“Protect the children.”
“Our kids are the future.”
“No Child Left Behind.”
Slogans that hold no weight when the “solution” to school shootings is to hide better.
When free lunch programs are cut because it is imperative that poor children starve at the institution they are legally required to be at.
When the state and system obfuscate any investigation into a documented child sex slave island and the people who perpetrated it and participated in it.
Children are the most oppressed class of people.
Knee-jerk reactionaries will say that I am undermining the real oppression that other demographics face - imprisonment, enslavement, forced sterilization, mutilation, discrimination, violence, silencing their voices when they cry out for justice. Yet children face all of these horrific scenarios regularly, and legally, and it is not only accepted as a part of a civilized society but also encouraged culturally. Discrimination and oppression from race, sex, gender, or other marginalized identities only compound on the oppression that children face - for example, young Black girls will experience racism and sexism, on top of the marginalization of being a child.
In general, children and teenagers are largely dismissed or controlled because Americans perceive them as inherent liars, manipulators, and delinquents. Many adults think children are always exaggerating, and therefore nothing they say is as extreme as they claim. This enables abusers because adults are less likely to believe a child, and the vast majority of child abuse cases are from someone the child is very close with, usually familially like a father, brother, or uncle. It is usually someone they trust, and therefore usually someone their loved ones trust.
Because of this unjustified bad public image, young people are frequently banned from establishments - gas stations, fast food, shops of all kinds - for no reason other than discrimination. Management fears that teens’ high energy (also called rowdiness) will damage their property or reputation. “No loitering” and “No skateboarding” are dogwhistles for “this place is unfriendly to minors.” No loitering - a sign that also targets homeless people and others with unstable living conditions. Why is simply existing in public a crime? This is a heavily contributing factor to how the outside world that is accessible to young people is growing ever smaller.
Yes, young people have less impulse control and less emotional regulation, but they are also more impressionable. Less impulse control and less emotional regulation are uncontrollable features of growing up, not personal flaws. When your guardians don’t listen to your words and dismiss your concerns, especially about mental health, teens and children often do things that others would call “misbehavior” or “attention-seeking.” Attention-seeking is seen as a personal flaw also, rather than a failure of caretakers to adequately take care of them.
Young people are treated as immature, ignorant, stupid, and irrelevant in any political conversation, or any serious conversation at all. Yet, when they do one of those attention-seeking behaviors because of their lower impulse control, they’re expected to be fully realized “young adults who should have the experience and control to know better.”
Children are completely and utterly dismissed in American society. Every aspect of being a young person is unvalued, from their opinions to their very life. School shootings are probably the first thing to come to mind, but they are neither the beginning nor the end of the violence that young people suffer. Institutionally, residential schools exist to punish and kill indigenous children, and boarding schools for “troubled” teens are torture camps for unwell or unwanted children. Young people are the only demographic that can be openly, legally abused by anyone. Parents, teachers, elders, siblings. Corporal punishment traumatizes and causes brain damage, from excessive cortisol and severe mental illness and trauma. Society says it's okay to hit your kids, but most people would catch an assault charge if they tried what they do to their kids on an adult.
Of course, young people have no say in any of this. Autonomy is a privilege gifted by generous parents, not an unalienable right. Adults get away with much more violent, controlling abuses against children than against other adults because of this lack of autonomy for young people. Many parents deem self-determination outside the planned route to be unacceptable. Even the most harmless decisions are often forbidden. A parent’s overbearing restrictions limit a child’s access to the world with no regulation. Parents can completely control a child's life up to a certain age. Young people are expected to do what they're told without question, to completely submit to all authority and yield their voice and power to an adult. Children are more vulnerable and require more guidance and supervision to keep them safe and healthy; however, many parents abuse this control to restrict a child’s personal expression and development, and ultimately harms the relationship between parent and child irreparably, and between child and society.
Not that society ever particularly cared about its children anyway. Young people are typically smaller until they're older, and less experienced with less situational awareness. These make them easy targets for kidnapping and trafficking - as demonstrated by Epstein Island. Sexualization of kids is so normalized in current western society that the perpetrators of these unspeakable crimes have not been held accountable, and likely never will in the current system.
Having parents, or stable guardians of any kind with the capacity to feed and shelter you, is a massively underrated privilege in capitalist America. And these are fundamental requirements that don't even yet meet the standard for good child-rearing, but at the very least allow children to live, to survive. Being a child without guardians puts one in the foster care system, which is massively underfunded for the amount of people they have to take care of. But foster care only goes so far, until the person is 18 years old, at which point they are released into society with little to no safety net. 1 in 4 of every person who ages out of the system becomes homeless within the first four years. 25% in 4 years, and 50% of homeless people in the US over all were in foster care at some point.
The scale of this governmental failure is monumental. What kind of ruthless society allows for this level of neglect?
Survival as a young person can be a heavy struggle; every species in the animal kingdom faces the struggle of keeping their children alive and healthy. As humans, we have the technology to ensure that no child goes without their needs met, no matter the case or the cause. Yet to use it for that purpose is an affront to conservative values, as they decline every measure taken to provide free food to children in schools.
Schools where teenagers, and in many cases even younger, are forced into 60 and 80 hour workweeks, between 40 hours at school and 20-40 hours of homework every week. And this is all only if the child doesn’t have to get a paid job, either from pressure from their parents or in order to support their financially unstable household. Adults ask young people to carry an unreasonable burden of labor because education isn’t valued as a kind of labor, which it certainly is. It takes time, energy, and effort and the commodity it produces is an educated worker. We start overworking our populace extremely early on, conditioning people into accepting long hours, unpaid labor, and breaks only to eat so one can do more work. As young as thirteen the concept of recess is discarded, and children must labor harder and longer with fewer breaks.
This is not a sustainable educational system and many parents recognize this - misguided, they often turn to homeschooling and other alternative school methods. Homeschooling is not a superior option, either, because it limits a child’s social development due to a lack of peers. Children need community - “it takes a village” as they say - and this is limited and controlled in any manner possible by parents, teachers - any adult in a position of power over them.
Which, in all honesty, is nearly every able-bodied adult. Children cannot advocate for themselves, and in the way society is currently designed there is a fundamental clash of interest between adults and children. Advocating for children’s rights, for children’s health and safety, can damage a person's reputation and even risk their career.
What a monstrous way to build a society.
