April is child abuse prevention month.
Is April 2022 the right time to rethink children’s position in society?
The World Health Organization defines child abuse in these terms: “all forms of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect or negligent treatment or commercial or other exploitation, resulting in actual or potential harm to the child’s health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust or power”. What constitutes child abuse is defined by adults, in child abuse research often children’s voices are absent. This definition, for example, can be easily interpreted as not including corporal punishment. Even the Convention of the Rights of the Child does not explicitly frame corporal punishment as abuse. In fact, only 14% of the world’s children are fully protected in law from all corporal punishment (https://endcorporalpunishment.org/countdown/#:~:text=Only%2014%25%20of%20the%20world’s,law%20from%20all%20corporal%20punishment). Because it’s impossible to argue for different protections for adults and children in society without recurring to childist logic, this means that only 14% of the world’s children are legally protected from child abuse. In a society where children’s legal status resembles that of slaves (even if for sure the vast majority of parents is far more benevolent towards their children than masters were towards their slaves), it’s not going too far to state that:
“Adult power over children is so absolute that in a sense all children are abused and all adults abusers” (Ennew, 1986, p.24)
When children’s voices are taken into account, child abuse appears to us not as an aberration but as normative (“A children’s perspective on child abuse”, Mason and Falloon, 2016). Children’s definition of abuse is necessarily much broader than that of adults’, because adults have an interest in maintaining their privilege. Despite this, none of the children in Mason and Falloon’s research viewed separation from their family as a solution. In our society, when a child is being abused by their parents, the alternatives to just enduring that abuse, unless it’s seriously threatening their life, are often worse. John Holt wrote in his classic “Escape from Childhood":
““Most children who lose their families remain wards of the state i.e. they are prisoners. That is the choice the law now offers. If you can’t (or won’t) be a child, you must be a convict, in some kind of jail, guarded by people whose chief concern is to keep you from running away.”
The same is true for children who are being abused (as defined by the law it necessarily entails extreme forms of abuse), they’re taken away from their parents and handed to other adult authorities to experience more abuse. Fox Harding (1991) has tried to provide a framework for analysing child welfare policies through four perspectives: laissez faire (patriarchy), state paternalism and child protection, the birth family and parental rights and children’s rights and child liberation. While the influence of the first perspective has declined in the last centuries, the only way to truly end child abuse, child and youth liberation, is still seen as unthinkable, and as I’ve examined in another article, elicits violent reactions from adults, especially parents, as most child liberationists are unwilling to compromise with the generational order (Alanen, 1992) by which relations between adults and children are structured. Some downright reject the concept of “child abuse", and view the attention the media has given to extreme examples of what is the normal way of adults to relate to children as obscuring it’s normalcy (Burton, 2018). However I don’t entirely agree, I think that the attention the media has given to extreme examples of adult violence towards children as possibly having a beneficial impact. Even the “usual" definition of child abuse that excludes corporal punishment and other forms of normalized adult violence encompasses behaviours that are absolutely endemic: “Globally, it is estimated that up to 1 billion children aged 2–17 years, have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect in the past year” (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-children). The recent attention to extreme examples of child abuse has started to make adults question assumption about what is normal behaviour, Alice Miller’s texts and research on “black pedagogy” is not youth liberationist literature, but it could easily be. Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) also could improve the social perception of children as an oppressed group (“Are children oppressed? The timely importance of answering this question”, Barth, Olsen, 2020). In France, some people have started speaking of “Ordinary educational violence” (Violences éducatives ordinaires) and “douces violences” (Schuhl, 2009). Therefore I think retaining the child abuse framework and continuing to highlight “extreme" examples of child maltreatment well as normalized ones is useful and could help some adults realize how humanity as a whole, and not just children, as John Wall reminds us in “Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge", is degraded when 29.3% of the world’s population is still experiencing forms of oppression that have begun to disappear over the last centuries for other minority groups even while they remain defranchised and exploited. I think that the global pandemic has been a useful moment to ask ourselves again if maybe the child liberationists of the 70s and 80s had a point. From childism in Covid-19 policies (Alwan, 2021), the ethical questions about paternalism barring children from getting vaccinations without parental consent prompts (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/21/dc-vaccine-lawsuit-parental-consent/), to the dramatic increase in child abuse during lockdowns (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213421003689, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/health/covid-mental-health-teens.html) we realize that we aren’t all the same even in the face of disease and death, like in all situations, children always get the short end of the stick. The situation of children during lockdowns has shown us that home, if you’re a child, is far from the best place to be. It’s actually probably the worst. The worst, but only after school. The way children have been forced by adults to return to school despite all the risks (https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/childrens-concerns-and-feelings-are-ignored-in-back-to-school-planning-164823) makes us again question both paternalism (just as adults who refuse mask and vaccinations too made us question the supremacy of the adult as rational actor) and the institution of schooling itself, another breeding ground for “extreme” forms of abuse and another institution structured around the dominance of the adult and the submission of the child. Is it time for the anarchist ideals of family abolition and school abolition to enter the mainstream, at least among leftists? Maybe we can start seeing why Firestone wrote her chapter “Down with Childhood!” and why Illich wrote “Deschooling Society" in the 70s.
I believe that in the society we live in to “prevent" child abuse, even in it’s extreme forms, is impossible. Society is run by adults, and no privileged group, despite the fact that we’re constantly told that the case of children is “just different", has the “best interests" of the group it oppresses at heart. Our society is structured around the notion that for the first eighteen years of your life you’re just supposed to endure mistreatment unless this mistreatment endangers your future as an adult as well. O’Neill stated in 1992 that the oppression of children is inevitable and just, and that, unlike for other marginalized people, “their main remedy is to grow up”. But what is true of adults as a group, doesn’t necessarily have to be true for the individual adult, or the adult reader of this article. The most important thing you can do to prevent child abuse is to #believekids. Always privilege the words of a child over that of their parent, guardian, teacher or any other adult. After the shameful case of #ChildQ, how do tweets like these from white adults look like?
This tweet made me think that the best way to prevent child abuse is to do exactly the opposite of what she suggests. You might not be able to change the world in one day, but you can slowly change yourself. Whatever the adult says, back the child.
