La Rioja recruits young people against sexist violence: grant or boondoggle?
La Rioja has launched a youth programme against sexist violence without stating pay or budget, fuelling doubts about its effectiveness and cost.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
La Rioja recruits young people against sens violence: grant or boondoggle?
The regional government of La Rioja, in Spain, has launched a programme aimed at young people aged 16 to 30 to get involved in the fight against sens violence. The initiative, presented without much fanfare, has prompted a chorus of awkward questions. The first, inevitable: who is paying for this? The second, more practical: what is the pay? The original call does not specify a salary, which fuels suspicions that this is unpaid or, at best, poorly paid work.
Behind the announcement lurks the old distrust of what is colloquially called a "boondoggle": a publicly funded programme of dubious usefulness that serves more to pad CVs than to solve the problem. The absence of concrete employment conditions does not help. In a context of youth precarity, asking young people to spend their time "debunking myths" or raising awareness without clear pay sounds like exploitation of volunteerism.
The proposal also stumbles over its language. It refers to "young people" in the generic masculine, but the fight against sens violence particularly affects women. The omission of "young women" was another detail that did not go unnoticed.
The scepticism is not gratuitous. In practice, the region's most educated and ambitious young people — those who could contribute rigorous analysis — are busy studying or working, often with the goal of moving to areas with a better job market. La Rioja suffers a brain drain that these initiatives, far from curbing, seem to ignore. Meanwhile, those who sign up will probably be those with the fewest options, turning the programme into yet another patch rather than a solution.
The unsettling fact: in a context where political discourse promises quality jobs for young people, the call is left hanging, with no investment figure and no number of places. Anyone who wants to know how much it really costs to stop sens violence will have to wait for someone to put it in writing.
The regional government of La Rioja, in Spain, has launched a programme aimed at young people aged 16 to 30 to get involved in the fight against sens violence. The initiative, presented without much fanfare, has prompted a chorus of awkward questions. The first, inevitable: who is paying for this? The second, more practical: what is the pay? The original call does not specify a salary, which fuels suspicions that this is unpaid or, at best, poorly paid work.
Behind the announcement lurks the old distrust of what is colloquially called a "boondoggle": a publicly funded programme of dubious usefulness that serves more to pad CVs than to solve the problem. The absence of concrete employment conditions does not help. In a context of youth precarity, asking young people to spend their time "debunking myths" or raising awareness without clear pay sounds like exploitation of volunteerism.
The proposal also stumbles over its language. It refers to "young people" in the generic masculine, but the fight against sens violence particularly affects women. The omission of "young women" was another detail that did not go unnoticed.
The scepticism is not gratuitous. In practice, the region's most educated and ambitious young people — those who could contribute rigorous analysis — are busy studying or working, often with the goal of moving to areas with a better job market. La Rioja suffers a brain drain that these initiatives, far from curbing, seem to ignore. Meanwhile, those who sign up will probably be those with the fewest options, turning the programme into yet another patch rather than a solution.
The unsettling fact: in a context where political discourse promises quality jobs for young people, the call is left hanging, with no investment figure and no number of places. Anyone who wants to know how much it really costs to stop sens violence will have to wait for someone to put it in writing.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (19 replies).
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