Between 18 and 35, everything is being built: where you live, how you work, whether you can access healthcare, how far you go in your studies. These are the years when the trajectory of a life is set. They are also the years when systemic discrimination hits hardest — and leaves its deepest marks.
Why 18–35?
This age range is not arbitrary. It corresponds to a period of multiple, simultaneous transitions: leaving the family home, entering the job market, accessing healthcare independently, building a social life and a future.
These transitions require navigating institutions — housing services, employers, universities, healthcare systems — often for the first time, and often without the networks or resources that make that navigation easier for others.
For young people from immigrant backgrounds or national minority populations, these transitions take place in systems that were not designed with them in mind. The gap between what the system promises and what it delivers is never more visible — or more consequential.
Who is at the centre of UNDETERRED’s research?
UNDETERRED focuses on two distinct but overlapping groups, both facing forms of systemic discrimination that are rarely acknowledged as such:
Young people from immigrant backgrounds
Whether they arrived recently or grew up in the country, young people from immigrant backgrounds encounter barriers rooted in norms and procedures that assume a particular kind of profile — one that doesn’t always match their reality. Language, administrative history, social networks, cultural references: these become silent selection criteria in housing, employment, health and education.
Young people from national minority populations
Discrimination against national minorities is often even less visible, because these are people who may have been part of a society for generations — yet continue to face inequalities that accumulate across sectors and over time.
A decisive period — a compounding effect
What makes the 18–35 window particularly critical is that difficulties don’t stay isolated. They compound.
Difficulty finding stable housing creates instability that makes it harder to hold a job. Precarious employment limits access to healthcare. A disrupted educational trajectory closes professional doors. Each obstacle reinforces the next — and the sum is greater than its parts.
This is why UNDETERRED takes a multi-sector approach: because to understand discrimination as it is actually experienced, you have to follow it across the whole of a young person’s life.
Not statistics. People.
Behind the data are real trajectories — young adults navigating systems that were supposed to work for them, finding unexpected walls, adapting, resisting, persisting.
UNDETERRED’s research is built on listening to these experiences directly: through qualitative interviews, surveys, and close collaboration with the organisations that work alongside these young people every day. Their voices are not illustrative material. They are the foundation of the research.