The Ballooning Youth of Pakistan

In more than 100 countries, people are getting not only more numerous, but younger. Youth bulges, combined with economic stagnation and unemployment, can burden these countries with disproportionately high levels of violence and unrest—severely challenging their hopes for social and economic stability. Pakistan is one such country

Pakistan currently has the largest number of young people in its history, with approximately 25 million people between the ages of 15 and 24. Pakistani youth makes up 63% and adolescents nearly 43 % of the total Pakistani population. Illiteracy, lack of awareness, poverty and dearth of focused attention to youth-related problems add to the complexity of the problems currently faced by the country in social sector development.

The predominance of young adults can be a social challenge and a political hazard. Our economy and labor markets have been unable to keep pace with population growth, contributing to high rates of unemployment. While unemployment tends to be high in Pakistan in general, it is among young adults three to five times as high as overall adult rates.

Young men in rural areas are often hardest hit relative to their expectations. Agriculture is the single largest source of livelihood worldwide, but many young rural men expecting to inherit land increasingly find themselves disinherited.

With few opportunities in rural areas, young people in Pakistan are increasingly forced to leave behind more traditional lifestyles and migrate to cities in search of work, education, and urban amenities.

Many urban areas are thus now home to significant, and potentially volatile, youth bulges. Rapidly industrializing cities and frontier areas can be spawning grounds for political unrest because thousands of young men migrate to these sites in search of already in short supply livelihoods.

Yet urbanization is proceeding faster than municipalities can provide infrastructure, services, and jobs. Municipal governments in Pakistan are the least able to muster the human and financial resources to contend with these problems, especially when the poorest, nontaxable segment of the urban population continues to grow rapidly.

Most young people, men and women, work in agriculture. Other types of work are segregated by gender, with females engaged in stitching, embroidery, and knitting (largely based at home) while young men work in factories, are self-employed, or perform skilled labor. Young people’s attitudes about gender roles remain traditional, with well-defined lines between the domains of males and females.

The UN projected that by 2007, for the first time ever, more people would be living in cities than in rural areas. This urban share could top 60 percent by 2030—with almost all of this growth projected to occur in the developing world.

We have a large number of youth between 18 and 35 who are properly educated, but have nothing to do. Urban discord, more than the rural sort, afflicts diverse social classes, including the angry unemployed. The risks of instability among youth are increased when skilled members of elite classes are marginalized by a lack of opportunity.

It isn’t difficult to find contemporary parallels. The collapse of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s in part to the mobilization of large numbers of discontented young men who were unable to put their technical educations to use due to party restrictions on entering the elite. And Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor and author of the controversial treatise on the Clash of Civilizations, has pointed to connections between tensions in the Middle East (where 65 percent of the population is under the age of 25) and the unmet expectations of skilled youth. Many Islamic countries, he argues, used their oil earnings to train and educate large numbers of young people, but with little parallel economic growth few have had the opportunity use their skills.

Pakistan where a large youth bulges, coupled with high rates of urban growth and shortages of employment opportunities, is already creating a very high risk of conflict.

The US has begun to take notice. In April 2002, in a written response to congressional questioning, the US, CIA noted that “several troublesome global trends—especially the growing demographic youth bulge in developing nations (Pakistan included) whose economic systems and political ideologies are under enormous stress—will fuel the rise of more disaffected groups willing to use violence to address their perceived grievances.” The CIA warned that current US counter-terrorist operations might not eliminate the threat of future attacks because they fail to address the underlying causes that drive terrorists.

Fortunately, demographics are not destiny. But the likelihood of future conflict may ultimately reflect how Pakistan chooses to deal with its demographic challenges.

There are nevertheless examples of some countries, where policies were in place that provided young men with occupations and opportunities—including land reform and frontier settlement schemes, migration abroad, industrialization, and the expansion of military and internal security forces. The latter strategy probably helped regimes such as North Korea, China, and Turkmenistan that maintain political stability during the post-Cold War era despite large proportions of young adults.

In the short term, Pakistan government will need to tackle the underlying factors contributing to discontent among young people, including poverty and the lack of economic opportunity. And the government can address part of the risk associated with youth unemployment by investing in job creation and training, boosting access to credit, and promoting entrepreneurship.

Ultimately, however, the only way to achieve the necessary long-term changes in age structure will be through declines in fertility. Government can facilitate fertility decline by supporting policies and programs that provide access to reproductive health services—voluntary family planning services and maternal and child health programs and counseling, including providing accurate information for young adults—and by promoting policies that increase girls’ educational attainment and boost women’s opportunities for employment outside the home. (www.asifjmir.com)

Women of Future

Through and through sexual harassment is not the end of gender mistreatment. Far worse than the emotional violence is the physical violence which men unleash on women. The tormenting statistics are ubiquitous. In US every 15 seconds a woman is battered and every day husbands or boyfriends kill 4 women. In Bangladesh 50 percent of all murders are murders of wives by their husbands. Pakistan—a tall Muslim country—also incubates serious state of women affairs. Rapes, harassment and assault by husbands and in-laws are commonplace. This establishes the exorbitant violence directed towards women specifically by men, and indirectly by social and cultural mores.

Many feminist theorists claim a strong link between the behavior of the male gender and male institutions towards both women and the Earth. The violence against women is mirrored in the levels of environmental destruction now taking place across the planet. The idea that nature is female is a common assumption shared by many cultures across the globe, and now Mother Earth is being abused just like many of her daughters.

Right or wrong, it is clear that in many parts of the world, it is "woman's world" which is being threatened the most by so-called development: forests, agriculture, fuel sources, housing, and water resources are being destroyed at alarming rates. Those resources are the basic elements of life for a majority of the world's women and the decline of those resources put the greatest pressure on women. It is male-dominated institutions, which are largely responsible for this sad state of affairs and women are asking for a change.

All the same, in advanced countries, the pressure is on women to perform in the public sphere and to maintain much of the status quo on the home front. While women have succeeded in making some trespasses into decision-making positions in business and government, they are still expected to perform traditional functions of maintaining a household, taking care of the kids, fixing the meals, and being a good spouse—a difficult exercise.

Springing from the premise that the personal is political, radical feminists argue that to adopt traditional political methods would be to play into the hands of male institutions. They seek instead to recreate their own world, their own reality, and seek to give energy to new woman- centered institutions rather than the old male ones. They build new theories of dominance and power and begin to look at the origins of male dominance, which soon became known as patriarchy. Mythic remnants of pagan mother-goddess worship can be found in nearly all divine religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The importance of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism is a classic example.

There are at least three mini-trends that result from deep-seated feminism, which could alleviate the rising power of women. One of those might be abnormal separatism, a tendency for some women to reject men entirely—as some sort of evolutionary mistake. This movement is an acceptance of an entirely different paradigm.

There are images of women about the future, which come from feminist literature. This entire group is science fiction or fantasy novels, which hypothesize a future world either dominated by women or a world in which men and women share power. Most of these utopian novels have common elements: societies at one with nature, decentralized, and to some extent communal societies.

Other images are also described in the literature. They describe a high tech future where women are treated no less than props.

Normal images of women’s futures are ubiquitous in commercial advertising and multimedia. Mainstream, business-as-usual images picture women in fairly conventional roles, more often than not as sex objects.

Biologically and physiologically men and women can be constructed similarly or differently. (In West) sex change operations have become routine, so changing gender is no problem if they decide they were born into the wrong type. Physiological differences are already narrowing between men and women in advanced countries due to improved health and vitamin use. The most dramatic evidence of this phenomenon is the narrowing gap between men and women’s athletic records.

Psychologically, women are increasingly in charge of their own procreation, bodies, financial and political lives, and a burgeoning women’s culture.

One way to make some sense out of these sometimes converging and sometimes conflicting trends is to consider a range of alternative futures for women. These scenarios are suggested in some cases by the images of the future that woman have and others are suggested by the major trends.

In one scenario there is business-as-usual where women continue to obtain their rights but becoming more like men. Women are able to achieve equal pay for equal work, but also get equal rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, and other stress-related disorders. Women in the Developing World will continue to be exploited and violated.

In another scenario future technological changes totally separate procreation from sexual recreation and gender roles; gender change becomes a simple procedure. Children are designed from the best genetic material and are expected to experiment with both gender roles.

Yet another scenario describes a different future where men will put them back in their place. This might occur after a major global ecological or economic catastrophe. In a backlash against women, polygamy and female slavery might reappear.

And yet additional scenario the basic differences between genders are maintained, but women share power with men equally. In this future there would be less gender-based divisions of labor and parenting would be a shared responsibility. Other features of this future are a more harmonious relationship with nature and a stronger community orientation.

These scenarios are just sketches of the alternative developments of the 21st century, but with a bit of luck challenging. Whether we approve of the changing status of women, or not; whether we accept the need for greater power for women, or not—we must prepare ourselves for the coming changes to our worldview. (www.asifjmir.com)