Do you just cost a beer?

Do the misleading laberynths of discrimination address to the youth?

 

D’Fiore Disco in East Piura City, Peru, had no better marketing strategy than, according to specialists, awarding the demerit. If you presented your university’s disapproved exams or banning certificates due to a low academic performance, you were granted with beer. It was not the pionner of the promotion. Press reports beginning 2013 said that university students began it at a party in one of exclusive facilities used to rent in Piura for this kind of activities.

 

If you don’t like to study, the offer looks like attractive for sure, but what is the message in the background? My interpretation is simple – you are too average that you only cost alcohol. And do you only cost alcohol?

 

Stereotypes and prejudges

I guess the marketer who created the campaign could think the youth is capable to have a free drink whatever. That is called stereotype or the reckless idea assigned to a people collective that seem to have a set of common characteristics. Communitarian leader Lita Aucca commented me that during a workshop with women in Sullana City, she quoted “After noon, the black men…”, and the most answer was “… sock.”That is another stereotype sample.

 

The stereotypes use to come from the prejudges, the anticipated valuation of something or someone not having an objective basis as a background but as a look. So, many people asume many things by looking at the simple look although they are not right, actually.

 

The prejudges and the stereotypes are the basis of social discrimination or the segregation of a group of persons due to apparent superiority or inferiority criteria, so an exclusive or inclusive treatment type is assigned according to every case. The exclusive treatments can degenerate into violence, like the beatings that use to give to transvestites because of his dressing style, or more specialized regimes like the apartheid that the late South-African leader Nelson Mandela fought.

 

Codes and resolutions

All the discriminatory behaviors use to have subjective criteria applied to, or disguised on, apparently standardized objective criteria: sex, age, social-economic condition, sexual orientation, physical or mental abilities, nationality, political or religious belief, . While we crumble much the criteria to cclassify the people, we will find one or more types of discrimination.

 

In Peru, those behaviors can be typified as a crime according to the Criminal Code’s 323^rd  Article vigent up to date. Over this legal basis, and many local resolutions approved in many places of Peru, it became to close businesses, especially discos and restaurants, or punish public officials.

 

There are only four vigent anti-discrimination rresolutions (ADR) in Piura – Sullana Province’s, and Catacaos and Piura Districts’ plus a regional one. None has been implemented yet. Sullana’s (013-2008/MPS) was the emblematic one in the department because it broke out after a dislate committed by a mayor against one of his councilors who has a physical disability. But, since the instrumen’s approval on July 16^th, 2008, the number of times that it was applied by the Sullana Province Municipality have been zero.

 

Is the admission right… reserved?

The ADR doesn’t look for closing a business as a purpose, but to avoid that arcaic uses, calling the customer’s exclusivity, are based on the subjectivity of criteria to serve the public, that many times are established by the owners. So, Ibiza Disco, base don Santa Rosa Bourgh, West Sullana City, did not let people in short pants to enter but under legal age people when the law forbids it, reason why it was closed ending April 2013.

 

Its radio advertisement ever had the stamp “Admission right is reserved” when the law forbids it. The discos operating near it committed the same way. Despite having the 013-2008/MPS as vigent, the municipality never intervened them by invocating it. Since the most user public are teenagers and youth, they’re the people that can be a potential victim of discriminatory acts, at least in fact, because there are also in parole.

 

A stigma called youth

The radio advertising of La Matanza District Municipality that looks for forbidding to sell alcohol to under legal age people is casted by two senior teenagers, but almost playing consumer roles forgetting they are the last step in the business chain.

 

Going nationwide, the emblematic case was the controversial modification of Military Service Law in 2013 that, due to excesses of the Peruvian militia, was turned in 1997 from mandatory to volunteer. Under the reason to reduce the citizen unsafety levels and the deficit of quartered personnel, the Peruvian government wanted to change the regime to a confusing stage that year – volunteerily mandatory or mandatorily volunteer?

 

Far away analyzing if the offer was sufficiently attractive for the youth, it was accused of not having interest in its homeland, and the fact that the 200-dollar fine couldn’t be paid by the most was minimized. At the same time, the students of universities were the only exonerated collective to go to the quarter, the most in undergraduating education in other words, also formed by colleges.

 

The legal reform did an exception with disabled people. Also householders, but it was questioned how they could prove it legally. Lima Lawyers Academy and the Ombudsman Office had the concern of Peru’s Federation of Students and they got to freese the quartered regime lottery just 24 hours before its start under the criterion that the law is discriminatory.

 

In every exposed case, the youth, that seem to benefit from those measures, becomes the victim of discriminatory conducts or those around them. If we cross this type of age ddiscrimination with the usual discrimination types, we will see wondering scenarios.

 

A Young woman uses to be victim of human trafficking and physical and sexual violence more than an adult one. A gay young man tends to be much mistreated than a gay adult man (especially if he has no money nor job). A young farmer man receives a worse labor treatment than an adult man from the same zone(even when he works for one of them).

 

It looks like the youth loses much when we talk about differentiate treatment. Peru’s Psychologist Academy CEO in Piura Eduardo Carmen said on Radio Cutivalú, referring to D’Fiore case, that during the youth, values are forging that will determine the rest of the person’s life. If we extrapolate it, we could infer that if we give it a vertical treatment to this population, it’s probable they give it to the future youth, if they are not giving it to actual teenage and childhood.

 

The dictatorship of age sadism will repeat ever. Although the lawyer Quique Rodríguez sustains that the D’Fiore promotion doesn’t fall into a crime, it can be comdemn by moral, indeed. And, by extension, any undervaluation manifest must receive the same treatment – reducing a young to a beer bottle, it’s other way to reify it, to discriminate it. While that thought continues that way, the national growth model will begin to bring down by any side because it is built on weak basements, or withouth them in the worst case.

 

The autor was one of the co-writers of Racism in Peru – How To Face It. Also discuss this issue with me on my Twitter account. The photographs featured in this entry are National Coordination of Human Rights distributed by FACTORTIERRA. The model featured on one of the photographs is Frank Cañola.