No, I don’t care about your opinion on youth liberation.
The humanity of children shouldn’tbe up for debate.
Youth liberation to this day is an extremely controversial issue in leftist spaces, and an unmentionable one among liberals and conservatives alike, as well as among most people who are highly aware of inequalities such as sexism and racism, without even mentioning people who aren’t heavily involved in politics and social justice. That is because often, as I already mentioned in other articles, the idea that for example women or black people should be the equals of men or white people is based on the idea that certain groups of adults shouldn’t be considered inferior to other groups of adults. The shared adulthood of adults from marginalized and privileged groups then is portrayed as the reason why they should have the same rights, as John Wall points out in his book “Give Children the Vote: On Democratizing Democracy”. This means that rather than identifying and opposing youth oppression as the foundational oppression on which all other forms of oppressions are modeled, adult members of marginalized groups preferred to anxiously stress their difference from the children to whom they were historically compared. “Adulthood and Other Fictions” by Sari Edelstein shows how in nineteenth-century America, the normative model of growing up, from a dependent immature child to an independent mature adult, was the preserve of a small group of people. White women and black people were denied adulthood and kept in a state of dependency throughout their adult lives. The fact that all marginalized groups have had their oppressions naturalized by comparisons with children has been recognized, but Edelstein’s book is original in the fact that it questions the idea that oppressing someone on the account of them being a child is natural, or that the concepts of “childhood” and “adulthood” are in any way natural. The whole idea of “adulthood” is identified as a disavowal of human dependency, which through the construction of “childhood” and “adulthood” gets displaced exclusively on childish bodies. Hence, why the elderly (old age has been often called “the second childhood”) and the disabled are also similarly disfranchised and subjected to violence, the first are seen as having lost their adult vigor and regressed to a childlike state, and the second as failing to measure up to society’s standard of “maturity”. The social construction of adulthood is defensive, one is an adult because one is not a child. It is common for example, when it comes to female oppression, for women to respond to paternalism (considered so natural for children) by saying they are not “little girls”. In this context, women, rather than adopting a radical stance and questioning the male norm that being “little” is shameful, simply apply the man/boy binary that is so central to the patriarchy to a “matriarchal” context. We, these feminists stress, should be equal to men because despite being women, we are adults. Youth liberation is a fringe opinion even among feminists, even though the patriarchy has not one, but two core tenets: Gender oppression and age oppression, termed by sociologists of childhood “marital patriarchy” and “age patriarchy” (Hood-Williams, 1990). Kate Millet in 1968 wrote: “The principles of patriarchy appear to be two fold: male shall dominate female, elder male shall dominate younger”. Now that women, thanks to what I will call adult feminism in this article (similarly to white feminism, adult feminism would be a form of feminism which openly excludes girls or tokenizes them, which refuses to examine age oppression in their lives and more broadly which refuses to acknowledge the oppression of all children as a core tenet of male supremacy), have more of a say when it comes to bringing up children, they are as much the property of women as of men (Willems, 2012). Marginalized adults have little sympathy for the children in their group, as women abuse and silence the girls in their lives and black adults display violence and aggression towards black children. If we consider racial oppression, we can see that violent parenting practices among black people are heavily tied to white supremacy, more specifically to slavery. The perception of black adolescents as dangerous is both racial and generationed, ephebiphobia, the fear of adolescents, a concept examined by American sociologist Mike Males, disproportionately affects black youths, but it is rooted in adult supremacy as much as white supremacy.
Logically then, maintaining “adulthood” as the standard of humanity (a white male-centric concept which by default excludes disabled people and can be revoked from women and minorities) requires that the oppression of children is made invisible. When one talks of “nondiscrimination” in discussions about childhood, it is taken to mean, equality between children, not between children and adults, the oppression of children is rendered illegible through its naturalization. Similarly, the idea that “all men are created equal” is also taken to mean that no child is born superior to another, not that a child isn’t “naturally” inferior to an older person.
The anxious nature of adulthood, caused by the positioning of the adult status as a prerequisite for having rights, is part of the reason why I do not debate with other adults about youth liberation. The out of proportion and often violent reactions even the most basic premises of youth liberation trigger in most people are proof that the majority of adults see the autonomy of youth as a mortal threat because it unsettles the strict immature/mature binary on which adulthood is based. I won’t validate these reactions, because there is nothing rational about them, they are based on rage and fear. Engaging with them would be a way of legitimizing them, the best way to destigmatize youth liberation is to stop pretending that the idea that children are less than humans is just an opinion that should be respected.
Mostly, I do not debate with other adults about youth liberation because two adults' treating youth rights as a debate is itself adultist.
In our society, it is adults who decide for children, even when they’re no longer infants and capable of expressing what they desire. Children do not get a say even in decisions that involve them. Even the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, not a particularly anti adultist text, it only asserts children’s right to be treated with dignity, mentions the right of children to be involved in making decisions that involve them (article 12). Of course, even though all countries except the US ratified it, its principles are rarely fully applied, especially this one. In addition to this, most children, especially those from impoverished countries, are unaware of its existence. 4 out of 10 think that adults fail to respect its principles, and 5 out of 10 state that adults do not involve them in decisions that involve them.
We can see this tendency not just when it comes to the more controversial issue of youth liberation, but also when it comes to children’s basic right to not be hit. For example, it is said that there is a “debate” about hitting one’s children to make them compliant, in this “debate” even the adults that oppose that violence base it on the fact that spanking doesn’t work (implying that if it did it would be okay to use it) or that it harms a child’s future (the idea that children have only value as future adults), or condone different modes of “discipline” that aren’t less abusive just because they do not involve hitting. The idea that a group of adults gets to decide whether or not children should be hit is just abhorrent to me. And the idea that a group of adults gets to decide whether or not youth liberation is needed isn’t that different.
Often, abusive parenting practices and the restriction of children’s freedom are defended by people who think youth liberation would restrict their “parental rights” (disturbingly similar to property rights), they are right on this because parental rights shouldn’t even be a concept, the idea of “parental rights” is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of rights. Rights exist to limit authority, there is no such thing as the right to have authority over someone else. The concept of “parental rights” then is only reasonable if you don’t see children as people but as property.
Often, dishonestly adults claim that “parental rights” help children because adults’, especially parents' and children’s interests, align. This is blatantly false. If anything, the state of being an adult is a conflict of interests when it comes to children’s rights. Adults benefit from keeping children a subordinate class. Not that a lot of adults do not have the well-being of children at heart. But definitely, those worried about losing their “parental rights” don’t.
Adults then shouldn’t, not only be the only ones taken seriously when it comes to discussion of children’s rights but should always be viewed with suspicion. If you are a parent, yes, your opinion on youth liberation matters less, not more, because it is in your interest that your children remain subordinate to you. The idea that only parents should have an opinion on children is no different than the idea that only men should have an opinion on women, it doesn’t make any sense. When it comes to decisions that affect children’s lives then the voices that should be centered are those of children themselves, not those of their oppressors.
And yet children face insurmountable challenges when discussing their rights to adults, that as an adult youth liberationist I don’t face. There might be some people who would be misogynistic towards me and apply the anti-feminist stereotype of the “crazy woman” to me because I believe in youth liberation, some others could make malicious insinuations (of which my favorite is that people who want to “weaken parental rights” want to do so to sexually abuse children, pretty ironical, considering most sexual abuse occurs in the family), I’m not at all immune from ridicule as an adult who supports youth rights, but at least people who disagree with me know they have to show at least some degree of respect and civility, something that is not at all granted to a child. I won’t debate youth liberation with an adult, reinforcing their idea that adults, unlike “irrational” children, are “reasonable” and can be debated with. I won’t try to come to terms with them. It’s not my place to negotiate the human rights of an oppressed group as someone who is not part of it. “But we were all children!” is the objection that is often leveled against this reasoning, and of course it’s true, but the nature of adultism, unlike that of other oppressions, is cyclical, the people who experienced it internalize its principles and go on to perpetrate it. And why we should trust the recollections of adults rather than the people who are children today is unclear, if you do not believe adult opinions have more inherent value. It would be like saying that we should only listen to poor people who have managed to become wealthy when it comes to the problems of the poor. Once you are wealthy, the problems of the poor do not affect you anymore, and you have an interest in oppressing the poor. And you don’t get to decide about their rights.
Whether other marginalized groups should have rights used too to be a debate among people who weren’t part of those groups, and for some, like transgender people, it still is. But it is only when those groups rejected the approach of convincing their oppressors by being accomodating and respectable that the movement truly moved forward. It is still frequent among white men to have “debates” on the human rights of marginalized groups. As Assata Shakur once said:
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them”.
No, I won’t debate youth liberation with you. If you think one-third of the human population should have no rights and be treated like property, I’m not the one that should explain herself.
