechanisms that guarantee that young people are recognized as subjects of rights, with agency capacity and with freedom over their life plans. As a methodology, it has implied a change of paradigm, to stop defining youth from the vision that adults have about them. Lydia Alpízar and Marina Bernal point out that many studies, public policies and laws are carried out by people (adults or young people) who consider that, from their place, they know what young people think, need or feel, without taking into account the opinion of young people. Therefore, the youths have positioned themselves so that the perspective of the youths is incorporated in all the things that involve them under the emblem “nothing about youths without youths”.
Background
Lydia Alpízar and Marina Bernal give an account of the different visions made on youth in history as well as the theoretical approaches with which the concept of youth has been approached.