MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

A lost generation?

According to a United Nations paper 35% of Argentine adolescents don't study or work and have become a generation of “difficult reinsertion”

Sociologist Susana Torrado who did the official presentation of the UN Population Fund paper in Buenos Aires blamed economic policies of the last three decades for the burgeoning number of teenagers who daily figure in crime and police related incidents.

"Argentine adolescents are compelled to an ever accelerating life rhythm: they live faster to die younger. Their life expectancy is considerably reduced compared to those that have; poor children's times are shorter".

According to the UN report, almost half the world's population is below 25 and 20% are adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19.

In Argentina 15% of births correspond to teenagers and those involving mothers below 15 are growing even faster.

"This is a direct consequence of the lack of sexual education, lack of access to anti-conceptive in government hospitals, and the solution is not financial but political".

"Social mobility came to an end in the seventies with the new economic policies, so we can argue that the transfer of poverty from fathers to sons is not a matter of the number of children, but rather the structural economic adjustment policies", indicated Ms. Torrado.

The sociologist added that "teenagers are in bad shape because their parents are in bad shape", particularly generations born between 1975 and 1985, "which was forced to socialize in exclusion".

Ms. Torrado described them as a generation of "difficult reinsertion which will most certainly generate in the future different forms of social conflicts"

According to the latest statistics, 54% of the 36 million Argentines live in poverty with 15,6% of active working force out of a job.