Denying Youth The Right To Public Space: A Growing Problem in American Society

   Recently a story has been making the rounds in the news media regarding an eight-year-old young woman whose mother had the police called on her and then had a Department of Children and Family Services investigation launched in reference to her, all at the behest of what sounds like a quite frankly imbalanced neighbor because the young person was walking her dog by herself on the streets of her suburban neighborhood. The mother ultimately had to hire an attorney to clear her name and the matter was put to rest in less than two weeks, but she was understandably outraged, disturbed, and somewhat traumatized by the incident. She explained to reporters that she rarely allowed her children to be unsupervised and that she felt "mom shamed" by this entire bizarre incident.

   First of all, one's heart does certainly go out to this mother who was doing nothing wrong and had to deal with an avalanche of legal harassment concerning her family. I find myself wishing that the person responsible for this family's nightmare was being publicly shamed in the same fashion as those individuals recently rightly publicly derided in the public sphere for calling the police on African-Americans simply going about their business while black. All of that being said, I find it somewhat problematic that the main focus of the media in reporting this story has been on the mother and not on the even greater problem which is ultimately linked to this mother's plight - the fact that increasingly in American society, young people are discouraged from occupying public space.

   The rationales given for attempting to keep youth from occupying public space tend to vary based upon the age of the youth and the nature of the space that an ageist is trying to deny a young person access to. For fairly young youth (such as Dorothy Widen, the eight-year-old young lady walking her gratuitously adorable white toy poodle in the aforementioned story) the rationales proffered by those who want to segregate youth from the rest of society and deny them all freedom of movement often come down to misdirected concerns about safety. Unsupervised children, we are told, will hurt themselves, hurt others, or be harmed by strange people with ill intentions. This is despite the fact that crime rates are actually far lower than they have been in years past when unsupervised children out and about were a more readily identifiable feature of urban, suburban, and rural life. Writing at the dawn of the second wave of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s (a much more laissez faire time in terms of youth being unsupervised compared to today), Shulamith Firestone, Richard Farson, and John Holt realized that calls for women to abandon themselves completely to mothering and supervise their children constantly were largely rooted in sexism dressed up as concern for children's welfare. Those who have subsequently written about the daycare ritual abuse and sexual molestation panics of the 1980s such as Richard Beck and Roger N. Lancaster have similarly noted that the mechanics of these modern day witch hunts were set in motion in large part due to increasing concerns within society about the fact that so many women were putting their children in the care of others while they worked outside of the home for the first time. Clearly, something other than an increase in actual dangers and risks to young people is driving these phenomena and a great deal of it has to do with the sexist notion that women belong in the home and should be watching and caring for their children at all times instead of occupying public space themselves.

   However, in the contemporary United States, while adult women do continue to suffer as a result of these problematic attitudes and the laws, policies, practices, and social norms that grow out of them, the greatest victims are in fact young people themselves. The fact that cultural anxieties about women's increasing independence from hearth and home present in the guise that they do speaks to the fact that very few people in America today are comfortable with openly stating that a woman's place is always and only in the home caring for her children and looking out for her husband. What we are comfortable with stating openly is that children need constant supervision. Young people should never be let out of an adult's sight. Curfews should be imposed to keep teenagers locked away after dark. Allowing a child the freedom to inhabit public space should be criminalized. Even supervised young people should be kept out of some public spaces just because some people don't want to see them. We as a society are increasingly comfortable with promulgating the notion that adults without children should see children out and about as little as possible and never on their own. While sexism may be fueling a great deal of this trend, anti-youth ageism is fanning the flames even further. And ultimately, young people are the biggest losers in this situation.

Book Review: Roger N. Lancaster's "Sex Panic and the Punitive State"

   As many of you know, I have been doing a lot of research into moral panics of the 1970s and 1980s era in order to explain how previous tentative yet meaningful steps in the direction of youth liberation in the 1960s and 1970s had been rolled back in the ensuing years. I have been doing this research specifically because writing about this is part of the introduction of the large scale book project that I am currently working on in reference to youth rights. Towards this end, I have already read and reviewed Richard Beck's book We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. I am following this review with one of the anthropologist Roger N. Lancaster's book Sex Panic and the Punitive State, which was published in 2011 by the University of California Press.

   The thesis of Lancaster's book is that a series of sexual panics, in particular those related to minors, fundamentally changed America over the course of the 1970s and the 1980s and ultimately contributed to dynamics that made the United States a far more punitive place than it had been before. From a youth liberationist perspective, perhaps the key insight of this text is Lancaster's insight that successive waves of sex panics, with their focus on a stereotyped idealized and asexual innocent (fictional) child victim, have created a network of laws, policies, practices, and assumptions embedded deeply within the culture and the workings of the state in reference to minors, adults, and sexuality that is increasingly draconian and out of touch with reality. The effects have come to extend far beyond anything having to do strictly with sexuality and have not been for the good.

   One bedrock tenet of my youth liberationism has always been that serious youth liberationists cannot be afraid to confront the harm that comes to both youth and adults as a result of authoritarian attempts to police youth and intergenerational sexuality because, while this may be politically fraught territory, it is also the ground upon which successive waves of sexually inflected moral panics have eroded the rights of youth and others in all manner of ways that extend far beyond the realm of sexuality. Youth liberationists can do this in a responsible way that recognizes that sexuality is an ethically fraught territory for people of all ages and that sexual exploitation can indeed be seriously harmful as radical feminist theorists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have written about eloquently. For this reason, I have long believed that feminists, youth liberationists, and everyone else should take a view of sexual politics that seriously grapples with the observations of sex critical radical feminism while pushing back strongly against notions of sexual panic that are used as a means of social control increasingly disconnected from any sense of proportion or reality.

   Writes Lancaster in a particularly poignant passage regarding the sex panics of the 1980s, "They distilled diffuse anxieties about sex and children into the pervasive perception that all children everywhere are at perpetual risk of sexual assault. In the resulting culture of hypervigilant child protection, the denial of childhood sexuality and the perpetual hunt for the predatory pervert are opposite sides of the same coin: the innocent and the monster, the perfect victim and the irredeemable fiend... They spawned expansive new subfields of psuedoscience - fanciful psychological profiles of abusers, whimsical diagnostic tools said to predict future predation or recidivism. They powerfully contributed to the consolidation of an ever more comprehensive culture of child protection, thus extending the purviews of both long-standing official bureaucracies (child protection services) and newer, quasi-official ones (victims' rights advocates)."

   In order to illustrate his point, Lancaster list a variety of important ways that these successive waves of sex panic "have led to to new terminologies and produced new ways of speaking and thinking about children." He writes that a "blanket 'no touching' policy" has pervaded many organizations responsible for child care in contravention of the long acknowledged wisdom that all people, especially very young people, need hugs and other forms of wholesome non-sexual touch in order to thrive. He notes that the insights of Freudian psychology, which acknowledged the reality that children are sexual beings and that all relationships "can have an erotic dimension without any overt sexual activity ever occurring" have been superseded by a new cultural logic that insists that acknowledging such psychological truths harms and damages children by "sexualizing" them. Lancaster states, "Commonsensical propositions, easily uttered before the 1980s - children sometimes develop crushes on their teachers, adolescents sometimes seek out sexual relationships with adults precisely because the latter are more mature, more experienced, and more sophisticated - have become suspect." Lancaster also notes that research findings which further the association between sex and trauma in the lives of youth are quickly afforded official status by politicians, journalists, activists, legal officials, and others while studies which find evidence to the contrary are ignored or even made into the targets of outrage and censorship. Finally, Lancaster notes that an obsession with the concept of childhood innocence "has become more valued than children themselves" as a focus on projects like abstinence only sex education and protecting children's and adolescent's sexual purity takes priority over securing the rights or material welfare of young people in any wider sense and that the term "pedophile" has, since the 1960s, become a household word denoting an increasingly widening set of sexual behaviors and desires.

   Lancaster wisely notes that unrealistic and stereotyped notions of youth asexuality are all too often quickly leveraged against youth themselves who fail to perform notions of childhood innocence to the satisfaction of the adults around them. He cites the statistic that ostensibly 41% of sexual abusers are said to be minors, but also notes that ultimately this statistic is problematic because "nonviolent, noncoercive sex acts between minors (or between minors and mature adults)" have come "to be classified as abuse." Ominously, the same sorts of logic that fueled the Satanic ritual abuse and daycare child molestation panics that were the primary subject of Richard Beck's We Believe the Children are now being employed in the service of labeling and punishing youth deemed to be "sex offenders" by overzealous and ill informed teachers, social workers, and law enforcement officials. Amazingly, Lancaster documents that in Maryland in 2001, for instance, one hundred and sixty-five elementary school aged youth were suspended from school for sexual harassment, including three preschoolers, sixteen kindergartners, and twenty-two first graders. Notes Lancaster wryly, "Children-who-molest, children-who-harass, children-who-abuse are mostly children who fail to validate adult fantasies of childhood innocence. And those fantasies are becoming increasingly fantastic." This is but one example of what youth liberationists are talking about when we insist that, all too often, child abuse and child protectionism are ultimately two sides of the same coin. A preoccupation with safeguarding an imaginary veil of childhood innocence does no such thing but in practice does ultimately lead to real and devastating harms for actual real flesh and blood children.  

   One fascinating and important point that Lancaster makes is that while mainstream acceptance of lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans has increased, the shadowy specter of the pedophilic child predator continues to perform a great deal of the sociocultural work that the figure of the deviant homosexual menace once performed. For this reason, Lancaster argues that sexual panics are especially detrimental to the freedom, rights, and interests of members of the LGBTQ community. In making this argument, Lancaster draws on the work of the renowned queer theorist Lee Edelman, a thinker whose name I have long been vaguely familiar with but who Lancaster's work truly made me want to read and engage with for the first time in a meaningful way. Lancaster also draws on his own identity as a queer man and his own experiences of how sex panics can wreck havoc within the LGBTQ community to buttress his analysis of the wider social phenomenon.

   Situating some fairly healthy and benign intergenerational relationships within the larger context of LGBTQ culture, Lancaster writes, "Like butch-femme or hustler-john relationships, intergenerational relationships were a long-standing paradigm of American gay life until recently. Equipped with fake IDs, teens as young as fifteen or sixteen were sometimes difficult to distinguish from young men who did not quite look their age ('twinks'). Their admirers (chicken hawks) were scarcely numerous, but they were a visible part of gay life in the late 1970s, when I arrived on the scene. (I should note here that, to the best of my knowledge, I have never met a textbook pedophile, someone whose sexual object of choice is a sexually immature child, and the chicken hawks I knew as a youth all condemned relations with children, as well as relations involving the use of force, deception, or exploitation, as they understood these terms.) No doubt opportunities for exploitation existed in these settings. But because participants in these relationships frequented the same bars and shared gossip through overlapping networks, they were subject to the norms of the subculture. Mature minors, young adults, and mature adults alike took a decidedly dim view of sugar daddies who mistreated their 'boys.' And whether the younger party was younger or older than eighteen, there was an explicit expectation that the older partner would mentor the younger, helping him to acquire education, skills, savvy, or other forms of cultural capital. It does not seem self-evident to me that deeply criminalizing this sort of relationship, banishing it from subcultural oversight and regulation, benefits minors." Lancaster goes on to note that in many cases it was the older lovers of mature gay youth who cared for, provided for, and loved these youth when ultimately their own biological families had abused, abandoned, and shunned them for their sexual orientation.

   Ultimately, I think that serious youth liberationists need to read this book in order to develop a deeper understanding of how the impacts of multiple waves of sexual hysteria in reference to youth in particular have shaped American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Lancaster's work should make it exceedingly clear that sexual freedom for youth must be on the youth liberationist agenda not because we seek to aid and abet the sexual exploitation of young people by older people or by each other, but because we see the very real harms that overtly puritanical and protectionist approaches to youth sexuality do to young people in particular as well as to society as a whole.

Roger N. Lancaster's book Sex Panic and the Punitive State published in 2011 by the California State University Press.

 
  

Book Review: Richard Beck's "We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s"

   As many of those who follow my work may know, I am currently in the process of writing a book on youth rights issues. When one endeavors to write a book about a topic that one has thought about as deeply and studied as much as I have in reference to youth liberation, it is interesting to realize those areas within your subject area of expertise about which you still possess significant gaps in knowledge. In the introduction that I am currently writing to the book, I was able to write confidently about the relationships among various works of youth liberation theory that appeared in the 1970s and how these works reflected the cultural, social, and political preoccupations of that moment in American history. However, when I came to the point in my narrative where I needed to write about how the moral panics and the reactionary cultural conservatism of the 1980s had winnowed away the preceding decades' advancements in youth liberation, I felt that I needed to do a lot more research to give an accurate account of the dynamics at play in the situation.

   In searching for books about youth and moral panics in the 1980s, one title that kept coming up again and again in my searches was Richard Beck's "We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s." This book, published in 2015 to critical acclaim, deals primarily with a slew of unfounded but highly consequential accusations of the sexual abuse of children by daycare workers in the 1980s and early 1990s. The title of the book initially made me uneasy as a youth liberationist. Since I knew that the book was about the ways in which these accusations of sexual molestation turned out to be overblown and unfounded, was the book called "We Believe the Children" as an ironic note meant to undermine the credibility of young people making accusations of abuse? Certainly no youth liberationist wants to promulgate such a narrative. However, the wonderful reviews for the book allowed me to overcome my hesitation and I am glad that I did for I discovered upon reading this fascinating book that the title is to be read in an entirely different light than I initially presumed.

   Perhaps the key insight of youth liberationism as a philosophy is that child abuse and child protectionism are all too often too sides of the same coin. In an ostensible effort to "protect" children (which in many cases is a euphemism for "controlling" them), children are placed in situations that are far more sinister than the often exaggerated or even imaginary threats from which adult caregivers seek to protect them. And by stripping young people of autonomy and freedom in the process, they then lack the means to escape the real terrors that besiege them. I don't suppose that Richard Beck would call himself a youth liberationist. In fact, I would be surprised if he had even heard that our movement exists. However, he intuitively understands this abuse/protectionism dynamic exceedingly clearly and in many ways, an exploration of this truth can be said to lie at the heart of his book.

   One of the most important things to understand about the pandemic of overwrought yet devastating accusations of sexual abuse by daycare workers in the 1980s that shook the nation is that this was not primarily a moral panic driven by lying children fabricating accusations of sexual abuse. Instead, the panic was almost entirely parent driven and the children caught in the crossfire of the hysteria were ultimately badgered, coerced, threatened, and confused into testifying to sexual molestation by adults that had previously been their caretakers. In addition to parents, social workers, police, prosecutors, child psychologists, and medical professionals were responsible for driving the panic and in many cases eliciting problematic testimonies of alleged abuse from young people. The reasons that these  individuals were so keen to glom onto this narrative of monstrous child abuse by daycare teachers varied. For example, the mother who set off the infamous McMartin Preschool sexual abuse case allegations was dangerously mentally unstable and out of touch with reality. Other parents found that involvement with the anti-molestation movement gave them a cause and an identity. Some prosecutors, police officers, social workers, and psychologists pushed problematic narratives out of careerism. But on a deeper level, Beck suggests, allegations of mass child molestation in daycare centers, ritual abuse hysteria, and the notions of recovered memories and multiple personality disorder really caught on because they all served more or less as a rebuke to the changing family dynamics that the sexual revolution, second wave feminism, and other social movements unleashed in the 1960s and 1970s. Casting daycare centers as hotbeds of child abuse, Beck argues, was a way for society to reassert that women should be in the home and not in the workforce serving as the primary caretakers of young children who should be kept away from those outside of the family unit at all costs.

   In addition to the book's focus on daycare sexual abuse allegations, the book also deals with the notion of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse being discovered by people later in life and then seen as the cause for the person's present psychological maladies with perhaps the most notable being multiple personality disorder. Beck is highly skeptical of the discourses surrounding repressed memory and multiple personality disorder and convincingly demonstrates that much of the supposed science used to support the existence of such phenomena is bogus. However, Beck argues that for many women in particular framing their experiences of oppression, abuse, and unhappiness within the context of the nuclear family in terms of ritual or sexual abuse that they have recovered memories of made sense in the legal, social, cultural, economic, and political context in which they found themselves.

   Writes Beck, "What was the source of this pressure that asked women to shoehorn all of their different experiences into a rigidly generic father-daughter incest narrative? Some part of the answer can be found in the legislation that extended the statute of limitations for adult survivors of childhood abuse only if the abuse had been sexual. Those laws did nothing to help adults who may have wanted to bring suit against their parents for physical abuse or neglect, and this created an incentive for women to talk about their childhood traumas in terms of sexual abuse regardless of their actual experience. Delayed discovery laws then created an additional incentive for plaintiffs to claim they had completely repressed memories of the abuse until recently. Plaintiffs who said they had always remembered what happened to them, that what they recently discovered was not the abuse itself but the psychological harm it caused them, had a harder time winning a favorable verdict. Finally, because there is no point in bringing a civil suit against someone who simply does not have much money, the suits that did wind up in front of a judge and in front of the media usually involved upper-middle-class families, who were also usually white. That this archetypal narrative of incest, trauma, repression, and recovery, all taking place in the context of middle-class family life, did not match the vast majority of abuse experiences that people actually had did very little to weaken its appeal. The narrative was a kind of key, and women who would or could not make use of this key found that the doors to social and legal recognition and aid remained closed."

   One particularly fascinating anecdote from the book involves the case of the Ingram family. In this family the father, Paul, was a police officer who excelled at his job and belonged to a tight knit police department. At home, he was rather authoritarian in his parenting style and had difficulty connecting on a personal, human level with his children although he loved them. When he and his wife, Sandy, had gotten married they had been Catholics but later on they became very involved with a charismatic evangelical Protestant church where people spoke in tongues when moved to do so by the Holy Spirit. The couple had five children, including a daughter named Ericka. During the 1980s Ericka was in her teens and early twenties and frequently attended a church camp called Heart to Heart and at one of these retreats, a charismatic preacher/psychic/motivational speaker began to speak about young girls being sexually abused and when a sobbing Ericka took to the stage, she told Ericka that she had been sexually abused by her father.

   In order to understand why Ericka so quickly bought into this notion and even welcomed it, it is worth knowing that Ericka had recently read a book by a woman who had claimed that her ostensibly respectable, Christian family had actually engaged her in horrific Satanic ritual abuse. She had also been hospitalized with pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) and had been told by a doctor that the only thing that could cause PID was sexual intercourse. This is not true as PID can also be caused by ovarian cysts which Ericka had and since Ericka was a virgin at the time the doctor told her this, she was very much rattled by the diagnosis. Thus, when her father was identified as a sexual abuser at the Christian retreat a lot of things probably began to fall into place for Ericka mentally.

   When Ericka went to the police to tell them that her father had been sexually abusing her and had also been involved in Satanic rituals, he did not resist the notion that he was an abuser but instead felt that perhaps it was appropriate that he was arrested despite having no memory of ever having done any of the things which Ericka was accusing him of. Writes Beck, "In 1988 Ingram and his colleagues all subscribed to what was then common wisdom among many police officers about child sexual abuse: victims could repress and forget their trauma for long periods of time and, crucially, so could perpetrators. Ingram himself had attended a statewide crime prevention meeting focused almost entirely on repressed memories, and he thought the presentation he heard there was very convincing." After two hours of police interrogation, the highly suggestible Ingram was ready to confess to all sorts of crimes. Egged on by the police as well as his pastor and his daughters, Paul told all sorts of wild tales of criminality.

   Finally, a professor from the University of California at Berkeley who was a sociologist of religion was called in. The professor was named Richard Ofshe. The police knew that Ofshe had done lots of academic work on the sort of thought reform that cults like the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church, and Syanon as well as the totalitarian governments of Soviet Russia and North Korea subjected people to. The police thought that perhaps the Satanic cult which Paul claimed to have been in had subjected him to mind control and they wanted to know all about it.

   However, the professor had also done academic work on the topic of false confessions. It was not long before he figured out the fact that this man had not done any of the heinous things that he said he had done. Ofshe tested his theory by telling Paul that Ericka had told him of a wild story in which he forced her to have sex with her brother while he watched. Ericka had not made such an allegation, but Paul was quick to confess to the accusation and began providing "memories" of the occurrence to the professor and the police. When Professor Ofshe confronted Paul with the truth, he refused to back down, still insisting that he had in fact done these horrible things. Writes Beck, "Ingram built the memory-generating machine inside himself at great personal cost, and it is not surprising that he would have been so reluctant to relinquish its benefits. It allowed him to say and believe that his daughters always told the truth no matter how crazy their stories became - by confessing his crimes, Ingram was now protecting his children, even if he had betrayed them for years. Ingram's memories also provided him with an elegant solution to the problem of how to be a good cop while being interrogated by cops. That his family and his workplace somehow accidentally conspired to incarcerate him for decades did not weaken Ingram's identification with either institution. He pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty years in prison."

   While in prison, Paul came to realize that he had not in fact done any of the things which he had been accused of doing and tried to appeal his conviction. However, as he explained to a journalist while he was incarcerated, real feelings of guilt about his parenting caused him to plead guilty to imaginary ritualistic and sexual crimes. He had been distant and emotionally abusive and occasionally physically abusive. Paul's guilt at his authoritarian parenting style ultimately led him to confess to bizarre sex crimes that he did not commit.

   Another important insight offered by Beck's book is the extent to which preschool aged youth were inundated with questions and suggestions about sexual abuse until some of them ultimately agreed that they had been abused in order to get the people pushing the abuse narrative off their backs. Ultimately these youth were abused, not by the supposed pedophiles and Satanic child molesters, but by the parents, social workers, psychologists, and police officers that harassed and harangued them. For instance, Bruce Woodling was a doctor that spent much of the 1980s "looking for ways to find medical evidence of chronic abuse in children" in Beck's words. The book goes into detail regarding Woodling's colposcope and his "wink response" test which involved probing the anuses, vaginas, and other genitals of the youth in his care. The fact that this was all done with good intentions only exacerbates the matter. Importantly, Richard Beck does not attempt to argue in We Believe the Children that the youth at the heart of these sexual panics escaped completely psychologically unscathed from their ordeals. However, what he does make clear is that those who most seriously harmed these young people were in actuality those most invested in promulgating a narrative of child protection in reference to them. While I was recently reading Dr. Lawrence R. Ricci's book What Happened in the Woodshed: The Secret Lives of Battered Children and a New Profession to Protect Them (which I also reviewed here on The Youth Rights Blog), I found myself thinking that some forensic markers of ostensible child abuse that attempt to locate the fact of abuse on the body of the child in question by reference to physically visible bodily signs could ultimately undermine efforts to protect children by leading to false negatives and undermine the rights of those falsely accused of child abuse by leading to false positive. The information that Richard Beck offers about this topic in We Believe the Children would appear to suggest that those are indeed pertinent concerns.

   One insight that I took away from this book as a youth liberationist and which I think that all youth liberationists should take away as well is the fact that it is ultimately self-defeating and irresponsible for youth liberationists to refuse to engage on the issue of sexual rights for young people and pushing back against the climate of sex panic that has increasingly come to permeate American culture, society, law, and politics in reference to young people. This is because exaggerated fears of adult sexual predators that ostensibly prey on youth and exaggerated conceptions of childhood and adolescent asexuality and immaturity lie at the root of so much ageist repression that has since extended a long way into domains that increasingly have less and less to do with sex. But if youth liberationists care about securing any liberties for young people, we cannot afford to be hesitant or avoidant in terms of pushing back against problematic narratives surrounding youth, adults, and sexuality. Instead we must insist on sexual freedom for all people regardless of age (while also being unafraid to draw upon the nuanced account of the harms that sometimes result from sexual objectification and exploitation regardless of the ages of those involved that second wave feminist thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon provide us with, thinkers and activists whom Beck is quick to disavow but who I strongly believe have important insights to offer about the nature of sexual exploitation and abuse that are not ultimately rooted in ageist notions of sex panic that the book describes as fueling the daycare and Satanic ritual abuse panics of the 1980s).

   Beck's account of 1980s sex panics is also useful for the way in which it situates these cultural phenomena squarely within the context of pervasive societal sexism and homophobia. A number of those falsely accused of committing child sexual abuse were gay, lesbian, or bisexual (or in some cases inaccurately thought to be so). This contributed to a sense that they were inherently guilty in the eyes of all too many average Americans in the 1980s. Similarly, men who worked as teachers, daycare providers, or other types of caregivers for youth were seen as inherently suspect as a result of doing so for reasons rooted in misandry and homophobia. Finally, misogyny was a major driving force of these moral panics. As more and more women moved into the workforce during the 1970s and 1980s and therefore looked to daycare providers, babysitters, nannies, and other non-family providers of childcare, society struggled to reconcile itself to women's increased activity within the public sphere and negative judgements leveled at women who did not fulfill traditional gender roles by choosing to work outside the home and therefore to entrust others with some of the day to day care for their children were regarded as behaving in a problematic way. Constructing daycare centers as sites of rampant child abuse was one way that society attempted to force women back into their traditional roles as full time wives and mothers who did not regularly work or volunteer outside the home to such an extent that it could be said to interfere with their full time child rearing responsibilities.

   Of particular interest to youth liberationists is the way that Beck stresses the extent to which the daycare, ritual abuse, and incest sex panics of the 1980s served to invisibilize any form of youth abuse, neglect, exploitation, or maltreatment that was not primarily sexual in nature. While social services aimed at ameliorating the challenging material conditions of poor and working class youth and their families were increasingly gutted and the physical and emotional abuse, oppression, and neglect of youth within the family was increasingly tolerated or even valorized in the name of patriarchal notions of parental rights, the increasingly exaggerated specter of the child molester whose monstrous crimes were defined in contrast to the norms of the nuclear family loomed large in the popular imagination of the era.

   In the excellent final chapter of Beck's book, he makes explicit the ways in which the legacy of the sexual moral panics which he chronicles continue to militate against the freedoms and liberties afforded to young people in America today and the disastrous consequences this has had for women and youth alike. He cites several examples of women who have been prosecuted for allowing their children to play unsupervised for limited periods of time in local parks or to sit by themselves in a car while the mother attended a job interview. Beck appears to imply that such negative state imposed consequences of allowing young people a certain measure of freedom tend to accrue to poor women and women of color in particular. Beck also writes about how the moral panics of the 1980s have led to all too many normal childhood and adolescent sexual experiences being pathologized to the detriment of youth who have done nothing seriously wrong. This can be especially troubling whenever the law gets involved and permanently labels increasingly younger and younger individuals as sexual offenders. In summary, Richard Beck gives a wide ranging and persuasive account of the myriad ways in which the fears unleashed upon American society by the sex-oriented moral panics of the 1980s functioned then and continue to function now as an important means of social control with ramifications for youth, women, men, poor and working class people, working mothers, people of color, and sexual and gender minorities in particular.

   Richard Beck's interest in the phenomena of repressed and subsequently ostensibly recovered memories of sexual and ritual abuse is another major part of the book's narrative. Beck carefully notes the many ways in which an increasing body of scientific and psychological literature on these topics has cast credible aspersions on the credibility of the memories of trauma and sexual abuse that individuals claim to recover in therapy. But Beck's analysis goes even deeper than that. According to Beck, the narratives surrounding these phenomena served to depoliticize the issues of rape, sexual abuse, incest, and patriarchal oppression within the family which feminists had worked so hard to politcize previously. Writes Beck in the book's penultimate chapter, "An earlier feminist analysis of incest and abuse had placed blame squarely on the nuclear family as an institution, as a way of distributing power among small groups that allowed fathers and husbands to exercise dangerous amounts of control over their children and wives. But recovered memory discarded this argument and replaced it with horror-movie plots and a parade of traumatized child-women. The isolation these women experienced in treatment, their dependence on the therapist as a surrogate parent figure, and the unprovability of their allegations rendered them completely nonthreatening from a political point of view."

   In conclusion, I would urge every serious youth liberationist to read this book. I would add the caveat that I believe that Beck's account of the feminist anti-pornography movement of the 1980s caricatures it to a certain extent and inappropriately lumps this movement in with other phenomena to which it may arguably bear a superficial resemblance but which I think is fundamentally different in kind from the sexual moral panics chronicled in We Believe the Children although an elaboration of this critique of the book and an explication of my interpretation of the works of Andrea Dworkin (one of my favorite feminist philosophers and a woman that I believe had deep youth liberationist sympathies as well) and other anti-pornography feminists is beyond the scope of this post. That criticism aside, I strongly endorse the rest of the analysis presented in this book. It will give you a deeper and fuller understanding of how we got to where we are in the current American legal, political, social, economic, and cultural moment in reference to youth issues. I was hoping that this book would contribute to my understanding on that front which is why I read it in the first place and it ultimately did all of that and more. I highly recommend this excellent book and cannot say enough wonderful things about it.

This excellent book was published in 2015 by Public Affairs Press.

    

Remembering and Celebrating the Work of Richard Farson, Radical Youth Liberationist and Author of Birthrights: A Bill of Rights for Children

   June 13, 2018 marked the one year anniversary of the death of the psychologist and author Richard Farson, the radical youth liberationist writer behind the 1974 classic of youth rights theory, Birthrights: A Bill of Rights for Children. He was ninety years old when he died in La Jolla, California. I would urge every single person concerned with the rights and liberation of young people to read Birthrights if they have not already done so. It is the first book on youth liberation theory that I ever read and it is in no way an overstatement to say that doing so dramatically changed the course of my life. It is to this day the best book ever written about the oppression of young people and how our society might do better by them. There is no other single volume which provides a fuller articulation of youth liberationist grievances, principles, values, and hopes for the future. It is both extremely accessible in its language and format and yet highly theoretically substantive and sophisticated, a rare combination in theoretical work on almost any topic.

   I have been thinking a lot about Farson and Birthrights in particular these days as I have recently begun work on my own book on the topic of youth rights and liberation. Birthrights was published during an era in American social and cultural history in which fairly radical notions in reference to the rights of young people were taken far more seriously than they were today by intellectuals and activists and yet, the more I reflect upon the conditions of American society at this present moment, the more I feel that the time is ripe for a second wave of radical youth liberationist writing, theorizing, and activism. There is no better encapsulation of the first wave of youth liberationist theory than Birthrights and as such, it provides those of us charged with ushering in a second wave of youth liberationist activism and theorizing with a wonderful legacy upon which to build. We are trailblazers, yes, but we are also part of a transgenerational lineage of radical youth liberationist thinkers, writers, and doers. It is important not to forget that.

   A good deal of what makes Birthrights so powerful and convincing is that Farson saw youth oppression both in its specificity and in its totality. He was able to see how youth subordination within the family, compulsory education, legal age restrictions, the juvenile justice system, and oppressive, patronizing, and paternalistic attitudes towards young people, to name just a few major areas of concern in reference to youth subjugation about which he wrote in Birthrights, were both serious and unique problems in their own right and also how they worked together as part of an interlocking system of force and coercion designed to keep young people, in Farson's own words, "incapacitated, oppressed, and abused." Farson's eye for both specificity as well as the panoramic view of youth oppression (and what might be done to remedy the situation) has been highly influential for me in reference to my own writing on youth liberation and has guided me in terms of how I approach the structure of the book that I am currently at work on regarding youth rights issues.

   Another important element of Farson's analysis was his focus on intersectionality long before the critical race theorist and legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw formally coined the term in the 1990s. Throughout Birthrights, Farson makes reference to the struggles of various groups within American society - women, men, prisoners, racial and ethnic minorities, disabled people, sexual minorities, poor people, elders. He sees how young people belonging to more than one marginalized group are impacted by multiple axes of oppression. He also sees how the struggles of groups other than young people may intersect with young peoples' own struggles.

   Finally, Richard Farson brilliantly understood that youth oppression is not just a product of laws and customs, although it is indeed a product of those forces. He also had a special sensitivity to and gift for describing the ways in which ageist attitudes impacted how adults saw young people and ultimately how young people came to conceptualize themselves. This is evident when Farson discusses the way that so-called "child prodigies" are in a certain important sense pathologized in contemporary American society, how youth sexuality is always only understood against the backdrop of deviance, how ageist attitudes towards young people infiltrate and impact the ostensibly scientific work done to study youth, and how adult preferences for children who are cute, obedient, quiet, docile, and apolitical reflect deep antipathy towards young people as individuals and their political interests as a class.

   As a second wave youth liberationist, I am so grateful for the gifts that Richard Farson provided to us via his work as a first wave youth liberationist. I pray that he rests in both peace and power and that his memory is forever for a blessing. Perhaps most importantly for those of us interested in continuing his youth liberationist work, I pray that we take his passing as a sign of a charge to keep in reference to continuing the work for youth rights and liberation that that first wave of youth liberationists began back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It's time for a second wave. I think we're up to it and I think that we're incredibly fortunate to have Richard Farson's brilliant work to guide us along the way.

Richard Farson: 1926-2017.

     

Reflections for June 2018

  

   So this blog post will just be some general reflections on various topics that have been popping up in the news recently and that speaks to the Pride season as well. First of all, like all decent people, I am horrified by what is going on in reference to immigrants seeking refuge in this country, particularly the youth my mother has taken to referring to as "the border babies." This is of course a youth rights issue. It is strange to see the same people who love to talk about parents' rights when this notion can be used to oppress a child suddenly deciding that family bonds aren't even worth recognizing once it goes against their authoritarian, racist, xenophobic impulses. I have been thinking a lot about Sojourner Truth's amazing and beautiful "Ain't I a Woman?" speech and how she speaks about her children being ripped out of her arms in the context of slavery. In the United States, there is an ugly history of invoking parents' rights when it is something that can be used to bolster authoritarianism and then ignoring the very real actual bonds that many parents and children have in the service of authoritarianism too. The people today that are willing to rip a breastfeeding baby out of their mother's arms at the border will be the very same people that will turn around and be angry that someone gave their child birth control pills or taught them about gay history without their permission. The same people who think that it is acceptable to tear these youngest of young people away from everyone they know and love and lock them in cages will also be among the first to pretend that it is due to children's special developmental status that they should be denied individual autonomy and freedom of any sort. It is because these bad people are authoritarians and oppressing people is what they do. Parents' rights are only invoked in order to help them do this. The notion of children as in need of "protection" only matters when "protection" is a synonym for "control." It has never been about protecting the children and it has never been about supporting healthy family bonds. It has only ever been about controlling and oppressing the children. Call your governmental representatives about this. Speak out on social media and in face to face interactions too. Attend rallies, marches, protests, etc. in your community. We cannot allow these atrocities to stand as Americans, as human beings, and as youth liberationists. 

   Moving on to a less depressing subject... I just read Michael Bronski's beautiful and amazing article entitled "When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children" He goes over a lot of the same history I am covering in the introductory chapter to the book I am writing on youth liberation issues right now but he also introduced me to some new things too. I would recommend that everyone read the article if they have not already done so. As a queer person and as a feminist woman who identifies particularly with the second wave radical feminist tradition, I found that this article inspired me to want to carry on this important and underappreciated legacy of radical youth liberationism because it is time for this generation and those coming up behind it to take the reins now. This article was a beautiful Pride present for me.

   I continue to make progress on the book I am working on about youth liberation issues. There is so much to say and I already know that the book will feature sections on scientific ageism, the problems with notions of parents' rights and guardianship, youth rights abuses taking place in K-12 schools, the suppression of youth sexuality, youth rights abuses in medical and psychiatric contexts, issues impacting youth of color and immigrant youth of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, issues impacting rural youth, the intersection of youth liberationism, feminism, and sex and gender issues, LGBTIQ+ youth issues, injustices taking place at the intersection of sizeism and ageism, the intersection of youth rights and disability rights, institutional abuse of youth, legal age restrictions, economic ageism, issues impacting poor and working class youth, the juvenile (in)justice system and other legal issues pertinent to youth, minor status, youth and social media, moral panics and their effects on youth, youth and politics, and cultural, spiritual, and social prejudices against young people. So little has been published in youth liberation theory since the early 1980s and yet so much has changed in our world since then. I don't want to leave anything important out of this work because I want it to begin to make up for all that hasn't been said on these issues for so long. I want everyone that reads it to see why we should all be youth liberationists and why we should all feel that we have a stake in curtailing anti-youth ageism in our society. If you have any comments, suggestions, or resources you think I should be aware of in reference to this project, please contact me and let me know.

   Thank you to everyone who reads this blog and/or follows The Youth Rights Blog Facebook page. Keep making your voices heard and your presence felt standing up for what is right and just. The world needs it now more than ever.

   

National Child Abuse Awareness and Prevention Month Book Review Special Post!

   So April was National Child Abuse Awareness and Prevention Month. April has been designated as National Child Abuse Awareness and Prevention Month in the United States since 1983, when President Ronald Reagan followed the U.S. Congress's lead in declaring it so. For my part, I decided that I would observe National Child Abuse Awareness and Prevention Month this April by doing some serious reading on the topic and then later reviewing the books I had read on The Youth Rights Blog. Since I am currently writing a book on youth liberation issues in addition to my regular work on this blog, I felt that researching and reflecting upon the issue of child abuse and neglect from a radical youth liberationist perspective would be a worthwhile way to think more clearly about both youth liberation and about child abuse and neglect.

   Much like rape, murder, violent crime, poverty, disease, and bigotry, almost everyone at least pays some degree of lip service to opposing child abuse and neglect. Perhaps for that reason, youth liberationists have not tended to invoke the language of "child abuse" or "child neglect" as often as the language of "youth oppression" when discussing the mistreatment of young people at the hands of adults. Youth liberationists feel that it is important to point out that it is not just the most egregious cases of child physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and neglect that almost everyone can agree are wrong that are problematic, but also the more commonplace, banal, accepted, and taken for granted ways that adults exercise arbitrary authority over young people that also need to be problematized. Youth liberationists also do not tend to see cases of child abuse and neglect simply as anomalous incidences in which uniquely bad actors perpetrate uncommonly evil crimes on young people. Rather, youth liberationists tend to see all of the many ways that youth are mistreated as existing on the same spectrum with cases of child murder, rape, and severe battering lying on the far end of the spectrum to be sure but existing on a continuum with many practices which are almost universally regarded as acceptable ways of disciplining or controlling young people. Finally, youth liberationists regard all forms of child abuse, neglect, and maltreatment as inseparable from the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic context in which they occur, one in which the notion of "parental rights" and other adult caregiver prerogatives to do with youth in their care as they see fit are regarded as something akin to natural rights and young people are systematically deprived of rights, autonomy, and dignity and discriminated against as members of a subject class. So to address the issue of child abuse through youth liberationist eyes is to take account not just of those bad acts committed against some youth by some adults but also of a larger context in which oppressed members of a subject class are placed in an especially vulnerable position due in part to being systematically stripped of their rights on the institutional and societal levels.

   All of that having been said, I do think that there are some advantages to youth liberationists from time to time invoking the language of "child abuse and neglect" in order to speak about some forms of youth mistreatment in some contexts. First of all, it gives us at least some shared vocabulary with those who may be allies of ours on at least some issues as well as those who are concerned with youth issues more generally. Speaking of the mistreatment of young people in terms of "child abuse" also carries with it the distinct advantage of making a clear moral and teleological claim to the effect that "Treating youth this way is wrong. It is immoral. This sort of treatment is not what children and adolescents are for." It also allows us to participate in the conversation with people of good will who are already concerning themselves with issues of child welfare and rights.

   The first book that I read on child abuse this April was Dr. Diane Prinz Callin's The Last Bastion: Child Abuse and Child Neglect in the Brotherhood of America's Schools. The thesis of this book is that the emotional, physical, sexual, and educational abuse and neglect of students in America's schools is a major but largely undiscussed social problem with far reaching consequences and that a culture of silence and unaccountability coupled with the willingness of educators and other school personnel to put loyalty to the profession and each other above the welfare of students keeps abused students from being able to seek justice for or relief from their sufferings. I agree strongly with all of this. 

   That said, this book offers little in the way of solutions or even thoughtful analysis of the problem and reads more like an angry screed than either a thoughtful analysis of a social problem or a self-help guide for students, parents, or others dealing with abuse from those within the school system. Many examples used are unsourced and very bold claims are made without any data to back them up or any nuance in the discussion. It's unfortunate that this book is not a more well-researched, well written, and serious resource because the problem it describes is a very real one in need of thoughtful analysis, actual data and statistics, and genuine solutions both for individuals dealing with the problem on a personal level and for society as a whole. This book sadly does not offer that.

   What I like that this book does is to state plainly that much of what passes for "strict discipline" or "school policy" in America's K-12 schools is in fact abusive. It is both child abuse in the conventional sense and it is an abuse of authority of the sort we understand police brutality to be. In a profoundly anti-youth culture, where all too many adults cheer the notion of "tougher discipline for teens" or "forcing youth to abide by the rules" and many people are not yet ready to understand and grapple with the notion of youth oppression, using the language of "child abuse" forces the acknowledgement that the conduct of all too many professionals in K-12 schools should be regarded as deviant. When we as youth liberationists hear about a school policy that causes young menstruating women to ruin their clothes because they are allowed so few bathroom breaks, we should refer to this as "child abuse." When we hear of youth facing corporal punishment in our schools, we should refer to this as "child abuse." When we hear about teachers demeaning or humiliating students, we should refer to this also as "child abuse." We need to be more clear in stating just how abusive an environment many PreK-12 schools are for students and we need to be willing to talk about the culture of silent complicity that even many good educators feel forced to participate in in order to keep their jobs. In their quest to impose discipline, many of America's PreK-12 schools have indeed become bastions of abuse and there is indeed a code of silence within the profession similar to the "blue wall of silence" one often hears about in reference to the police. I wish that Callin's book had offered more concrete suggestions for students, parents, and good teachers for how to deal with these problems. Good resources are sorely needed where this issue is concerned.

   The second book I read about child abuse this April was What Happened in the Woodshed?: The Secret Lives of Battered Children and a New Profession to Protect Them by Dr. Lawrence R. Ricci. This book was much more rewarding for me as a reader as it was clearly a well written, well sourced book on a difficult yet important topic. The subject of the book is the emerging medical specialty of child abuse pediatrics. Writes Ricci, "The crime scene of a child's abused and neglected body can, through careful medical analysis, lead us inexorably back to what happened, sometimes to who did it, and most revealingly to why it happened." The problem with Ricci's formulation is that it makes perfect sense when discussing battered infants, but becomes more and more problematic as children grow older. When a young person clearly states that they are in an environment where they are being physically, sexually, or emotionally abused, what is called for is not CSI: Child Body Edition. What needs to happen is that that young person needs to be able to go somewhere else that they feel safe, secure, and hopefully, loved. The courts may need physical evidence in order to prosecute abusers, but the right marks showing up in the right place should not be a necessary prerequisite for a young person being able to leave an oppressive situation.

   One important point that Ricci brings up in his book is the extent to which the child welfare system revolves around the goal of family preservation which can prove tragic when, as is all too often the case, preserving a family is seen as more of a priority than providing safety for a child. This is but one way in which the notion of "parental rights" poisons nearly every aspect of our child protection system at the roots.

   Perhaps the most fascinating chapter of Ricci's book dealt with Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It is a bizarre form of child abuse but one that our culture facilitates by way of common attitudes about mothering, caregiving, disability, and children. Medical practices that center parents instead of appropriately centering child patients play a role as well. Munchausen by proxy is a rare and strange pathology, but its ability to arise as a condition at this point in our society owes a lot to institutionalized ageism and ableism in the medical context and elsewhere. While alas these rich links were not explored in the ways in which I would have liked to have seen them be, we are provided with several fascinating case studies of the phenomenon.

   So to wrap up this post, I will say that Ricci's book is well worth your time if you are interested in learning more about child abuse pediatrics. I'm glad that I read it and I learned a lot. Callin's book had potential in terms of its thesis statement but the execution was poor. If you have found any books about child abuse and neglect or related subjects to be especially worthwhile, please leave the names and authors of these books in the comments section so that I can check them out too. Thanks for reading!

 

They Can Talk!!!

   So I have recently decided to become a parent. As a radical youth liberationist, this has caused me to reflect a great deal on many things. Now, before we go any further, I should state that I am not planning on parenting a human child any time in the immediate future. What I am planning on doing is becoming what I refer to as a "pupper parent." I am in the process of saving up to purchase a Bichon Frise puppy from a breeder. I have wanted a Bichon since I was at least in high school. I am in contact with two breeders whom I have investigated thoroughly and who appear to treat both their animals and their clientele very well. When the time comes, I plan to purchase my baby girl from one of these two breeders.

    Since deciding that I want to bring a companion animal into my life sooner rather than later, I have been doing a lot of reading about dogs in particular and pets in general. Recently I have read Kim Kavin's The Dog Merchants: Inside the Big Business of Breeders, Pet Stores, and Rescuers, Jessica Pierce's Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets, and Michael Schaffer's One Nation Under Dog: America's Love Affair With Our Dogs. I am currently in the middle of David Grimm's Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship With Cats and Dogs.  

   In the contemporary literature on the bond between humans and their canine and feline companions, one theme that keeps popping up is that of the cat or the dog as a member of the family and as a child of sorts. (I hesitate to refer to dogs and cats as "surrogate children" as most pet parents, I suspect, either already have human children as well or have no desire for them. Some may want human children in addition to a "critter child." The animals are not, in the vast majority of situations, replacing human children for people that would like to have them and do not. They are coming to live with people who want an animal. That is certainly the case for me.) As one might expect for these creatures which have increasingly come to be regarded as fully fledged family members, their legal status is in the process of evolving in interesting ways. One way in which this is occurring involves custody disputes over animals as well as talk of animal "guardianship" as opposed to "ownership."

   The more I have thought about the idea of domestic animals having human legal guardians (as opposed to owners), the more I like it. I find it appropriate for all of the same reasons that I find the concept of the custodial guardianship of human children and adults with disabilities to be wildly inappropriate. Namely, unlike the vast majority of human youth and adults with disabilities subjected to custodial arrangements, dogs, cats, and other domestic animals cannot talk (or type or use sign language or point at a letter board or communicate linguistically in other ways).

   When I read about a judge having to decide who gets custody of a dog in a divorce case, it makes sense that the judge makes his decision by hiring an animal behavior expert who then proceeds to visit the homes of the two individuals seeking custody of the dog to gain a sense of where the dog would fare better. (This actually happened in an animal custody case in California in 1994.) It is up to a human to decide what is in the dog's best interest because unfortunately the dog cannot speak to us and say "I would like to live with Linda instead of Stanley."

   However, what is puzzling is that the law essentially treats the issue almost exactly the same in situations in which human children are involved. There should be no need for a court to assign custody of a child that is capable of making their own wishes known. Perhaps there may be a need for a court to step in and make sure that the child is aware of what all of her options are and to make sure that one parent doesn't prevent her from having a relationship with another non-abusive parent, but it is rather ridiculous that we treat the children so similarly to the dogs when, unlike the dogs, they are actually capable of verbally expressing their feelings about the matter at hand.

   Guardianship is an appropriate institution for domestic animals which cannot speak to us and make their preferences known on where they would like to live, who they would like to live with, what they would prefer to eat, what sorts of elective medical procedures they do and do not want, how they wish to be cared for when they are sick, whether or not they would like to breed, and other such matters. It is up to humans to think rigorously about these issues so that we can truly be said to be acting in the best interests of our animals and not simply doing what is convenient for us or seen as more socially acceptable at any given point in time. Because our dogs and cats cannot tell us "I deeply value the experience of motherhood and I don't want to be spayed" or "It is important for me to spend time outdoors in order to fulfill my species specific functions" or "I am in a lot of pain so please take me to the vet" it's up to us to figure out what is in their best interests and attempt to provide them with lives in which they can flourish. So many dog and cat owners lament "If only my animal could talk..."

   And yet young people can talk but we so frequently treat them as if what they have to say does not matter that we appear not to value their ability to communicate with us. Young people can tell us "I don't trust that person" or "I would rather attend this school than that school" or "This is where I want to live" or "This is who I want to live with" or "This is what I enjoy doing" or "I don't like this." It is time that our laws and our society at large stops treating young people the same way that we treat animals which cannot speak to us and express themselves linguistically. The same institution that is appropriate for a non-speaking animal is not appropriate for a human being of any age or developmental stage capable of expressing themselves linguistically.

One can talk (or will be able to very soon). The other cannot. This should make a difference in terms of how they are treated in law and custom. It does not make a difference in their respective levels of adorability as both are gratuitously precious.

 

Youth Liberation As a Personal Commitment: Reflections and Resolutions

Youth liberationist friends are the best sort of friends. From left to right, there is me, Victoria Rodriguez, Katrina Moncure, and Alexander Cohen. We were eating at a Chinese restaurant in DC on this occasion. Victoria is another good friend that I met through the youth liberation movement who has since become an attorney at the LGBTQ Task Force and a nationally recognized figure in the burgeoning transgender rights movement. Victoria has also been active in reference to disability rights, queer rights, and other vitally important social justice causes.

   So recently I have been thinking a lot about what being a youth liberationist means to me as a personal commitment. It has been about seven years since I became a radical youth liberationist. I had previously been involved with activism for a variety of causes that were and remain important to me, but when I became a radical youth liberationist something inside of me changed. I was living in Washington DC at the time and schmoozing with a lot of folks in nonprofit jobs in my Master of Public Administration program, at internships, in job interviews, and in other settings. I was reading and talking to people about a lot of different social movements - queer and trans rights, women's reproductive rights, international human rights, disability rights, racial justice activism - and I was learning a lot. I found all of it worthwhile and valuable. I saw a role for myself in furthering all of these worthy causes. And yet after talking to some youth rights activists that were then affiliated with the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) (a problematic organization I have a somewhat fraught history with but which served as my introduction to the youth liberation movement) and reading Richard Farson's book Birthrights, a seismic shift occurred inside of me.
  

The canon. These are the books that ultimately made me a youth liberationist. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (which features an entire chapter entitled "Down With Childhood!"), John Holt's Escape From Childhood, Richard Farson's Birthrights, and Howard Cohen's Equal Rights For Children.

   I had always been secretly bothered by the way in which our society organizes relations between adults and younger persons. Something about it had always troubled me in a way that I struggled to put my finger on and that I lacked the vocabulary to name. I was bothered by the authoritarian control that sexist, racist, and heterosexist parents could exert over their children and the common attitude that someone's children were simply theirs to raise as they saw fit unless they were violently abusing or sexually assaulting them. The way that I and other students were treated in school by our teachers and school administrators never sat right with me, even when I was in kindergarten. The authoritarianism of the school system had always bothered me. It saddened me that my racist older cousin could prevent her children from having me as an influence in their lives and yet she was allowed to fill their heads with anti-miscegenation white supremacist garbage because she was their mother. I was haunted by stories of child abuse I heard from a woman that spoke to the students at my undergraduate institution about her career in child advocacy. A documentary on the local public access television station that I just happened to watch one day while I still lived in Tallahassee, Florida (fresh out of my undergraduate days at Florida State University) about the ways in which African-American male students are often labeled and pathologized within the school system made a particularly strong impression upon me. When my law class for public administration students studied DeShaney v. Winnebago, I began to formulate in my mind the notion that due to guardianship laws, the father who abused and nearly murdered his son was somehow an agent of the state and therefore the government did have an obligation to do more to prevent this from happening once they knew about the potential for abuse, in contradiction to the way that the Supreme Court had ruled on the case. I read a blog post while I was probably still an undergraduate on The Bilerico Project blog in which the blogger noted that societal expectations shape the rate at which young people mature - this was a revelation to me and suddenly it caused a lot of things to make a lot of sense to me that hadn't made sense before. On my Amazon Wish List, I added a few books about children's rights over the years starting from the time that I was a senior in high school. I found the topic intriguing. I didn't know what the answers were but it seemed to me important to figure out. All of this was before I was a youth liberationist or even aware that a youth rights movement existed. My sense of justice had always been fundamentally offended by the ways in which society at large structured relations between adults and younger people, but I lacked a theoretical framework with which to understand the problem and I did not see much in the way of immediate and obvious solutions.

Me at my American University graduation in 2012 when I obtained my Master of Public Administration degree. At this point, I knew that I wanted to enter a philosophy program next so that I could begin the work of theorizing youth liberation in the academic context. In my arms is Truffles, a plush lamb who is the unofficial mascot of the radical wing of the youth rights movement. He got to graduate too with a degree in Sheep Studies which my mother presented to him in our family's hotel room after my graduation ceremony was over.

   And then reading the psychologist Richard Farson's Birthrights caused everything to come together for me. Birthrights was an out of print book published back in the 1970s. The only reason that I even knew of the book's existence is because someone in NYRA that I was interviewing for a class project on local nonprofits recommended it when I asked him if he had any suggestions for further reading about youth rights for me. (This class project would ultimately serve as my primary entrance into the youth rights movement.) I either ordered a very cheap used copy of the book on Amazon or obtained the book through NYRA's lending library. And when I started reading it, all of a sudden, it all made sense. My sense that children were oppressed and that the adults in their lives exerted undue authority over them was a sign of ethical intelligence as opposed to maladjustment or an inability to accept the world as it must be. The way Farson discussed everything from the pathologization of child prodigies in an ageist society to the stifling and rigid character of the American K-12 public school system to his reflections on the politics of childhood resonated with me in a deeply satisfying and yet intellectually and ethically challenging way. I wasn't sure at the time quite what to make of Farson's views on abolishing the voting age and the age of consent, but the broader themes of the book - that children are oppressed as a class, that the pathways which child development takes are in part socially constructed, and that it was worth radically rethinking the institutions of the family, the school, the juvenile justice system, the law, and cultural attitudes as they pertain to youth - struck a chord inside of me that I had unknowingly longed to hear played for years. "This stuff is really out there and really radical, but I think I might agree with it," I thought to myself.

   Reading everything about youth rights that I could get my hands on and talking to more youth liberationists about both youth liberation theory and in many cases their own personal experiences of ageist oppression radicalized me even further. Getting to know young activists in middle and high school who were already sophisticated organizers and thinkers underscored for me just how arbitrary age-based notions of competence, character, and intellect can be. I also talked to people who had struggled unsuccessfully to gain emancipation from abusive and unhappy home situations as minors, people who had been abused or kicked out of their homes due to their sexuality while they were still in their teens, people who had been sent off to abusive "troubled teen" facilities against their wills, people who bore the physical and psychological scars of traumatic non-consensual elective medical procedures performed on them as minors. I was outraged both that these things were happening and that there was no large scale mass movement in existence seeking to address these injustices.

   When I came to Washington DC I had initially wanted a career for myself in politics. The plan was that I would get my Master of Public Administration degree at American University, work as a government bureaucrat or nonprofit administrator for a few years, and then run for elected office. However, when I found the youth rights movement that all changed in an instant and I didn't even mourn the fact that I was letting the dream that I had clung to for so long die. The day that I signed the ASFAR (Americans for a Society Free of Age Restrictions) Declaration of Principles, I surmised that I would probably never have a political career. I didn't care. Doing this work was more important than holding any elected office could ever be. The world was full of people trying to become legislators, governors, and the President of the United States of America. The world was not full of people  trying to ameliorate anti-youth ageism and the many evils it engendered. I needed this movement and it needed me.

   A lot has changed for me since I first became involved with the youth liberation movement back in 2010 and 2011 and yet my commitment to this cause remains steadfast. The way that I engage with people these days about youth liberation issues is probably a lot kinder and gentler than it was in my first few years as an angry activist, but my positions are still fundamentally the same. The passion is still there. My values have not changed. Both I and everyone close to me has come to know that being a radical youth liberationist will always be an important core part of who I am. This will not change even if one day I become a parent. It will not change as I age. And perhaps most rewarding of all for me has been seeing the transformations of some of the people around me as I have shared my message with them.

Alexander R. Cohen and I. Alexander has taught me so much about what it means to be an activist, an intellectual, a philosopher, an academic, and a radical youth liberationist. You can follow his Facebook page to learn all about his values and interests as a philosopher-journalist-activist and to read his opinion pieces on hot topics ranging from youth rights to immigration to guns to business rights.

   My mother has always been a highly ethical person and a person who deeply loves children. She was widely regarded during her teaching career as one of the best educators in her entire public PreK-12 school. (She has recently retired after devoting a lifetime to educating elementary school aged youth.) During the course of almost my entire lifetime she taught first grade at Baker School in Baker, Florida, the tiny rural Southern town in which I grew up. In fact, she was my first grade teacher. She combined a great deal of compassion and love for her students with an intense work ethic, boundless creativity, and a keen expertise in pedagogy. She understood how very young youth learn, how they think, and how they begin to mature developmentally. Introducing her to youth liberation theory and watching her become more sympathetic to these ideas and gain a greater understanding of the need for a radical youth rights movement has made me even prouder of my mother than I already was. I have also introduced some of my philosophy professors to youth liberation theory over the course of my studies. I do not know if I have converted all of these bright people into staunch child libbers, but I am proud that I have exposed them to new ways of thinking about the relationship between adults and young people and I hope that I have challenged them to perhaps be more ethical and less dismissive towards the capacities and need for autonomy of the youth in their lives.

Mama and me. She baptized me, she taught me how to read and write, and she has taught me a lot of life lessons over the years. Now I'm teaching her youth liberation theory and while she's not yet on board with all of the most radical stuff, she grows more radical by the day.

   Youth liberationism, like feminism, has to show in the way that one lives one's life. Andrea Dworkin and John Stoltenberg lived feminism. I aspire to live youth liberation. Growing up in the church, I would hear folks say to one another "You are the only Bible that some people will ever read." As a youth liberationist, I have adapted this to "You are the only Birthrights that some people will ever read." In fact, I would imagine that for most of the people that I interact with, I am their sole point of contact with the youth liberation movement. This comes with a lot of responsibility and I take it very seriously. I can't associate with people that hit their children. If you post a meme on Facebook about how your child needs to meet a belt, I'm going to unfriend you and I'm also going to make sure that you know why I did it. When people post private information about their children on Facebook without their children's permission, I cannot condone that and I am willing to lose friends over it. When someone casually mentions that they like to snoop through their children's things or that they keep important and personally pertinent information from their children, I have an obligation to make it known that I do not condone this even if I am not in a position to directly change things. If I say nothing, it can be interpreted as tacit approval and someone will get the idea that even their radical youth liberationist friend thinks that what they are doing is okay. I've learned to say things in a way that hopefully does not come across as alienating or disrespectful, but I also keep to the truth that it is absolutely imperative for me to say something in most of these sorts of situations.

Me at the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) Annual Meeting held at the University of Maryland back in 2011 where I was elected to the Board of Directors of the organization. I served for a year. I had a lot of struggles with some of the other leadership of the organization who did not share my approach to activism, but my time in NYRA ultimately allowed me to meet a number of wonderful people that remain great friends, confidants, interlocutors, and co-conspirators to this day. In this photograph are Katrina Moncure and, on either side of me, Usiel Phoenix and Nigel Jones. Both Usi and Nigel became good friends and also taught me a great deal about youth liberation too. It was nice to have some fellow queers in the struggle with me and as was the case for me, their queerness informed their approach to youth rights activism and theory.

   When I applied to Ph.D programs this cycle, I could have chosen to write on any number of topics. Writing on a currently trendy topic in philosophy may have helped my chances of getting into a top program, but it would have come at the cost of my personal mission and sense of integrity. I went into academia because I care about helping to spread important ideas and no idea is more important to me than youth liberation. If a program does not want me as a radical youth liberationist doing work on this vital issue, then that is not the program for me. I see academia as my way of making a difference and contributing something of value to society. Some social movements probably have too much theory and too little concrete political action. Where youth liberation is concerned, we are still at the stage where theory is necessary to help people to understand a.) that something is wrong, b.) what it is that is wrong, c.) that it is possible to right the wrong, and d.) how we can begin to go about righting the wrong. One major problem that I saw during my time on the NYRA Board was how a lack of theoretical grounding made taking effective political action against ageism more difficult than it otherwise would have been. When you're theory-phobic, perhaps rallying around the cause of trying to get people under the age of eighteen admitted to a local junkyard seems like a good use of activist energy, but when one theorizes the ways that guardianship, minor status, legal age restrictions, compulsory education, and prejudicial cultural attitudes towards youth form an interlocking nexus of oppression that also intersects with sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, cissexism, monosexism, sizeism, ableism, colorism, lookism, predatory capitalism, medical paternalism, state oppression, and authoritarianism more generally, it should be clear that our finite activist energies are better spent elsewhere.

Me at the graduation ceremony where I received my Master of Arts degree in Philosophy from San Francisco State University in 2016. I entered philosophy and academia in no small part because I wanted to theorize youth liberation for a larger audience. While at SFSU, I wrote my MA thesis on youth liberation. My thesis committee chair told me that I had introduced him to a whole new world of theory and activism through my work. 

   The youth liberation movement has introduced me to so many wonderful people who have changed my life for the better. In particular, Alexander R. Cohen and Samantha Godwin taught me a great deal about what it means to be a youth liberationist, a philosopher, an activist, and an academic. Katrina Moncure has gifted me with her friendship and has been a wonderful co-conspirator to bounce ideas off of when I am thinking and writing about ageism and related issues. Shain Neumeier is a great friend who has also taught me a great deal about the intersection of ageism and ableism. Because of Shain, I am a much better philosopher than I would otherwise be when it comes to theorizing that particularly fertile and yet fraught ground. Gibson Katz and I have practically grown up together since we first became friends when he was a middle school student in his early teens and I was in my early twenties studying public administration at American University. Now he's a young adult off at college and I'm in my thirties looking at Ph.D programs. William Gillis has taught me so much about anarchism through a youth liberationist lens. Abel Magana has introduced my work to others and introduced me to opportunities to publish it that I otherwise would not have had. I am honored and humbled by Ayman Eckford's work translating my writing on youth rights topics into Russian and sharing it with the youth liberation movement of Russia. There are so many other amazing individuals, more than I can list here, that have made a difference in my life as a youth liberationist, but I want all of them to know that I see and appreciate all of their contributions.

Shain Neumeier and I. A wonderful friend and a great role model in so many ways. A fierce advocate for justice who has taught me so much about the intersection of ageism and ableism. Shain is an attorney who currently runs their own law firm which specializes in youth, elder, and disability rights legal issues such as supporting the rights of minors to make their own medical decisions even when their legal guardians object and helping disabled adults fight guardianship arrangements, institutionalization, and nursing home placements. I'm ridiculously proud of the work that Shain does every day to help oppressed individuals to resist paternalism, marginalization, dehumanization, and authoritarianism in their own lives. 

   So where does that leave us in terms of the overarching theme of this blog post - youth liberationism as a personal commitment? For me, it means that I am going to try to post more regularly on the blog here and I may bring back the Weekly Roundup as a good way to collect all of the important youth rights related stories that I come across in the course of a week in one place. I am additionally exploring other new avenues to spread youth liberationist ideas, although I am not in a position to publicly speak about details at this time. I also want to challenge all of you to make youth liberationism more of a core part of your identity and your way of life. For parents and teachers, it means in part holding oneself to the highest of ethical standards in dealing with the youth in one's care and working to foster their autonomy first and foremost. For all of us, it means making sure that others know our youth liberationist commitments, not laughing along at an ageist joke or cooperating in someone's attempts to belittle or oppress their children. Maybe it means saying or doing something even when it's uncomfortable or could risk rupturing adult relationships. Before he went completely off the deep end, Tim Wise spoke of his anti-racist activism as a white man on behalf of people of color in terms of "speaking treason fluently." Adult youth liberationists need to get comfortable with this stance. For us adults, youth liberationism also entails being a positive, affirming presence for the young people in our lives. In some cases, it may mean finding opportunities to support young people in our communities and to be of service to them. I have sometimes contemplated what a difference it would make if every serious, competent, committed youth liberationist I know volunteered to become a guardian ad litem. Being a youth liberationist means bringing youth liberationist values to every institution we encounter and to every role that we inhabit. We don't take these values off and on and we don't allow these roles and institutions to diminish our commitment to them.

Protesting the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC), an abusive institution where Autistic and other neurodivergent youth and adults are subjected to electric shock and other forms of torture, outside of a government building with Shain as well as my best friend of over twelve years Patrick T. Ayers (who still doesn't really get this youth rights stuff despite my near constant efforts to educate him) and Shain's partner and fellow activist and youth liberationist Lydia Brown. Lydia is an attorney, writer, organizer, public speaker, and activist friend of mine who has taught me a lot by example about activism through their work on behalf of youth, disabled people, people of color, queer and trans people, women, non-binary people, poor people, and other often marginalized groups of folks. You can get a taste for Lydia's brand of activism by checking out their Autistic Hoya blog. The legal structure of guardianship allows injustices like those that are still happening daily at the Judge Rotenberg Center to take place. Without guardianship and the notion of minors and some disabled adults as the quasi-property of their parents that it inscribes into law, there would be no JRC. Without profound degrees of ageist and ableist thinking in our society, there would be no guardianship as it currently exists.

   As for the young people reading this blog post who are committed to youth liberation, I don't think that it is my place to lecture them as to what their youth liberation activism should look like. The only advice I would give to them is to find a way to make sure to remember the indignities and everyday oppressions of youth so that you can look back on them when you are older and to think critically about how these injustices continue to reverberate throughout both society as a whole and individual lives. All of the effects of youth oppression and growing up in a profoundly ageist society do not immediately end when one turns eighteen or twenty-one years of age even if some of the most unjust and degrading aspects of minority are no longer a fact of life. Some people believe that being concerned with ageism is a phase that children and adolescents go through and then grow out of. Insofar as this may be true in some cases, it is not due to a sudden rise in maturity on the part of the formerly oppressed young as they age. It is because the problems posed by being a young person in an ageist society cease to be as keenly felt as one comes to be afforded the rights and privileges associated with adulthood and as time goes on, other more seemingly immediate concerns may take the place of  one's initial concerns in reference to ageism. One may even find that one benefits from their newfound place of privilege within the ageist hierarchy, particularly if one is a parent or a teacher. However, that does not mean that the injustices which initially troubled one were not painful or wrong. And discounting the importance of youth liberation as an activist cause as one ages is ultimately short-sighted when one stops to take note of all of the ways in which youth oppression contributes to almost every other major problem in our society from sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and racism to an easy acceptance of authoritarian and paternalistic government policies to an entire cohort of American adults raised by American parents and educated in American schools who felt that electing an ill informed, authoritarian, bigoted, lying, cheating, treasonous, absurdly unqualified con man to the American presidency was obviously a great idea.

Katrina Moncure and I. It's not easy being a youth liberationist sometimes and I would go crazy without her. She served on the NYRA Board of Directors for many years prior to meeting me and then for a few years after the year that I had served on it too. For years she moderated NYRA's online forums among other roles. She currently blogs about youth rights issues on her own personal blog, Sure, Why Not? and runs the I Support Youth Rights Facebook page, a great resource for anyone interested in exploring youth liberation theory in more depth.

   Our movement is growing but it is still a small movement. For this reason, how we conduct ourselves as individuals in public and in private is important for the example that it sets. We have to hold ourselves and each other accountable. Nonetheless, I have found taking up this cause to be immeasurably rewarding. Perhaps I picked a hard row to hoe, as the old saying goes, in committing myself to youth liberationism and hitching my fortunes to those of this cause, but I cannot imagine deciding to do anything else. Youth liberationism is something to be proud of and I am grateful to God that I found this movement and have been able to dedicate myself to making the mission of youth liberation a core part of my life's work. I would invite everyone reading this blog post to find a way to make youth liberation a more personal commitment in their own lives in whatever form that may take for them.  

Listening and learning with a critical ear at the NYRA Annual Meeting in 2011. Katrina sits next to me. A youth liberationist's work is never done.

   Disclaimer: All opinions shared in this blog post are solely my own. I do not speak for anyone else who is named here or whose photograph appears here.