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ARGENTINA: Hundreds of Thousands of
Teenage Girls "in Limbo"
By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES (IPS) - Cintia, 17,
already has three children and is trying to
go back to school, which she dropped out of
several times because of the births and when
her kids were sick. But the principal of her
high school is not optimistic.
He believes that when the cold weather
starts with the arrival of the southern
hemisphere winter, the young woman will just
drop out again.
Cintia* forms part of a huge pool of
adolescents in Argentina who neither work
nor study, nor are looking for a job.
Sociologists here refer to them as the "ni-ni"
(neither-nor), a group made up of an
estimated 756,000 youngsters – 73 percent of
whom are girls or women - between the ages
of 15 and 24.
"Boys in that age group go out, and tend to
get drawn into the world of crime. But the
girls stay at home, which is why, even
though they are a majority in this group,
they are invisible," sociologist Guillermo
Pérez, co-author of the Torcuato Di Tella
University study "La Cuestión Social de los
Jóvenes" (roughly, The Social Question of
the Young), told IPS.
In this country of nearly 40 million, there
are 6.4 million young people aged 15 to 24.
Of that total, 2.7 million are vulnerable
because of their socioeconomic or family
situations. This group includes the "ni-ni",
most of whom are girls who mainly stay at
home.
Pérez said most of these girls come from
female-headed households. When the mothers
find work, their oldest daughters drop out
of school and take over the care of the
house and their younger siblings.
But there are also personal reasons that
lead the girls to drop out of school, the
most frequent of which is pregnancy.
While boyfriends in this situation tend to
leave school to seek some sort of informal
sector employment, pregnant girls tend to
find their lives restricted to the domestic
sphere and child-rearing, and are condemned
to a sort of limbo of inactivity and
resignation, the study says.
Pérez says public policies aimed at
providing young people with support in the
form of scholarships or training rarely
reach this specific group. "What is needed
here are policies to prevent girls from
getting pregnant and dropping out of
school."
Once the girls drop out of school, he says,
it is difficult to get them to come back:
"They aren’t too enthusiastic about it."
Lourdes Dorronsoro, a social worker with
Cimientos (Foundations), a local NGO that
offers scholarships and tutoring to some
33,000 teenagers around the country, tells
IPS that teenage girls drop out of school
after they have their first child, or
because they have to take care of their
younger brothers and sisters when their
parents find temporary work.
The Cimientos programme where Dorronsoro
works reaches out to 200 youngsters who left
school or have missed more than 70 days of
class in four schools in the poor Buenos
Aires suburb of Berazategui.
Half of the 200 students are girls, 17 of
whom dropped out of school in 2007 because
of the birth of their first child, said the
social worker. Only two of them have managed
to return to school this year.
The surveys conducted by Pérez and his
colleague Mariel Romero for the study found
a great deal of apathy among the young
respondents. The girls "have no plans or
dreams, no hopes. They have no future. The
present is so difficult, they have so many
unsatisfied needs, that there is no place in
their lives for wishes or goals," says the
report.
Cintia tells her story
That is the impression one gets from
Cintia’s candid smile. She says she first
got pregnant at the age of 13, but didn’t
realise she was expecting until she was
seven months pregnant. "I was just hungry
and tired, and my mom told me I was getting
fat, that I had to go to a nutritionist,"
she tells IPS, laughing.
A month after her first daughter was born,
the 18-year-old father left. "He tried to
hit me," she says, but without clarifying
whether he left her, or whether she or her
parents kicked him out. He has not had any
contact with his daughter, who is now four
years old, since then. "I know he had two
more kids, and now he’s in prison for
robbery," she says.
According to the study, which is based on
hundreds of surveys, the girls "live in a
matriarchy. Almost all of them have been
left" by their boyfriends or husbands.
The young men, for their part, do not
include their children in drawings of their
families, as if the kids were somehow the
"property" of the women, says the study.
After she had her baby, Cintia tried to go
back to school. But her little girl was
frequently ill and had to be hospitalised,
and Cintia missed too many days of class as
a result.
Later, she got involved with another
boyfriend, a man 20 years her senior. She
returned to school, but dropped out when she
had her second daughter.
The story repeated itself again with her
third child, and with more frustrated
attempts to return to school.
The principal of the night school, who did
not want to give his name, commented to IPS
that it is very difficult for teenage
mothers to complete their secondary school
education, and said they tend to drop out
over and over again.
He says he lets them bring their children to
school, where the little ones run up and
down the hallways. But he never kicks out
the mothers - they drop out themselves, he
says. After a while they come back because
of the need to finish school in order to get
a job, which is Cintia’s hope.
She is excited about the possibility of
getting a cleaning job at a leading fast
food chain – an aspiration that is within
the reach of many girls from poor
neighbourhoods. But even this seems overly
ambitious. "Without having graduated (from
high school), and with three kids, I just
won’t get called back. If I only had one
kid, it would be easier," she admits.
Dorronsoro says the future is not easy for
these kids, whether they are girls or boys.
"They say they go to school to ‘be
somebody’, but we work hard to get them to
understand that they are already ‘someone’
and that what school gives them are tools to
build their future," she says.
Cintia has sought assistance from different
state agencies, but without success. After
she had her first baby, she went with her
mother to ask a gynecologist to insert an
IUD, so she wouldn’t get pregnant again. But
the doctor said she was too young for an
IUD, and prescribed the pill instead.
After her second pregnancy, she went back to
the gynecologist, and was once again refused
an IUD. "They prescribed a contraceptive
pill that you can use while you’re nursing,
but they’re not effective," she says.
Finally, after her third pregnancy, the
doctor inserted an IUD.
Because her boyfriend is unemployed, Cintia
tried to get a subsidy for her family, but
she was denied it "because I’m a minor."
She then tried to apply for a programme for
young entrepreneurs, but there were no
vacant slots. The only help she gets are
free milk for her children and food stamps.
Her oldest daughter is in preschool, but her
second, who is almost two and has health
problems, is still on the waiting list for
day care. Despite her young age, the little
girl is being treated by a psychiatrist
because she has seen so many scenes of
domestic violence among the adults in her
family, Cintia says.
Her oldest daughter did not suffer the
impact so much because "every time there was
trouble, I would send her running along by
herself to my mom’s," says Cintia. But the
second girl "cries and has to take
medicine," whose name the young mother does
not remember, although she thinks it is a
"sedative."
The young women surveyed by Pérez and Romero
came to the interviews with their children,
who were looked after by a group of
educators and psychologists so their mothers
could answer the questions.
Off-the-record, the professionals who took
care of the children said the little ones
had significant developmental delays.
"The girls ‘postpone’ their sense of
failure," says Pérez. "They say they would
feel like they had failed if things didn’t
go well for their children. But behind each
one of these 600,000 girls there are at
least one or two children who are going to
be trapped in the same marginalisation,
ensuring that the cycle of poverty is not
broken."
* Not her real name.
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