I woke up this morning to the death toll in Gaza, since October 7: 9,500 people, over 4000 of whom were children.
Among the 242 hostages still held by Hamas, 37 are children.
In Israeli jails, 170 Palestinian children are held without trial.
Every day, close to 60,000 young people and children are held in correctional facilities and jails in the United States, many of them (some stats say close to 85%) are held as de facto adults, in adult jails. The US is the country with the highest youth incarceration rates in the world, and Black youth are five times more likely to be jailed.
A new podcast has exposed a policy of arresting children as young as 7 and placing them in a juvenile jail for one to three nights, without charges and ostensibly “to teach them a lesson,” in one county in Tennessee.
All of our children, some more than others, are living in a world with a rapidly changing climate, and where the future is increasingly unknowable.
In the US, over 20% of teens have seriously considered suicide, says a recent report.
Fire arms are now the number one killer of children in America; in 2023, 1,156 teens and 246 children were killed by guns.
This isn’t going to be a fun, upbeat post.
But I’d like to talk about how at the core of violence against children (and especially violence against more marginalized children, and more marginalized people) are the ways we see them as less than human, and the ways we silence them and refuse them a place at any and all tables that matter.
Before I carry on, a couple things:
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Ok, here we go.
Adult spaces, adult decisions, adult privileges.
I see that so much of the way we treat children comes from our ideas about who children are and what they deserve.
They are, fundamentally, not full citizens. The world we’ve created, especially the industrialized, Western world, is simply not built for them. I could point to a million small ways children’s presence from public spaces - what we often refer to as “adult spaces” but are actually everyone’s spaces - is actively not encouraged. And how in the process of limited children’s autonomy out in the world, the existence of children as independent beings, valued for just existing and for their contribution to society, is erased.
Public bathrooms all over are often too big and too high for children to reach. Counters and shelves in shops are also often inaccessible. The entire industrialized world is literally built to adult, and often adult man, size.
When adults see children out and about in the world that belongs to them, too, they are asked “what they’re doing out here on a school day.” Can you imagine being questioned about why you’re in a coffee shop or the supermarket or the park “on a work day”?
Children are systematically segregated from adult life by our newish concept of “child-friendly” spaces, menus, and activities, which serve to sever children and childhood even further (and to an extent, mothers and primary carers too) from the so-called adult world.
Children have little to no voice in public decision-making, and although there seems to be a shift happening in some communities, they still have nothing close to an equal voice in their own and their family’s life.
Children have no real spending power that doesn’t have adult strings attached. They have very little recourse to justice, and their rights are often cancelled out by the parental rights of their parents.
Children don’t get a choice about how to be educated, and where and how to spend the majority of their waking hours. They have a right to education according to the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child, AND a duty to learn in ways that are acceptable to the society they live in. In some countries, their right to education is in fact a forced right. You would think that if children could have a say in anything, it might be in creating spaces to spend the majority of their time.
Children are openly spoken about in ways that would make many of us shudder were they applied to any other historically oppressed group of people.
Children’s consent and physical and mental integrity are routinely overriden in so many spheres: at home, at the doctor’s office, in hospitals, in schools, in shops, at family member’s homes.
Why don’t we care?
Why don’t we care about children as a group?
We pay a ton of lip service to how children must be protected and shielded, how children are sacred, how they must come first - but then our cumulative actions as a society point to something entirely different: the dehumanization and erasure of children.
This is a much larger discussion but one of the reasons I’ve written about before, is that many of our systems and societies are built around the principle that might is right - and so those with more power will get to decide what goes, and those with less will be sent to the margins, silenced, erased. Children are possibly one of the most disenfranchised groups in society - not only do they not have a voice or a vote, but the adults who are charged with protecting and speaking on their behalf, very often do not.
Children don’t really count as a political, economic or social force.
At the root of why this is, are our conceptions of children and childhood. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t bang on about it more than I have to. But in brief, we see children as works in progress, not as full beings in themselves, and therefore as less than, in need of constant correction and protection. Our governments increasingly see children as economic entities to invest in for desired social and economic outcomes. Not as humans who deserve equitable treatment right now, just for existing.
Everything we say and do to them, all the ways we treat them, all the laws we pass that concern them, all of it fails to put children first because our conception of children is not one of primacy, of inherent value. It is one of a passing phase where you don’t quite count as a full human. Where you can and should be influenced, but shouldn’t be able to decide for yourself.
The false binary
Much like mothers and primary carers, the nuclear family is sold to us as the ideal, when in fact it is a very intentional way to isolate us - to remove us from what might once have been a network of support, sharing and community engagement, and keep us isolated, unsupported and too burnt out to change things.
At the same time, we are also intentionally sold a story that centres around a binary: we cannot both respect and honor children, AND care for their health, educate them, protect them from harm.
In other words, treating children like humans would mean we’d have to truly hear them, get to know them, stand by them, solicit their participation and consent - and how would we make sure they were healthy, safe and educated? And how would those of us mothering and parenting actually get to live OUR lives too?
How would we get to go to work if our child decides they don’t want to go to school?
We can’t pursue a career, AND respect out child’s decision-making around how they’d like to be cared for and educated.
I don’t buy this binary. I don’t buy that we either force our children to brush their teeth, or we respect their wholeness and they get cavities. That we either give up ourselves to care for them, or we stand up for ourselves and they will just have to deal with spending their days in environments they dislike, or that are harmful.
Yes, our economic and social structures make us believe this binary choice must be true: this, too, is intentional.
But I refuse to see our children’s rights and integrity as somehow opposed to our own as women, mothers, parents.
I think this is a fiction, and even when it does feel like this is true I don’t see it as an absolute truth, but as a socially constructed one. One that has become true because of the limited choices that are made available for us.
It’s also important to remember that this binary is a product of white, Western culture: Indigenous and Black women in the US have always worked, AND cared for their children, as well as many other women and men and carers all over the world.
The reason it often feels like children bear the brunt of our “feminist” choices as mothers, is that as white women we’ve been raised to believe in this binary - that someone has to lose out, and it’s either going to be us, or our children. (I’m going to write more about feminism & child lib soon!)
Stand up for children
I recently finished Minna Dubin’s book Mom Rage, and while I enjoyed it and could relate to so much of it, one big, unspoken thing loomed over the entire book: why do we get away with taking our rage out on children?
Why are children always at the bottom of the pile? Even in their own home?
The short answer for me, is power. Mothering (and parenting) can feel utterly devoid of power at times, but we almost always have power over our young children. We take out our rage on them, our unresolved issues, and we get away with treating them like not-quite-human.
In social justice circles, there is so often talk about the rights and liberation of an ever-expanding selection of people, and this is how it should be.
Children are more often than not completely absent, even here. (This is not to say they are quiet or powerless - some of the most important justice movements were and are led by young people!)
Our adult-dominated world is capable of seeing the active discrimination of other groups of adults - and even of some species of animals! - and to still be completely oblivious to adultism and adult supremacy, because we cannot tell it apart from the water we swim in.
When we see young people speaking up, we still label it “bad behaviour” or allude to mental health struggles, bad parenting, the impact of social media, rather than seeing it for what it is: resistance and advocacy.
And then we wonder why children are always the first and most tragic casualties of war, of the intentional defunding of public services, of lack of health insurance coverage, of the stubborn refusal to pass gun control measures, of poor mental health services, of unemployment and addiction, of rampant capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy.
There is nothing that complex or hard for me about seeing children as a group that needs to be supported, respected and honoured just for existing as themselves. A group we can be in solidarity with, and that can only be a positive force in society.
I’d love to know your thoughts!
Thank you for taking the time to read.
Fran x
Love this, so good.
I would add that it’s problematic to say ‘violence against children’ - violence without a subject. Much like ‘violence against women’ should be ‘men’s violence against women’, ‘violence against children’ should be ‘adult violence against women’.
I am very sensitive to subject-less structures, passive voice and other sentence structures that downplay active roles at the moment with the way media and also people are writing about Gaza at the moment. (I will write my own post about it.)