Poor Youth as a Social Category in Turkey

In this article, there will be a comparison between the studies about poor young people in Turkey and their western counterparts. It is especially important to study the poor young people and work on some policies in a country with a sizeable young population and severe poverty, such as Turkey. The young people have been studied for a very long time in the west. However, contemporary studies are different from the others in several points. First of all, prior studies usually focused on education issues, while the new ones discussed the youth issues on a wider platform. Secondly, most of the current works is about the active participation of the young people. Thirdly, these studies have focused on the ways of cooperation between the institutions and the young people to develop some policies. All these attempts help to improve new methodologies not only in youth studies, but in social science in general. This type of studies has been done intensively in the European Union. Indeed, European studies have been rich both in content and subject. The main aim of these studies is to understand the nature of transition of the young people with various social backgrounds to adulthood and to find the best and productive solution to the young people’s problem in this stage with their active participation. By doing this, the suitable policies will be developed to help the young people in their transition. Especially the studies on disadvantaged, excluded and vulnerable young people have been gain a firm ground. The basic assumption behind these researches is to help the disadvantaged and excluded young people to integrate into society when they became an adult. In Turkey, on the other hand, the youth studies have been a new area. The young people are only referred indirectly in the poverty studies. Most of the existing studies do not give any concrete suggestion about the way to encourage active participation of the young people. In fact, it is difficult to say that they found a way to bring different actors such as local governments, NGOs and young people together to develop policies