Q&A with Jamie Vernaelde, Ipas senior researcher
The lead author of Ipas’s Future Proofing: The Professionalization of an Anti-Rights Youth Generation explains why this trend matters now—and what sexual and reproductive health and rights movements must do to counter it.
Anti-rights actors have long understood that young people are key to consolidating power. For many decades, conservative movements have invested in youth—especially to push back against sexual and reproductive health and rights and LGBTQI+ rights—building generations of well-networked leaders now driving the movement from national to global levels.
These conservative youth networks (and the powerbrokers behind them) are a sophisticated, coordinated force, working to future-proof the anti-rights movement and reshape politics and everyday life in ways that threaten human rights and democracy.
To counter them, progressive movements need to understand how this long-term strategy recruits, funds, coordinates, and mobilizes young people—and how it’s evolving to target even younger cohorts. The report, Future-Proofing: The Professionalization of an Anti-Rights Youth Generation, examines exactly that.
Here, lead author Jamie Vernaelde, an Ipas senior researcher, explains why it matters now—and what to expect in the future.
Why does this report matter right now?
Vernaelde: Anti-rights organizations are recruiting and supporting young people more than ever. Major legal, advocacy, and communications groups that are against sexual and reproductive health and rights, abortion, and LGBTQI+ rights—groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and the Political Network for Values— regularly engage and train young people to go out and challenge human rights in spaces like the UN, the European Union, and other legal and political spaces. We are also seeing a rise in far-right youth politicians—from Latin America to the U.S. and Europe—who are highly networked, campaigning against bodily autonomy and the universality of human rights and getting elected. Collectively, with allies on social media, they are captivating minds as well as spaces that are not only having real political consequences right now throughout the world but will have repercussions across future generations.
What’s the clearest takeaway for sexual and reproductive health and rights advocates?
They need to not just listen to youth but act to put our young colleagues and partners forward first. Young advocates are already leading resistance to anti-rights organizing, developing blueprints for action to protect human rights. Unfortunately, that makes them vulnerable to doxxing and other online and in-person attacks, not to mention the mental and emotional toll it takes. We need to not only be part of their support system but go further and ensure they receive any desired training, networking and funding they want and need.
Which part of the pipeline in developing anti-rights youth leadership worries you most and why?
The duality of investment in and attacks on education worry me the most. On one hand, anti-rights are shaping minds in their own image and ideologies, from law to history and beyond; on the other, they’re going after public education and key topics, everything from medical training on providing abortion care at a university level down to how young people and children learn about their bodies, sexuality, diversity, and identity.
What did you find that surprised you most when researching this report?
I think realizing how much investment in young people has been a deliberate strategy for decades and, particularly in the U.S., a deliberate reaction to the civil rights movement. Roe v. Wade was just one of a series of flashpoints that include desegregation, the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and the rise of LGBTQI+ rights, which really activated anti-rights actors to mobilize young people.
The report includes detailed recommendations for how we can counter the rising anti-rights youth movement. How were these recommendations created?
What was wonderful with both the report foreword and recommendations was that a human rights youth advisory panel wrote the former and reviewed draft recommendations, edited, and added to the final recommendations. These recommendations are not only for our sexual and reproductive health and rights community, but also for donors who should be invested for the next generation to win. (You can view a quick overview of the report’s recommendations here, or access the entire report and full recommendations here.)
10 key recommendations to track and combat the anti-rights youth movement
Your recommendations call for multi year, unrestricted funding and real movement infrastructure. What’s the cost of not doing that—what do we lose when youth support is short term or tokenistic?
Without investing broadly—not just funds but mentoring, networking, and accompaniment—in young people, we are going to lose strategic decision-making spaces to a cohort of anti-rights young people that have grown up in a supportive system that is designed to roll back the very rights of future generations.
What should we watch over the next two years?
Anti-rights youth have their own demonstrable and powerful presence on the global and digital stages, showing a new way to reach a youth audience with conservative ideology and tap into its potential to spread regressive values. Over the next two years, we need to be in those spaces, not just observing and learning from the tactics and language they use so successfully but crafting and pushing our own narratives. That has to be done with progressive young people who can speak to not just Gen Z but Gen Alpha.
What’s your final takeaway?
To protect and hopefully continue to expand rights related to bodily autonomy and gender justice in this current highly hostile political environment, we need to understand and find new ways of thinking and acting to meet this moment. Anti-rights youth “pipelines of talent” are here, now. They are motivated, activated, networked, and funded, and we have to do the same.
The post How anti‑rights movements are grooming the next generation and what we must do next appeared first on Ipas.
