– a strong “intraindividual” variability: at this period of life, the individual can change rapidly and strongly.
On the other hand, one phenomenon will affect all young people in France the extension and precariousness of youth, as shown by the statistical data in Table 1.1.
Table 1.1. Average age at end of education in France
| Year | 1930 | 1970 | 1990 |
| Age | 15.8 | 20.3 | 21.5 |
This extension, which is desirable, is sometimes even decided politically, when a minister declares that 80% of an age group must obtain their baccalaureate. The price to be paid is the prolongation of dependence on parents. Thus, 72% of 18–24 year-olds live with their parents (EU average).
Another consequence is the delay of parenthood (see Table 1.2).
Another negative consequence is that many people enter the world of work in a precarious way; previously, it was done in a way of integration, but today, it is more a question of experimentation (the archetype of the trainee).
Table 1.2. Average age of mothers at first child in France
| Year | 1974 | 2019 |
| Age | 24 | 29 |
As a result, unemployment is twice as high among young people (23% compared with 10% for the general population) and 20% of young French people live below the poverty line, a reality that the country does not dare to face.
Experimentation is therefore what specifically characterizes this period of life: experimentation with work, roles, psychoactive products and so on.
Still, within this cohort, the university dropout rate is massive: 30% in the first year.
Another contemporary phenomenon strongly influences adolescence today: the rise of “individualism”, the disappearance of traditional solidarities and therefore the autonomization of identity constructs and “intergenerational transmissions deficit”. The loss of influences such as family, religion and communism will disturb identity construction, a fundamental developmental task of adolescence, hence the “uncertain individual”.
1.7.3. Risk behaviors and rites of passage
From birth to death, the individual passes through a certain number of states and statuses and, since the beginning of humanity, societies have created rites to frame and operate these passages. These rites can concern the stages of life (such as burial to pass from the state of life to that of death), changes in religious status (baptism to pass from the profane to the sacred state), temporal markers (seasonal rites) and so on.
Each society has developed its own rites, but we owe to ethnologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep (1909) the idea of an anthropological structure common to all rites in his work The Rites of Passage, a systematic study of the rites of “passing through the door and over the threshold” of, for example, hospitality, adoption, pregnancy and labor, birth, childhood, puberty, initiation, ordination, coronation, engagement and marriage, funerals and the seasons.
The duration of the rites of passage between childhood and adulthood can vary in traditional societies (from two weeks to several years), but a temporal sequence and common meanings emerge; this sequential structure unfolds in three stages: the first is organized around the separation, the second around the intermediary and the margin and the third around acknowledgment of the initiation and the passage.
From the Latin etymology limen, which means “threshold”, van Gennep created three concepts:
1) preliminary rites, or rites of separation from the previous state;
2) liminal rites, carried out during the intermediate phase, putting in play testing or symbolic death;
3) postliminary rites, or rites of reintegration with the acquisition of a new status.
In traditional societies, these rites would allow for a harmonious passage from childhood to adulthood: prepubescent subjects were separated from the rest of the social group, isolated in places devoted to liminal rites and underwent a certain number of physical or moral tests, “symbolic markings” at the end of this intermediate phase. At the end of this intermediate phase, the young person was reintegrated into the group with full adult status, without restrictions.
Moreover, these rites of passage were initially different for boys and girls in traditional societies:
– in boys, they were public, exercised in groups; the period of testing was essentially applied to boys, meaning the necessary separation of the boys from their mothers, in order to reach adult, paternal or reproducer status, subject to the order of seniority; in addition, physical testing during the liminary phase was more perilous in order to make them affirm their masculinity;
– in girls, the rites were more private, less collective, more intimate, such as pregnancy, for example; there was no separation from the mother, but transmission of the procreative function, there was continuity and non-breakdown.
In our modern societies, many rites of passage have lost their meaning and validity: military service no longer exists, the baccalaureate no longer guarantees a job, marriage often leads to divorce and religion has lost its influence. In this context, which rites remain and are still functional? Can we still speak of rites of passage in modern societies?
The use of psychoactive products is currently used by many young people for this purpose (as was traditionally the case with the first drunkenness of young men), but while this use fulfills the first two functions of the rite (it symbolically separates from the world of adults and from the norm and constitutes a test of the body and mind), it seems to be of little use for the third function, reintegration with the acquisition of a new status, since this use may, on the contrary, lead to a certain marginality or even to exclusion or homelessness.
Piercings and tattoos, very in vogue at present, are indeed an equivalent of the symbolic markings of the body and the scarifications, but is that enough to confer on them a value of insertion? Running away, wandering, cars “speeding runs” and extreme sports, among other activities, do not seem to be very effective either.
A number of differences between traditional and modern rites have been identified in this regard (Jeffrey 2008):
– In traditional societies, rites were framed and supervised by adults; in modern societies, young people are much more left to their own devices. However, the test must be recognized by the community to allow for reintegration (as with school exams), particular examples being the raids or boat trips that are proposed to young offenders to reintegrate them, to learn about life in a group and to understand their limits.
– In traditional societies, rites had a transmission function concerning the fundamental question of death; today, although death is no longer part of life, our contemporaries want to be invincible and immortal, so there is a forgetfulness,