The pitfalls of being young. On participation, capabilities and disabilities

Fernando David Márquez Duarte examines how young people, and especially young disabled people, are shut out of Mexican politics

StandUp Magazine
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read

Being a young person has never been easy. Besides the physical and cognitive changes that the transition from adolescence to adulthood brings, the society in which we live has been making this transition harder for us.

The period of youth, if we use it in the sense of age, implies commonly from 15 to 25 years (depending on the country as for example, in México the range is from 15 to 29), in which we are not considered neither children nor adults, and thus, the people that have the power don’t include young people completely in political, social and economic decisions.

In politics, few people take the decisions and the majority takes the outcomes of the actions. We are also living in a political system (some to a greater or lesser extent depending on the country) where the group that governs wants, and does what takes, to maintain the status quo. This translates into perpetuating in power and blocking other groups to obtain it. Being public officer just for the sake of society and people is not the common situation in these times, although there are public officers and governors that really care for the population and work for their development.

Whichever the case may be, there are groups that are left out of the political decisions and of the topics for the public agenda. These marginalized groups can be racial minorities, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, the poorest, disabled people and young people.

“there are groups that are left out of the political decisions and of the topics for the public agenda”

In the majority of political discussions, young people are not fully considered as being capable of taking political decisions. The reasons to marginalize youth are based on biased ideas, such as a lack of experience, age, maturity and so on.

If we analyze these so-called arguments, we realize that they are not really obstacles for decision-making capabilities. There are adults and older people who make wrong decisions in politics, there are public officers with plenty of experience that not only take decisions that are not in the best interest for the population, but deliberately take decisions to harm the population by being corrupt and favoring their bank account and we can also elucidate that maturity is not a matter of age and is not something that can be measured by the political decisions you take, that someone will continue to physically grow is not an obstacle to take a well-thought decision.

Being capable of is not something that someone else can decide for you, if we analyze the capabilities approach of the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, we realize that each individual has their own ideal of capabilities, every person considers a different set of capabilities to be the most valuable, and each individual has a different conception of the development that they want to achieve.

An important aspect to debate is about people with disabilities, who are often a marginalized group of the decision-making process. Amartya Sen declares that the state is the responsible to compensate the capabilities (that translate into choices) that this group cannot have. Reinforcing this argument, Rawls in his justice theory establishes that disability surges from the failing of the social institutions to adjust to the necessities of these people. Often young people in this group are even more marginalized. In our society being disabled still holds a shameful status. The state should maximize their options, to make all citizens have the same opportunities to achieve development. Considering that the World Health Organization reported in 2011 that 15% of the world population lived with some kind of disability and more than 60% living in developing countries the urge to include people with disabilities increases.

Another important point to address is what is considered as participation. If we analyze the forms of participation, one of the big mistakes of politicians about young people is to consider that the only way of participation in the public arena is voting. There exists a whole other spectrum of participation forms in which youths are actively engaged. The forms vary between actions like protesting, marching, taking part in NGOs, in collectives, in community groups, and in volunteer work. In some countries, young people participate more than adults in these actions. Added to that, new ways of online participation are flourishing due to the internet. Some participation forms have had a greater impact, like calling to action in social networks like Twitter and Facebook and participating in online polls, consults and forums. Online participation has gained so much impact in youth that United Nations itself invited youth to participate in online polls and surveys to define the 2030 agenda with the topics that youth considered as priorities.

“In some countries, young people participate more than adults”

In México, there are strategies that government makes to foster youth participation. Let’s take the case of the “national strategy of civic culture” (ENCCIVICA) of the National Electoral Institute (INE) which is an autonomous organisation. In each state there exists an autonomous electoral body, in my state (which is Baja California) this body (IEEBC) published the “Political and Civic Culture Program”, this program seeks to foster citizen participation in politics. There are several positive proposals that are written in the program, like organizing a forum of political rights of people with disabilities or creating material like manuals for citizen participation. The problem is that the majority of the proposals and strategies that are in the program were not delivered. Another problem of this program is that they actually are marginalizing groups of citizens. For example, in the forum the program only states that political parties and politicians will participate — excluding NGOs, academics, collectives. Another of the strategies that the program proposes is to form a “youth network for democracy”, in which it states that they will invite student councils of different schools to join, and what happens with youth from NGOs, from collective, or youth that are not involved in any of the mentioned groups?

Along with the marginalization of young people, there are constant corruption scandals of public officers and governors along México. There are at least 10 ex-governors with serious corruption charges against them that haven’t been found by the authorities — even in the federal government high ranked officials the corruption scandals keep going. With all the efforts to block young people from decision making and all the government corruption there is no surprise that youth are not thrilled to participate in the traditional forms of engagement, like voting and being part of political parties, but find other ways to be part of the political arena and try to make a change.

In my case I lead an NGO called “Youth with Vision”, in which we have realized different projects with the objective of developing social leaders and fostering youth citizen participation, our actual project is a campaign to create consciousness in the region to include and respect people with disabilities sharing facts, news, information and theoretical arguments to realize what being disabled implies. On social media, we expose able bodied people parking their cars in places reserved for people with disabilities to highlight ableism. And this is just another way of citizen participation and to be part of the political arena.

I want to let young people know that we can make a positive change in our communities in so many different ways. Whether being part of NGOs, volunteering, being part of community associations and groups, reaching politicians, protesting online and offline, and many more. The only thing you need to do is take that first step and be the change that is needed for everyone.


If you like this article then you can order issue 1 of Stand Up

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Stand Up magazine is dedicated to giving young people a platform in UK politics.

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Stand Up magazine is dedicated to giving young people a platform in UK politics.

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