tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51518025303574805042024-03-05T19:14:07.254-05:00The Youth Rights BlogThe online home of radical youth rights theory.Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-16401543878597475562022-07-17T21:50:00.001-04:002022-07-17T21:54:26.980-04:00An Open Letter To Female Youth Who Are Pregnant as a Result of a Rape<p> I want to tell any young woman who finds herself pregnant as the result of a rape that they are survivors first and foremost. The rapist took your body and made you pregnant against your will. You were forced into that situation. Choices were taken away from you. That was evil and wrong. </p><p> I want to tell you that if you decide to have that baby, you could be a great mother. Even babies conceived in rape can go on to be wonderful people. In many cultures around the world, young women your age parent their children freely. Jesus's mother was only a teenager. If you want to be a teenage mother, then you will be great. Everyone should see you as a hero for making a difficult choice in a tough situation and rally around you. That is important and brave and strong.<br /></p><p> I want to tell you that if you decide to have an abortion, that is a heroic choice too. Women have fought long and hard to have the right to an abortion and no man who implants his seed in you against your will should get the luxury of you carrying his child against your will if you do not want that. You can go back to normal as much as you can (although of course these situations change people) and everyone should see you as a hero and rally around you for standing up for your right to choose not to let a man put something where it wasn't supposed to be. That is important and brave and strong.</p><p> I don't want you to listen to politicians or activists or doctors or parents who all have an opinion. I don't want you to take your cue from the Supreme Court. I want you to make the right choice for you in accordance with your values and lifestyle. I want you to think "What do I want?" and go from there. And I want all of us to support you in whatever decision you make. This is what being a youth liberationist feminist looks like. And whatever you choose, we should all be proud of you. And God will be proud of you too.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> <br /></p>Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-24642489458280643602021-09-15T09:51:00.000-04:002021-09-15T09:51:24.880-04:00Youth With Disabilities: They Get to Set the Tone!<p> So I have officially been on hiatus from this blog for the past year as I am currently in the process of writing a book on youth rights issues. The current working title of the book is <i>Youth Liberation: The Ageist Oppression of Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults and the Need for a Radical, Rights Based Revolution</i>. I love it and I don't think it is going to change. Anyway, I figured that whenever I wanted to write about youth rights stuff, it would be more productive to put that time and energy into the book than into the blog. However, there are some things which don't feel right for inclusion in the book but which I think do merit a blog post and that is what has got me checking in from my official hiatus status today. Today the topic is parents who share inappropriately about their child's disability issues online and with people in other contexts.</p><p> Recently I defriended someone on Facebook that I had grown up with. I hated to do this as this was someone whom at one time I had greatly respected but I had felt my respect winnowing away after watching this individual make a series of what I can only describe as increasingly problematic parenting choices which she then sought robust community approval for. I'm not going to go into detail about all of the things I saw this individual doing which bothered me as a queer feminist enmeshed in the youth and disability rights communities, but suffice to say that I watched the train wreck in slow motion, knowing that there was little that I could do to stop it. But the thing which finally put me over the edge and made me feel that I had to call this person out and defriend them was seeing them share the actual physical copy of their daughter's gynecological records online along with a heaping side of cringeworthy sexist, heterosexist, ageist, and ableist comments from this mother that would make anyone with even an ounce of intersectional feminist sensibility want to throw up. I felt complicit and I made a choice to tell this mother that this was not appropriate and that I did not wish to be Facebook friends with someone who inappropriately shared private details about their child's medical history online. This is an adolescent young woman we are talking about here, not a baby. I can see contexts where the young woman herself choosing to share this information could be helpful, but to share it for all and sundry to see on Facebook along with her mother's inappropriate comments struck me as obviously and severely wrong.</p><p> What this mother was doing was turning her daughter into something like a zoo exhibit in a way that no calls to raise awareness could justify. If a medical provider had shared this type of information about a patient on Facebook, they would be in violation of a slew of state and federal laws and yet somehow it's supposed to be okay when a parent does it in regards to their child?!?!?! This mother claimed that their daughter consented to this, but growing up in a household where boundaries are violated and she is infantilized, there is no way in which that consent could be meaningful. And this is something that the mother never even should have asked of her child in the first place. It sickened me. It saddened me. It angered me. And the fact that no one but me was speaking to this as a problematic thing to do only speaks to the way in which over the years this mother has worn down any sense of appropriate boundaries regarding her daughter in reference to her community. Over time, she had normalized things that should never be viewed as normal.</p><p> On the other extreme end of this issue, I recently saw a post in which a parent was patting themselves on the back for telling their disabled child that they did not need to explain to others about their condition and the devices needed to manage it. Instead of helping her child to figure out how much he wanted to disclose and how, recognizing that such things would be necessary as one moves through space as a visibly disabled individual, this mother seemed to feel that the answer was to tell her child "My mother says I don't have to answer that." There is so much that is problematic about this statement. First of all, it's centering the mother's voice, turning the child into a puppet for her views. Secondly, as this is likely to come up again and again as an issue and it's safe to assume that curiosity, especially from children, is not necessarily a sign of malice, wouldn't it make more sense to work with the child to come up with a standard answer to the question that is friendly and informative without giving away too much private information? Wouldn't this be a more helpful and humane way to teach a disabled child to navigate the world? Nah, that would make too much sense!</p><p> So what unites the mother sharing her daughter's gynecological records on Facebook and the mother who tells her child to answer any question about their disability with "My mother says I don't have to answer that?" Of course, they are both fools despite existing on opposite ends of the disabled child sharing spectrum, but they are also both centering their own response instead of thinking seriously about what would be most helpful for their child and helping their child to use their own voice and create and enforce their own boundaries. That's why this post is titled "Youth With Disabilities: They Get To Set the Tone!" <br /></p>Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-52382887288119864672019-11-12T06:37:00.001-05:002021-10-22T03:56:52.822-04:00An Open Letter to Deyjah Imani HarrisDearest Precious Deyjah,<br />
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It is odd that I, a stranger, have to write you this letter, but I am doing so because unfortunately, your private business became public due to your father's bizarre, abusive, and quite frankly disgusting decision to discuss your medical history in the public press. First of all, no parent should do that in reference to you or any child of theirs. It abrogates their very responsibilities as a parent to discuss such private matters in a public way. It shows that, at least in that moment, they have abandoned the role of a responsible parent and do not need to be treated with the normal parental deference that some folks feel that parents are entitled to. I know that you are over the age of eighteen and this is a good thing as you as not as minor in the eyes of the law and therefore your father cannot force you to undergo any medical procedures that you object to. Nonetheless, you may be looking to older adults for guidance at this time as you try to figure things out from the perspective of the media firestorm that your father has hurled you into and therefore I wanted to say a few things to you as a thirty three year old woman whose life work in large part revolves around supporting and defending the bodily, medical, and sexual autonomy of younger people.<br />
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First of all, a test for the presence of the hymen is not a medically valid test and any doctor offering or claiming to perform such a test needs to have his medical license revoked. I have heard that the main purpose of the hymen from a biological standpoint is to keep fecal, urinary, or other bodily material from entering into the vagina during the first couple of years of a baby's life and causing an infection. It has nothing to do with ensuring "virginity" or "purity" or anything of the sort. Many people don't even have a hymen to show past puberty. This is not something that a legitimate medical practitioner would wish to associate themselves with. So I would keep that in mind and consider filing some sort of report to authorities regarding any doctor that was willing to play that game with your father. The entire concept of virginity itself is a cultural, not a medical, construction and you may enjoy learning more about this sort of thing by reading Hanne Blank's book "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Virgin-Untouched-History-Hanne-Blank-ebook/dp/B01LXAGYSK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2IOV60MBPFUX9&keywords=virgin+the+untouched+history&qid=1573551806&s=books&sprefix=virgin+the+%2Cstripbooks%2C215&sr=1-1" target="_blank">Virgin: The Untouched History</a>." It is an interesting book that deals with many men who view virginity in ways not dissimilar to your father, among other topics which it broaches.<br />
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Secondly, your body belongs to you first and foremost. It is not your father's business whether or not your hymen is broken be it by masturbation, playing sports, or engaging in sexual activity with someone you are interested in. You should feel free to use your body in any consensual sexual capacity that you wish. You, like all folks your age, should also seek out birth control, STD prevention, and sexual health resources from medical professionals who have nothing to do with your family and they cannot reveal anything about you under penalty of law to them. This is your right as an American and as a woman. Your body is for your pleasure and for you to use as you see fit and your father's attitude and actions towards it are creepy, predatory, dangerous, abusive, and wrong. Your father's behavior is not normal within families in America today (although by taking the long view of history you will learn that you are by no means alone in having a father who wishes to control your body as if you were his property, which you are most definitely not). As an African-American woman, there is a lot of cultural history surrounding the control of the bodies of women of color by people other than the woman in question which you might wish to take a deeper dive into. As a white woman, I probably cannot share those particular insights with you as well as other women of color can, but many will be willing and able to do so I am sure. There are many resources available specifically for women of color in reference to sexual and reproductive health. <a href="https://www.plannedparenthood.org/" target="_blank">Planned Parenthood</a> and<a href="https://www.scarleteen.com/" target="_blank"> Scarleteen</a> might be good general places to start looking into matters of sexual and reproductive health. <a href="https://www.sistersong.net/" target="_blank">SisterSong</a> seems to be specifically interested in helping Southern women of color in this department so they may be a good resource as well. In any event, you have been caught at the crossroads of sexism, ageism, and perhaps racism through no fault of your own and there are those who are ready to help you along the way.<br />
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The important message for you to take away from this is that your body is yours to use and enjoy however you see fit. If you want to abstain from sexual activity for any reason, that is completely fine. If you want to engage in sexual activity of any sort, that is completely fine too although there are certain responsibilities to yourself and others that go along with that, which you probably well know. What you need to realize is that you are in control of your body, medical treatment, sexuality, reproductive health, and life. You do not owe an intact hyman to your father or anyone else and it is abusive to even suggest that you do. You deserve better than this. You shouldn't have had to go through this media nightmare of your father's making. But there are many women, men, and non-binary people of all ages, colors, socioeconomic statuses, and backgrounds who wish to support and sustain you nonetheless. Anyone who tries to make excuses for your father's creepy and abusive behavior is dead wrong. Look out for your younger siblings in your household and do what you can to ensure that they are not subjected to the same sort of abuse that you were by your father and apparently unethical medical professionals. Do not be afraid to look outside of your family for support, wisdom, resources, guidance, help, or protection for yourself or others. Know that nothing inherent within you or anything that you did caused your father's abusive and deleterious behavior towards you. I and so many others are rooting for you. May God bless you always.<br />
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Love,<br />
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Kathleen Nicole O'Neal<br />
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<br />Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-46439964749783934112019-06-02T20:30:00.001-04:002019-06-02T20:34:46.135-04:00Organizing at the Intersections of Ageism and Anti-LGBTQ Bigotry <a href="http://bilerico.lgbtqnation.com/2011/08/ageism_is_an_lgbt_issue.php" target="_blank">Eight years ago, I wrote a piece about the intersection of LGBTQ rights and ageism.</a> A lot has changed since I wrote that post and in a sense, a lot has stayed the same. There have been wonderful gains made in terms of outlawing anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy in minors. Is this child protectionism? Is it youth liberation? I don't know, but everyone does know that previously minors could be subjected to harmful anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy on the whim of their bigoted parents and now they cannot in many states and I consider that a victory. (Although these things may not pass in the states where they are most needed.)<br />
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We have changed the culture such that being gay is no longer the sort of thing that gets you bullied in many places. Now, you have adult and youth allies that you can contact as a young person and many people will support you if you are dealing with heterosexism or cissexism. We are making positive change.<br />
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And yet fundamentally the issue of youth liberation is left out of the conversation. Banning anti-gay conversion therapy does not lead to a more serious intellectual and political challenge of guardianship and minor status, but it should. If young people were liberated, so many harms that the LGBTQ community fights would disappear. Young trans folks could start transitioning medically and socially as soon as it felt right for them whether or not their parents approved. LGBTQ youth bullied in school would be able to choose a different school where other students shared their values. LGBTQ youth kicked out of their familial residences could start their lives with a guaranteed basic income and no need for the support of bigoted parents. Getting rid of legal age restrictions would integrate these youth into the community faster and help them to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency. Autonomy is the goal and supports facilitate that.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In the 1970s, gay liberation and child liberation went hand in hand. We need to bring that back.</td></tr>
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This Pride, remember to stay radical. <a href="http://bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/michael-bronski-when-gays-wanted-liberate-children" target="_blank">In the past, youth liberation was on the LGBTQ agenda just as anti-racism, feminism, and disability rights are on the agenda today.</a> We need to bring that same mentality back today. Happy Pride!Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-65020972569886629022019-05-23T16:31:00.006-04:002019-05-23T16:50:19.837-04:00Book Review: Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People Edited by Alice Wong I have just finished reading the anthology <i>Resistance and Hope: Essays By Disabled People</i>. The book's other subtitle (which I love) is "<i>Crip Wisdom for the People</i>." This volume is edited by Alice Wong and is a part of the Disability Visibility Project. As I have found is oftentimes the case with anthologies which emanate from the disability community, the quality of writing will vary a great deal. Some pieces simply seemed like exercises in which the writer recited the list of politically relevant identity groups to which they belonged and then sought to promote their personal projects. Other pieces were excellent. The three best pieces in the anthology were written by Shain M. Neumeier, Lydia X. Z. Brown, and Victoria Rodriguez-Roldan. I'm proud to call all of these individuals personal friends of mine, but that is not what made their work stand out to me. It was the extent to which they were able to move beyond the politics of the personal to make their work speak with urgency to the issues facing disabled individuals and disability communities now. I would also add that all three individuals are youth liberationists. Their politics is grounded in recognizing the worth of all persons and working to create liberation from there.<br />
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Brown's piece, entitled "Rebel - Don't Be Palatable: Resisting Co-optation and Fighting for the World We Want" focuses on the ways in which our movements themselves can be draining, discriminatory, exclusionary, and oppressive. It asks the reader to think about the ways in which activist communities to which they may belong all too often reenact the same rituals of devaluation and degradation that take place within so many other spaces within our society at large. Essentially, it is problematic to treat people as disposable simply because they may have behaved inappropriately at some point in time or shared an opinion with which one or the wider movement disagrees. And yet that is so often the course of action that our movement circles take.<br />
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The absolute highlight of the book for me was Shain M. Neumeier's article "Back Into the Fires That Forged Us." Neumeier has a way of speaking to the heart of an issue in universal terms while bringing out unique aspects and connections among issues that others may not have noticed before. The ways in which Neumeier connects notions of authoritarianism, cruelty, and the criminalization of poverty and disability under the aegis of social Darwinism is impressive and thought-provoking. Perhaps most impressive of all, despite the piece's deep dive into such disheartening territory, the essay manages to end on a meaningfully hopeful and optimistic note. Neumeier's words are inspiring in the best possible way.<br />
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Victoria Rodriguez-Roldan's piece entitled "Who Gets To Be the Activist?" relates the story of how Rodriguez, an attorney for the National LGBTQ Task Force, found herself talking to a legislative assistant for a Congressman about the Murphy Bill, legislation which would have stripped legal protections from people with psychiatric disabilities. The legislative assistant explained to Rodriguez, "You need to understand, this is just the <i>serious</i> mental illnesses we're talking about. Like bipolar and schizophrenia." At this point, Rodriguez informed the legislative assistant that actually she and her partner were both diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At this point, of course, the legislative assistant tried to backpedal and failed miserably. This story allows Rodriguez to make the larger point that disability inclusion has to mean all disabled people or else it is meaningless. It is beautifully and poignantly written.<br />
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The last piece in the book is by comedian Maysoon Zayid and in it she says that, prior to the Trump era, the disability community had "focused less on survival and more on battling against ableist language and for the right to run out of spoons." I do not think that this is a fair summation of all of the disability activist work I have seen going on prior to the Trump era, but there is a grain of truth in it. The best pieces in this volume speak to what is truly important in reference to disability rights.<br />
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Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-56821973611915425602019-04-12T11:40:00.002-04:002019-04-12T11:42:58.710-04:00Gypsy Rose Blanchard, "The Act," and the Problematic Assumption of Caregiver Benevolence Gypsy Rose Blanchard's story is an object lesson in all of the ways that ageism, ableism, sexism, and the oppressive assumption of caregiver benevolence can intertwine with our society's mores and institutions to ultimately entrap someone. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Dee_Dee_Blanchard" target="_blank">For those unfamiliar with the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Wikipedia provides a good synopsis.</a> I watched the HBO documentary that was made about the situation, but ultimately felt that it missed an opportunity to explore the ways in which ageism, ableism, and the problematic tendency to view anyone in a caregiving role as necessarily beneficent contributed to the tragedy of Gypsy Rose Blanchard's life. However, the Hulu series <i>The Act</i> which dramatizes the story does a much better job of exploring these elements of the story. Watching it is truly thought provoking and disturbing in ways that should make all of us think more deeply about the caregiving relationships that we are privy to in our own lives.<br />
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Watching the scenes in which Dee Dee Blanchard speaks over her daughter, rushes to attempt to acquire a guardianship in reference Gypsy, and explains to anyone who will listen that Gypsy is "not like other girls" and "has the mind of a child," I thought of the parents of some individuals that I know with intellectual and physical disabilities that have echoed those same words and behaviors. While in these cases there is not the element of Munchausen by proxy that existed in reference to Gypsy, one nonetheless finds oneself thinking that some of these parents seem perhaps too happy to infantilize their children, that they are too quick to control their children's associations, that they are all too glad to take on the role of "benighted mother of special needs child," that they take too much pride in keeping their children dependent, ignorant, and impotent in reference to the things that matter in one's life.<br />
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<i>The Act</i> is a very well made series and the acting, cinematography, music, and other elements of the production are top notch. But what makes it truly great art is the way that it forces the viewer to see that there is a bit of Dee Dee Blanchard in a lot of parents and caregivers and that there are so many ways in which our culture is complicit in the oppression of the many Gypsy Roses of the world, even when Munchausen by proxy is not necessarily a part of the equation. And of course, there are many victims of Munchausen by proxy whose torture is aided and abetted by our society's refusal to center the autonomy of youth, elders, and people with disabilities and to question the benevolence of those who would claim to speak for them (and who all too often actually speak over them). This is a powerful television series and I strongly recommend it as required viewing for all of those concerned with the issues that I blog about here.<br />
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<br />Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-62150251359401579172019-03-01T22:33:00.004-05:002019-03-01T22:33:59.370-05:00Disabililty Day of Mourning 2019 and the Presumption of Caregiver Benevolence <br />
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Every March 1st, the disability community mourns those of us disabled people whose lives have been lost too soon, particularly those who are the victims of caregiver and familial violence due to prejudice and hatred directed towards us as a result of intolerance for our disabilities. Disabled lives are ended prematurely all too often for a variety of tragic reasons. Sometimes the issue may be the physical health problems that we live with which in some cases have the potential to cut our lives short. Sometimes the issue is a lack of funding and resources devoted to our care and welfare, which can have particularly deadly consequences for us. As was the case with the recently departed disability rights activist Carrie Ann Lucas, sometimes insurance companies and/or governmental austerity policies are at least in part to blame. Sometimes the issue is one of medical malpractice, medical neglect, medical paternalism, or even the medically sanctioned killing of disabled people, all ways in which the medical industrial complex all too frequently systematically disvalues the lives of disabled individuals with devastating consequences. However, one of the most salient causes of the death of disabled people, both disabled adults and disabled youth, that is discussed widely within the disability community but almost entirely ignored outside of the community, is the epidemic of caregiver and familial violence that disabled people face and all too often lose their lives as a result of.<br />
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In our society, we like to think of caregivers, especially parents, as always loving, benevolent, and well meaning. We want to believe that even when they may not always do the right thing, they fundamentally want what is best for those in their care. And of course this is often the case. No one denies that many parents and caregivers for disabled and non-disabled people alike love those they care for a great deal and sacrifice a lot to try to do what is right for them. However, what we don't talk about is the reality that there are those who don't have the right attitude towards those in their care and yet wield authority over them all the same. The automatic presumption of caregiver benevolence is dangerous and deadly, particularly as its invisible and uncontested influence makes its presence felt in law, policy, and common social practices.<br />
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According to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), in the past five years six hundred and fifty disabled people have been murdered by their parents. <a href="https://autisticadvocacy.org/projects/community/mourning/" target="_blank">According to ASAN's website</a>, "We see the same pattern repeating over and over again. A parent kills their disabled child. The media portrays these murders as justifiable and inevitable due to the 'burden' of having a disabled person in the family. If the parent stands trial, they are given sympathy and comparatively lighter sentences, if they are sentenced at all. The victims are disregarded, blamed for their own murder at the hands of the person they should have been able to trust the most, and ultimately forgotten. And then the cycle repeats."<br />
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Two major societal assumptions are at work in terms of how the media and the culture at large reacts to these events. Ableism is a major part of the equation. So is the presumption of parental and caregiver benevolence that ultimately harms disabled people of all ages as well as youth with and without disabilities. Disability and youth liberation and oppression are intimately intertwined with one another. The Disability Day of Mourning is a day that youth and disability rights advocates should take time to reflect deeply on these connections, mourn for the victims of violence justified in the name of ableism and paternalism, and recommit ourselves to working for a more just world for both disabled people of all ages and for youth with and without disabilities. This is what understanding intersectionality is truly all about. Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-50850577415571393312019-02-26T03:58:00.001-05:002019-02-26T03:58:11.714-05:00Book Review: Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6FpTo58RWl2ngXlV50eRvSUP8SurS2imc_xznKRU51NNuLRO1CMVT2w5u36Wqi9iKIlQFS9iBoYuElnZeFCocAJc-iZOlLDYM4DTxeVJZgcW9UcBTfWtaKNq-TCi94Vy3uIt6w9RrUgc/s1600/Harmful+to+Minors+Book+Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="331" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6FpTo58RWl2ngXlV50eRvSUP8SurS2imc_xznKRU51NNuLRO1CMVT2w5u36Wqi9iKIlQFS9iBoYuElnZeFCocAJc-iZOlLDYM4DTxeVJZgcW9UcBTfWtaKNq-TCi94Vy3uIt6w9RrUgc/s320/Harmful+to+Minors+Book+Cover.jpg" width="212" /></a> In the course of doing research for my own book project on youth rights
issues, I have been reading voraciously about a wide variety of youth
related topics. As I read these books, I am trying to review as many of
them as possible here on<i> </i> <i>The Youth Rights Blog </i>so that readers of the blog can get a sense of the literature that is out there on these topics, what various works have to offer, and where they fall short. Today's review regards independent journalist, scholar, and activist Judith Levine's 2002 book <i>Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex</i>. While some of the material in the book is now dated and is therefore clearly a product of its time (particularly the material which refers to then widespread and current youth attitudes regarding issues of gender and sexual orientation as well as some likely no longer accurate statistics on various topics), much of the material within the book is as relevant as ever. You could write an entire book about any given domain of youth oppression - the juvenile justice system, youth oppression within the medical industrial complex, problems with the PreK-12 education system, youth oppression and abuse within the family, the moral bankruptcy of the notion of parental rights, etc. - and this is essentially what Levine does in <i>Harmful to Minors</i>, zeroing in on the myriad ways in which youth sexuality is repressed, policed, controlled, pathologized, shamed, stigmatized, and restricted and the myriad harms that this causes to youth and often to adults as well. Levine is a good writer and <i>Harmful to Minors</i> is a powerful book.<br />
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On the whole, <i>Harmful to Minors</i> is an excellent work of youth liberation theory that succeeds in portraying and theorizing in a right thinking way about the wickedness and devastation wrought by decades of moral panics surrounding sexual issues pertaining to young people coupled with wide ranging rollbacks of youth freedom in matters sexual and non-sexual alike that have resulted from these seemingly never ending moral panics. Few people are able to grasp the central tenet of youth liberation theory - that child abuse and child protectionism are in actuality two sides of the same coin. Even fewer individuals are able to communicate this truism clearly to others while talking about such highly charged topics as age of consent laws, moral panics concerning pedophilia, and HIV/AIDS. Levine, however, is able to do both of these things and does them very well in this book.<br />
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All of that being said, I do have a few minor criticisms of this work. I think that it is important that Levine's focus on youth sexual rights be situated in a somewhat wider youth liberationist context than she gives them in most of the book. Towards the end of the book, Levine does tie her focus on youth sexual rights in with the larger issue of youth as autonomous citizens and community members, but I think that it would have been better if that perspective had been more obviously present from the beginning of the work and had more clearly informed it throughout. Youth sexual rights are important in part because they are inextricably bound up with a larger web of issues involving youth rights to bodily autonomy and personal self determination. I think that Levine recognizes that, but she could have made this point much clearer and she could have done so much earlier on in the work, thus deflecting the criticism that her interest in promoting youth sexual autonomy is somehow prurient.<br />
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Finally, I felt that Levine's chapter on abortion rights was altogether too blase about the ethical and personal dilemmas raised by the issue of abortion for individuals of any age. And while Levine seemed to take the view that any adolescent who found herself pregnant would be all to eager to have an abortion and that this would be the right decision for most youth in that situation, she ignored the choice that many youth make to parent and did not speak at all to the rights and interests of young parents stigmatized by our society's negative discourses surrounding teenage pregnancy and parenting. I think that this was a major missed opportunity and a mistake. Reproductive justice and liberty, including for young folks, is not about enforcing a one size fits all agenda or glossing over the real and challenging issues raised for an individual of any age who thinks about electively terminating a viable pregnancy.<br />
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Having voiced my criticisms of <i>Harmful to Minors</i>, I want to end this review by saying unequivocally that it is an excellent work of youth liberationist theory and that everyone interested in youth liberation issues needs to read it. A great deal of what Levine has to say will no doubt inform my own work on youth rights issues in reference to sexuality going forward.Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-20306278432063472252019-02-16T20:14:00.001-05:002019-02-26T03:59:41.112-05:00A Conference Presentation and a Distillation of Why I Am an Unapologetic Radical Youth Liberationist<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJ9t38L2DdMO9JJVkdsTebKcLkoxmTDlnRX2U6WZ0fF9EFQP1Fqt_ojdXoVESFmgB4_ZH9_WE_lRl2n7DqUm5PYPcKZ44xfQ6NaTj6AAgoXq60Rw8h0fSDdKHHk6mDYauW51uj8iIUq8/s1600/Jackson%252C+Me%252C+and+Alexander.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJ9t38L2DdMO9JJVkdsTebKcLkoxmTDlnRX2U6WZ0fF9EFQP1Fqt_ojdXoVESFmgB4_ZH9_WE_lRl2n7DqUm5PYPcKZ44xfQ6NaTj6AAgoXq60Rw8h0fSDdKHHk6mDYauW51uj8iIUq8/s320/Jackson%252C+Me%252C+and+Alexander.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jackson Howard Wagner, me, and Alexander R. Cohen. Great friends and comrades.</td></tr>
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Back in November, I had the privilege of attending the wonderful Applied Philosophy Workshop at Bowling Green State University. On Saturday, November 3, 2018, I gave a presentation at this conference entitled "In Defense of Liberated Young People: A Critique of the Protectionist Developmentalist Position." The talk went really well and I could tell that folks were nodding along and understanding the message that I was trying to convey. The information that I presented was mostly taken from the Master's thesis that I wrote on this very topic (and which I am proud to say was given the honor of "passing with distinction" from my graduate committee) as a graduate student at San Francisco State University. My wonderful youth liberationist friends and comrades Alexander Cohen and Jackson Howard Wagner were there and they really helped to make this conference presentation a truly wonderful experience.<br />
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After my presentation, a graduate student at Bowling Green State University was tasked with delivering a response to the material. At first, I thought he was raising some good points that I wanted to respond to, but he closed his remarks in a dismissive and flippant way by saying "What if teenagers are running off to the mall in their bikinis to get tattoos on their faces?" I had five minutes to respond and this is basically what I said after setting a timer on my iPhone.<br />
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"The presenter that we just heard from raised some good points and I want to thank him for his response. However, he said one thing in particular that I wanted to respond to. He talked about teenagers in bikinis going to the mall to get tattoos on their faces. Well, I know a lot of young people and I don't know any that are clamoring to go to the mall in bikinis to get facial tattoos, although I suppose that that would be their right if that is something that they wanted to do. But here is what I do know about. I know about youth that are abused within their homes physically, emotionally, and/or sexually by their families and are returned to those very families when they attempt to run away. I know about youth who have been sent by their parents to gulag schools for behavior modification that traumatized them for life. I know about youth who are not allowed to express their gender or sexuality within their family and as a result they are oppressed and abandoned with no options. I know about youth subjected to medical procedures against their wills who have been traumatized for life by that. I know about youth who are bullied or mistreated in schools and do not have the option to choose other educational institutions. I know about youth who are in schools that are just not a good fit for them and where they are just not thriving as they should be and they do not have the option to make a change. I know about youth subjected by family members to behavior modification programs which traumatized and pathologized them. I know about youth who were denied freedom of conscience in reference to religion and spirituality, which is such a sacrosanct value in our society. I know about youth indoctrinated into racism, sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism by their families. I know about families that want to break up loving relationships involving youth because of the partners' ages, race, or sex. So, I do not know about teenagers in bikinis at the mall getting facial tattoos but that is what I do know about."<br />
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After that statement, everyone clapped and I sat down, knowing that I had given the right response to my interlocutor's words. We cannot allow youth rights issues to be trivialized. They are too important not to do so.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfCmPVhbjR42P-qat8CMRf9ByUjUMHrJZYm8a_c8QM2oDRAfdBF0yWiCLLg3PbmysEHT-5x7Mk9yYVx4SrW6ecNR_kvP7_Mv6NkaCT8oAEYHZPSUFrzrJSqNfpq0bYhBWOpE2TCtd3B4I/s1600/Me+with+Kathryn+Gonda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfCmPVhbjR42P-qat8CMRf9ByUjUMHrJZYm8a_c8QM2oDRAfdBF0yWiCLLg3PbmysEHT-5x7Mk9yYVx4SrW6ecNR_kvP7_Mv6NkaCT8oAEYHZPSUFrzrJSqNfpq0bYhBWOpE2TCtd3B4I/s320/Me+with+Kathryn+Gonda.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Me and my wonderful host, Kathryn Gonda, at the Bowling Green State University Philosophy Conference.</td></tr>
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<br />Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-26461545132867964782018-08-26T06:13:00.003-04:002018-08-26T06:13:58.940-04:00Denying Youth The Right To Public Space: A Growing Problem in American Society<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxrOVMKIux1B6sPuPP-R9Eju2fC-iv2c05pME_mV5fsdonFvwqj0XsQ0ssIt7MxehEo_IF8pq2StSHdaoQs9UJX-aAZTkio84eACIsmXp50VizTOuz9OSG-vM3eHhu54r48E5je4xnGKQ/s1600/Dorothy+Widen+Walking+Dog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="833" data-original-width="1484" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxrOVMKIux1B6sPuPP-R9Eju2fC-iv2c05pME_mV5fsdonFvwqj0XsQ0ssIt7MxehEo_IF8pq2StSHdaoQs9UJX-aAZTkio84eACIsmXp50VizTOuz9OSG-vM3eHhu54r48E5je4xnGKQ/s320/Dorothy+Widen+Walking+Dog.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Recently <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2018/08/24/an-8-year-old-girl-was-walking-her-dog-on-her-own-and-someone-reported-her-to-the-police/?utm_term=.955b2bbcc9dc" target="_blank">a story has been making the rounds in the news media</a> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <a href="https://www.eater.com/2016/11/4/13504422/kids-restaurants-banned-children" target="_blank">Even supervised young people should be kept out of some public spaces just because some people don't want to see them.</a> 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.<br />
Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-16408542469701818972018-07-25T00:56:00.003-04:002022-06-20T00:02:50.377-04:00Book 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, <a href="http://theyouthrightsblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/book-review-richard-becks-we-believe.html" target="_blank">I have already read and reviewed Richard Beck's book <i>We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s</i></a>. I am following this review with one of the anthropologist Roger N. Lancaster's book <i>Sex Panic and the Punitive State</i>, which was published in 2011 by the University of California Press.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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)."<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i>We Believe the Children</i> 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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidvnALaL12yWw5rPEbltal-sM1lNJhK7BOQkOdKJ_tpirqNxo4TGgZRK5tu8wCao1jMtZwq2ZWb7JqHFaH_68Y2F9b-8vGODgfH0CsMSTjQsGEntWcmndmGYmIMq0PTObKEX_pzCxjWOo/s1600/Sex+Panic+and+the+Punitive+State+Book.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="667" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidvnALaL12yWw5rPEbltal-sM1lNJhK7BOQkOdKJ_tpirqNxo4TGgZRK5tu8wCao1jMtZwq2ZWb7JqHFaH_68Y2F9b-8vGODgfH0CsMSTjQsGEntWcmndmGYmIMq0PTObKEX_pzCxjWOo/s320/Sex+Panic+and+the+Punitive+State+Book.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Roger N. Lancaster's book <i>Sex Panic and the Punitive State</i> published in 2011 by the California State University Press.</td></tr>
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Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-47924727556107676412018-07-18T15:16:00.001-04:002018-07-18T21:12:20.091-04:00Book 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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."<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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."<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i>We Believe the Children </i>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 <i>What Happened in the Woodshed: The Secret Lives of Battered Children and a New Profession to Protect Them</i> (which I also reviewed here on <i>The Youth Rights Blog</i>), 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 <i>We Believe the Children</i> would appear to suggest that those are indeed pertinent concerns.<br />
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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).<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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."<br />
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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 <i>We Believe the Children </i>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.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO9QovELrHNEE2JVnVejxOOuWNebE7QT0EMqBfYsgVL0YOBRmAfScdSb0PkNUKLrE92cRqDW2k6jbO_kO0VNH-EfpRzUj0D0jBaxRrpsWukx3cYiTUE-RqgTtNAVXTQgyhIQyrRsdL1ls/s1600/We+Believe+The+Children+Book+Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1053" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO9QovELrHNEE2JVnVejxOOuWNebE7QT0EMqBfYsgVL0YOBRmAfScdSb0PkNUKLrE92cRqDW2k6jbO_kO0VNH-EfpRzUj0D0jBaxRrpsWukx3cYiTUE-RqgTtNAVXTQgyhIQyrRsdL1ls/s320/We+Believe+The+Children+Book+Cover.jpg" width="210" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This excellent book was published in 2015 by Public Affairs Press.</td></tr>
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Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-39733581748713290412018-06-25T10:18:00.005-04:002018-06-25T10:19:51.835-04:00Remembering 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, <i>Birthrights: A Bill of Rights for Children</i>. 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 <i>Birthrights </i>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.<br />
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I have been thinking a lot about Farson and <i>Birthrights</i> in particular these days as I have recently begun work on my own book on the topic of youth rights and liberation. <i>Birthrights</i> 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 <i>Birthrights</i> 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.<br />
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A good deal of what makes <i>Birthrights</i> 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 <i>Birthrights</i>, 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.<br />
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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 <i>Birthrights</i>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Richard Farson: 1926-2017.</td></tr>
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Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-52644855162826684872018-06-20T03:54:00.004-04:002018-06-20T03:59:11.063-04:00Reflections for June 2018 <br />
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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 <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/sojourner-truth.htm" target="_blank">Sojourner Truth's amazing and beautiful "Ain't I a Woman?" speech</a>
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. <br />
<br />
Moving on to a less depressing subject... I just read Michael Bronski's beautiful and amazing article entitled <a href="http://bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/michael-bronski-when-gays-wanted-liberate-children#.Wx12Z51tMHE.facebook" target="_blank">"When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children"</a> 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-91137155563395481552018-05-03T01:35:00.004-04:002018-05-04T05:00:27.256-04:00National 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
The first book that I read on child abuse this April was Dr. Diane Prinz Callin's <i>The Last Bastion: Child Abuse and Child Neglect in the Brotherhood of America's Schools</i>. 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 <span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269">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. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"> </span></span><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269">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.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"> 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 href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charter-school-bathroom-policy-periods_us_5ae7a19be4b04aa23f26463c?ncid=engmodushpmg00000003" target="_blank">a school policy that causes young menstruating women to ruin their clothes because they are allowed so few bathroom breaks</a>, we should refer to this as "child abuse." When we hear of <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/teens-face-corporal-punishment-in-rural-arkansas-for-participating-in-student-walkout" target="_blank">youth facing corporal punishment in our schools</a>, we should refer to this as "child abuse." When we hear about <a href="https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/when-the-teacher-is-the-bully/" target="_blank">teachers demeaning or humiliating students</a>, 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.</span></span></span><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"> 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.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"> The second book I read about child abuse this April was <i>What Happened in the Woodshed?: The Secret Lives of Battered Children and a New Profession to Protect Them</i> 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.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"> 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.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"> 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</span></span></span></span><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"> 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.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"><span id="freeTextreview2365662269"> 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!</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span id="freeTextreview2365662269"><span class="readable reviewText"></span></span>Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-12351853650306562872018-03-31T05:00:00.002-04:002019-02-26T04:48:10.871-05:00They 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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>The Dog Merchants: Inside the Big Business of Breeders, Pet Stores, and Rescuers</i>, Jessica Pierce's <i>Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets</i>, and Michael Schaffer's <i>One Nation Under Dog: America's Love Affair With Our Dogs</i>. I am currently in the middle of David Grimm's <i>Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship With Cats and Dogs</i>. <i> </i><br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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).<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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..."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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.</td></tr>
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Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-67194991381478835362018-03-01T13:40:00.000-05:002018-03-01T13:40:15.348-05:00Youth Liberation As a Personal Commitment: Reflections and Resolutions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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.</td></tr>
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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 <i>Birthrights</i>, a seismic shift occurred inside of me.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The canon. These are the books that ultimately made me a youth liberationist. Shulamith Firestone's <i>The Dialectic of Sex</i> (which features an entire chapter entitled "Down With Childhood!"), John Holt's <i>Escape From Childhood</i>, Richard Farson's <i>Birthrights</i>, and Howard Cohen's <i>Equal Rights For Children</i>.</td></tr>
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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 <i>DeShaney v. Winnebago</i>, 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 <i>The Bilerico Project </i>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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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. </td></tr>
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And then reading the psychologist Richard Farson's <i>Birthrights</i> caused everything to come together for me. <i>Birthrights </i>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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv2adEHv0wkRtTBDURof0pTaqTFwL2FTsWn4-H5Mx4UasyQwV6VCefGOLqnPDhBW36IsHuNMsZQA2ITA7D_IsvVg77Z4RZdZ1HU4duJZjBaJIt2vn_LHw72k7zSt6DexaDpy9PCC1NflM/s1600/Alexander+and+I.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv2adEHv0wkRtTBDURof0pTaqTFwL2FTsWn4-H5Mx4UasyQwV6VCefGOLqnPDhBW36IsHuNMsZQA2ITA7D_IsvVg77Z4RZdZ1HU4duJZjBaJIt2vn_LHw72k7zSt6DexaDpy9PCC1NflM/s320/Alexander+and+I.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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.</td></tr>
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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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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.</td></tr>
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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 <i>Birthrights</i> 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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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.</td></tr>
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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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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. </td></tr>
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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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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. </td></tr>
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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.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAwLXzpH-Cm9G-XQltYFF_WBsFQNQ0_APp2fOyjmSvBbKvTZxVykzHrH2mKd2xGpszyrocNVnJqN6fVT1JjKdI8-Sz626xxX6l4f1NKQFPVB2GDO5rKRlGhIJJLVZSLtDEPhDj2pEMxR8/s1600/Activisting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAwLXzpH-Cm9G-XQltYFF_WBsFQNQ0_APp2fOyjmSvBbKvTZxVykzHrH2mKd2xGpszyrocNVnJqN6fVT1JjKdI8-Sz626xxX6l4f1NKQFPVB2GDO5rKRlGhIJJLVZSLtDEPhDj2pEMxR8/s320/Activisting.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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.</td></tr>
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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. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTt743LZF9W4r5HB3E6PywE1uZsdhccUTo7E5G8m6npyvo1oy46PE9P3J3xp-feE5Mw4wX81cBSQYfYddRqZNSsupUUsJMov11z33MIQKfg5unGAbXiJbwrZhjAKnQiuMzleRq92FUWtM/s1600/Katrina+and+I.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTt743LZF9W4r5HB3E6PywE1uZsdhccUTo7E5G8m6npyvo1oy46PE9P3J3xp-feE5Mw4wX81cBSQYfYddRqZNSsupUUsJMov11z33MIQKfg5unGAbXiJbwrZhjAKnQiuMzleRq92FUWtM/s320/Katrina+and+I.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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. </td></tr>
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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. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi72ZoFzsljFXPDFC1mWba6gwzkVgZlEYHimgpaF3HaVOs1AbDKTI_sgdS-YbkV5TH3-SOncaghzsbOu0t6Mj0QCvReZnJR3eqQMG80Higr_ll6btltBccPsofMk9Z8RUp6obUPbEpOFTc/s1600/NYRA+Annual+Meeting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi72ZoFzsljFXPDFC1mWba6gwzkVgZlEYHimgpaF3HaVOs1AbDKTI_sgdS-YbkV5TH3-SOncaghzsbOu0t6Mj0QCvReZnJR3eqQMG80Higr_ll6btltBccPsofMk9Z8RUp6obUPbEpOFTc/s320/NYRA+Annual+Meeting.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">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.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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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.Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-24177095533245626862018-02-25T19:53:00.000-05:002018-02-25T19:53:05.930-05:00Ageism and the Discourses of School Safety The aftermath of the mass shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018 could provide enough material to teach an entire course on how ageist anti-youth discourses and practices operate in American society. As someone who writes and thinks about these topics a great deal, I think that I can say that I have never before seen so many pertinent examples of how anti-youth ageism operates playing out on the national stage in such a short span of time. The purpose of this blog post is not to make an argument about gun control but to walk the reader through the ways in which ageism against youth has operated at every turn in the way that politicians, pundits, and many citizens have responded to both the tragedy of the mass shooting and the wave of youth initiated gun control activism that has begun to occur in its wake.<br />
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To start with, one must first understand the rise in school shootings in the context of the increasingly punitive and carceral culture of America's K-12 schools. For instance, Mark Ames argues in his book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Columbine/dp/1932360824/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1519524284&sr=8-4&keywords=going+postal" target="_blank">Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond</a> </i>that school shootings can best be understood as "modern day slave rebellions." While this thesis may seem to ignore some inconvenient truths about mass shootings (i.e. the fact that they increasingly take place in malls, movie theaters, universities, etc., the obvious psychological problems and lack of empathy of so many of the mass shooters, the fact that the shooters often inflict violence indiscriminately instead of just inflicting it on oppressive authority figures), it is worth engaging with Ames's ideas in order to better appreciate how this culture of excessive focus on discipline and ageist oppression in American K-12 schools may be received by already troubled individuals, thus precipitating the sorts of tragedies we observe all too frequently when a gunman shoots up a school. Unlike Ames, I do not see mass shooters as perfectly analogous to slaves rising up against their owners. These individuals are no heroes and are rightly regarded as pariahs. However, I do think that the often authoritarian and punitive culture of American K-12 education (as documented powerfully by director Cevin Soling in his documentary film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids" target="_blank"><i>The War on Kids</i></a>) may play a role in at least some school shootings.<br />
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As Soling's excellent film documents, zero tolerance policies (instituted in part in response to concerns about gun violence in the 1990s) in schools that were initially instituted to crack down on hard drugs and dangerous weapons soon morphed into an excuse for the most authoritarian of school personnel to begin treating students like prisoners. <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/29/the-top-10-zero-tolerance-follies-of-201" target="_blank">Lenore Skenazy of <i>Reason Magazine</i> documents some of the most egregious examples of how these policies operate</a>. A student is suspended for bringing a knife to school in order to cut an apple. A seventy-nine-year-old substitute teacher is fired for having students as friends on Facebook. A student receives detention for sharing their lunch. Our schools increasingly operate more and more like warehouses for inmates than like communities in which learning takes place. It is not difficult to see how the increasingly draconian logic of American K-12 educational institutions could operate so as to further distress already troubled young people, in some cases with tragic results.<br />
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For many years now, activists concerned with the <a href="https://www.childtrends.org/publications/school-prison-pipeline-intersections-students-color-disabilities/" target="_blank">welfare of students of color and students with disabilities</a> have attempted to draw our attention to the so-called "<a href="https://www.aclu.org/issues/juvenile-justice/school-prison-pipeline" target="_blank">school to prison pipeline</a>" and the ways in which it all too often sets youth up for a life of control under the thumb of the carceral state. What has perhaps been less remarked upon but is equally important is the ways in which spending so much of their lives in an increasingly regimented and oppressive institution wreaks havoc on the psyches of students, some of whom ultimately lash out in violent ways with devastating results.<br />
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Moving on from the school shootings themselves, we also see ageism at work in the ways in which the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were received by many adults as soon as they began to speak out. These were bright, articulate young people who had just survived a traumatic attack that had injured some of them and left others of them without friends and mentors that had previously been a vital presence in their lives. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxD3o-9H1lY" target="_blank">They said the same things that so many survivors of and individuals impacted by mass shootings have said</a> such as the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/newtown-families-voice-support-for-gun-control/" target="_blank">parents of the elementary school students murdered in Newtown, Connecticut</a>, <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/emotional-moment-parkland-students-pulse-shooting-victims_us_5a8d8a88e4b00a30a2515545" target="_blank">the survivors of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida</a>, and <a href="http://www.westword.com/news/stephen-barton-aurora-victim-and-gun-control-advocate-grew-up-ten-minutes-from-newtown-5877467" target="_blank">survivors of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater mass shooting</a>.<br />
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Nonetheless, because these specific traumatized yet resilient survivor-activists were teenagers many commentators felt that it was necessary to put them in their place as recalcitrant children in need of discipline, giving all of us a parade of examples of adult authoritarianism at its worst. <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/media/374819-dinesh-dsouza-apologizes-for-mocking-parkland-shooting-survivors-after-massive" target="_blank">Dinesh D'Souza (who at one time arguably occupied the role of conservative intellectual but is now best understood as an increasingly unhinged right wing troll) glibly tweeted out that students upset by the news that the Florida House of Representatives would not open a debate on legislation banning assault weapons had received "the worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs."</a> <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florida-shooting-survivors-parkland_us_5a8c54dce4b0273053a52821" target="_blank">Former Georgia Republican Representative Jack Kingston seemed to see these grieving activists as pawns of some larger force, stating, "Do we really think seventeen-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?"</a> <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/374656-oreilly-questions-media-interviews-with-fla-shooting-survivors-who" target="_blank">Disgraced former Fox News television personality Bill O'Reilly also weighed in, asking "Should the media be promoting opinions by teenagers who are in an emotional state and facing extreme peer pressure in some cases?"</a><br />
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When you are an adult who has survived a traumatic event or lost a child in a national tragedy, your proximity to atrocity renders you more credible in the eyes of others when you speak out about the issues surrounding your loss or your trauma. Even those who ultimately disagree with the positions that you may take on political issues in response to these events respect your grief, your outrage, your terror, your courage, your witness, and simply your right to an opinion as someone close to that about which you speak. When you are a teenager, your voice can be easily silenced and your views can be cheaply discounted because you are ostensibly too emotional, too immature, too suggestible to have anything to say worth listening to.<br />
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It would be awful enough if the ageism on display in the midst of this national tragedy simply involved a few third rate right wing pundits making ill conceived comments but alas ageism is even baked into the more arguably well-meaning attempts to respond to this tragedy and the wider epidemic of gun violence plaguing our nation. <a href="http://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2018/02/23/rick-scott-proposes-450-million-school-safety-program/" target="_blank">In a rush to appear as if he was doing something while still avoiding giving offense to those proponents of gun rights that make up part of his base within the Republican Party, Florida Governor Rick Scott proposed a plan endeavoring, among other things, to put a police office in every Florida K-12 public school and to allocate one officer per every one thousand students by the 2018 school year, to increase funding for the installation of metal detectors, bulletproof glass, and steel doors in schools, and to pass a law requiring all purchasers of firearms in Florida to be over the age of twenty-one years.</a> <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/24/politics/trump-tweet-arming-teachers/index.html" target="_blank">President Donald Trump tweeted out his support for the prospect of arming teachers.</a> <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/02/22/587799539/at-cnn-town-hall-sen-marco-rubio-declines-to-say-he-wont-take-nra-money" target="_blank">Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio also spoke of his support for new age restrictions on the purchase of firearms.</a><br />
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As is so often the case in American life whether the issue is guns, abortion, tobacco, alcohol, pornography, marijuana, violent media, or any other hot button topic, compromises are made on the backs of young people, already a disempowered group of individuals with little power over the formal political processes that govern all of our lives and in many important respects almost as little power over their own individual lives. Age restrictions are put forward as solutions not because they prevent bad things from happening but because politicians are unable or unwilling to restrict the rights of those who are not currently already marginalized due to their age.<br />
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In the context of a widespread and ongoing national discussion of the ways in which K-12 educators are all too often quick to see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/04/black-students-teachers-implicit-racial-bias-preschool-study" target="_blank">students of color </a>and <a href="http://hechingerreport.org/pipeline-prison-special-education-often-leads-jail-thousands-american-children/" target="_blank">students with disabilities</a> as disciplinary problems compared to white, non-disabled students and of the ways in which <a href="https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/" target="_blank">police officers are all too often responsible for unjustly killing and injuring citizens</a>, it seems foolhardy at best and malicious at worst to put forward the idea of armed teachers and more law enforcement officials in schools as a solution to our nation's problems with gun violence. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/the-absurdity-of-armed-educators/553961/" target="_blank">As Vann R. Newkirk II notes in <i>The Atlantic</i>, the Second Amendment enshrines the individual right to bear arms in the United States Constitution out of a concern with personal liberty which "hardening" schools with armed personnel only serves to undermine.</a> This "security theater" may ultimately do little to prevent gun violence in schools (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/three-sheriff-s-deputies-remained-outside-school-during-parkland-shooting-n850946" target="_blank">which was certainly the case in the Parkland shooting itself as the school's armed police officer refused to enter the school and engage with the gunman when the shooting began</a>), but it does have consequences for students. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/02/22/putting-more-cops-in-schools-wont-make-schools-safer-and-it-will-likely-inflict-a-lot-of-harm/?utm_term=.db6e1da73b5f" target="_blank">In the words of journalist and expert on criminal justice and civil liberties Radley Balko,</a> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155902391400289&set=a.10152459020610289.1073741828.741225288&type=3&theater" target="_blank">"There's little data to suggest putting cops in schools has made the students at these schools safer. The students are, however, more likely to be Tased, beaten, body-slammed, and arrested for misbehavior that previously resulted in detention or suspension."</a> A cycle that any youth liberationist and many youth are all too familiar with plays out once again... authoritarian efforts to "protect" children and adolescents ultimately further endanger them, often in ways beyond the imaginings of those who initially put in place those measures designed to "protect" them. <br />
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This brings us to perhaps the grossest display of adult authoritarianism on display in the aftermath of the Parkland shootings which is how many teachers and administrators have responded to student activists in the wake of the tragedy. Student activists are being penalized for making their voices heard and disciplined for showing a sense of civic duty and concern for national affairs. <a href="https://www.emileemcgovern.com/blog/2018/2/23/students-participate-in-walkout-school-takes-everything-away-from-them" target="_blank">Tessa Haraldsen and Mariah Skolinsky of Sebastian River Middle School in Indian River County, Florida were penalized for participating in the nationwide walkout and suspended from school, removed from all extracurricular activities, and not allowed to attend an upcoming school dance. </a>Haraldsen in particular expressed confusion over why a teacher who praised civil rights activists in the classroom was quick to discipline her for her own gestures of protest on issues of national importance. <a href="http://time.com/5171089/texas-school-threatens-suspend-students-protest/" target="_blank">Needville, Texas's Independent School District Superintendent Curtis Rhodes sent out a letter to parents of students stating that any student participating in walkouts would be suspended.</a> As always, for many teachers, administrators, and staff members of our nation's K-12 schools, the focus is less on educating students to be engaged and civic minded participants in the world around them than on disciplining, controling, and asserting authority over them.<br />
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My mother brought my attention to a meme making its way around Facebook lately. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10215395584265262&set=a.1331841978567.2049194.1306546291&type=3&theater" target="_blank">Writes Marcey Raymond Kusper, "In class today, the topic of school protests to honor the seventeen victims of the Florida shooting came up. One of my students said 'I think it's stupid. How about you make friends with seventeen kids you normally wouldn't instead of walking out of school.' What great conversation came out of it. Smile at seventeen people you normally wouldn't smile at, say a kind word to seventeen people who might not have someone to speak to, open up your heart to seventeen people who might be hurting, offer friendship to seventeen people who might have had none. Now that could change the climate of the school. Seventeen reasons for change... Seventeen reasons to make a difference. What's your seventeen? I like that slogan. Today warmed my heart to be a teacher. #WhatsYour17."</a> While school climate is an important issue and the aims of the walk out do not represent the politics of all students, this meme brings to light the ways in which authoritarian mentalities among teachers, administrators, and staff function within the K-12 school context. <br />
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In the context of this meme, it is obvious that the teacher is uncomfortable with students making political demands and voicing opinions on political issues and so she takes comfort in hearing a student stating that the walkout is "stupid." Walking out of the classroom, making political statements, engaging in political acts is deemed a challenge to her authority so she would rather students "smile" at one another and "open their hearts." What makes this even more laughable still is that this call for kindness comes amidst the backdrop of calls to "harden" schools, arm teachers, crack down on ostensibly inappropriate interactions between teachers and students, and make schools more like prisons.<br />
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We need a youth liberation movement that challenges all of the ageist logic that has been on display over the course of the past few weeks as the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School grapple with their personal and collective tragedies and as young people across the nation are beginning to find their political voice. In the wake of this tragedy, it has been heartening to see so many youth exhibiting a newfound boldness in challenging authority figures that I for one lacked at their age. It has also been heartening to see many adults, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/22/politics/obama-parkland-students/index.html" target="_blank">including former President Barack Obama, </a>voicing their support for these youths' right to take a stand and make their voices heard. However, I hope that these same adults are there to support the right of youth to speak out not just when they're speaking out for a cause that these adults have long supported, but when they are taking a stand for their rights more generally - their right to vote, to make their own medical decisions, to make their own decisions about where they live and who they live with, to make their own decisions about all aspects of their lives, their bodies, and their futures. Ultimately I want to see more adults recognizing the rights of young people to take ownership of both their own lives and to participate in the national and international conversations surrounding political issues that effect us all.Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-67974565400003907172017-11-04T00:40:00.000-04:002017-11-04T00:44:17.932-04:00Youth Oppression, Popular Culture, and 1980s Nostalgia Recently I saw the movie <i>It </i>and it struck me just how far we as a culture have fallen in terms of honoring and allowing for youth autonomy. I have never really been struck by the 1980s nostalgia wave like some millennials seem to be. Perhaps it is because I was born in the late 1980s and so my childhood was largely colored by the tropes and trials of the 1990s. But the outpouring of love that millennials who were too young to experience the 1980s heap on movies like <i>It</i> and shows like <i>Stranger Things </i>leads me to believe that something else may be at work as well.<br />
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Perhaps all of this nostalgia for the 1980s (as depicted in the popular culture) is a sign of a repressed yearning for the sort of wild childhood that most of us never had but desperately wanted. We all wanted to grow up in the sort of world where youth had spontaneous adventures that were not micromanaged by adults. Much as humanity longs to return to a mythical Garden of Eden that surely existed in the past even if no one has ever experienced it, younger millennials long for a time before permission slips, zero tolerance policies, hall passes, curfew laws, and a general culture of fear and anguish around unaccompanied minors robbed them of their ability to create meaningful worlds with other youth without the ubiquitous presence of adult gatekeepers and chaperones.<br />
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You can see this impulse at work as well in the excitement which <i>Game of Thrones</i> fans express in reference to the character of young Lyanna Mormont. Lyanna is the head of the House Mormont, a title which she took on at ten years of age. Her house's sigil is the bear and Lyanna lives on Bear Island. She is portrayed in the show as a competent, wise, and brave leader who calls the shots militarily in the context of an always threatening world of war, winter, and intrigue. <i>Game of Thrones</i> fans love Lyanna partially because she is such a striking emblem of youth empowerment. The same can be said for other fan favorites on the show such as Bran, Sansa, Arya, and Shireen - the show being known and lauded among fans for its depictions of strong youth characters.<br />
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It is oftentimes instructive to look towards the popular culture that is most resonant at any given time for clues to elements of the zeitgeist that one may otherwise miss for lack of an obvious cultural calling card. I for one have long thought that Americans' increasing cynicism regarding the political establishment could have been predicted long before Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz learned this lesson at the hands of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders simply by noting the popularity of <i>Veep</i>, <i>House of Cards</i>, and <i>Scandal</i> - shows in which the president and those around him or her are depicted as venal, corrupt, self-interested, and vain. On a similar note, I think that the popularity among adults of shows featuring strong and empowered young characters speaks to both a sense of regret about our own childhoods and anxiety surrounding the way that we continue to raise our children today. <br />
<br />Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-49032603662018160632015-04-16T00:09:00.003-04:002015-04-16T00:45:15.263-04:00We Live In A Deeply Oppressive Dystopia But It Isn't A "Parenting Police State"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Image description: A white sign featuring a red triangle. In the
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youth holding hands. The caption beneath the triangle reads "Free range
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<i> </i>Recently <i>The Washington Post</i> published a story which has been getting a great deal of attention as of late. Entitled "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our-parenting-police-state/2015/04/13/42c30336-e1df-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html" target="_blank">'Free-Range' Kids And Our Parenting Police State,</a>" the article by Petula Dvorak focuses primarily on the case of two youth - siblings aged six and ten years respectively - who were picked up by police officers in Montgomery County, Maryland and held in police custody for hours because they were out walking about two and a half blocks from home without adult supervision. Due to this incident, the parents of the two young people were forced to appear in court and were eventually even found guilty of "unsubstantiated child neglect." As far as this incident goes, these parents and these youth deserve our sympathy and our solidarity as well as our outrage at the horrible ordeal which they were all forced to endure. The Montgomery County Police Department and the county's judicial system deserve our condemnation for it.<br />
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By referring to a "parenting police state" in the article and its title, Dvorak was undoubtedly intending to evoke the bizarre and dystopian aspects of this situation and this impulse is no doubt one which we all ought to endorse as far as it goes. However, this phrase fundamentally misconstrues the true nature of social, cultural, and political problem at the heart of this incident and other incidents like it and in so doing, makes it more difficult for us to understand and thereby combat these injustices for the benefit of youth and parents alike. Parents, even when grievously harmed as the parents in this incident no doubt were, are not the primary targets in the vast network of laws, discourses, customs, social norms, ideas, and practices which have led to a situation in the contemporary United States in which it is not all that unfathomable for two young people to be picked up and detained for hours by police for being in public without adult supervision a few block from their home and for their parents to have to appear in court due to this incident and to be found guilty of child neglect when they do so. The targets of this network of laws, discourses, customs, social norms, ideas, and practices are young people themselves. The recognition of this reality is not in any way intended to detract from the very real suffering and injustice experienced by the parents in this situation and others situations like it. However, by framing this injustice primarily in terms of its negative effects on parents, Dvorak makes it harder for anyone aware of the incident to understand it because the motives and discourses which make such an event intelligible are obscured.<br />
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The latter part of the twentieth century and the earliest part of the twenty-first century in the United States may well be remembered later in human history as the era in which the world became an increasingly closed and oppressive place for young people. During this period of time, the notion that young people require constant adult supervision and that it is inappropriate for young people to ever occupy public space without an adult escort present to surveil them has gone from being virtually unheard of to taken for granted by American adults and youth alike across a variety of demographic lines. The same impulses driving the laws and attitudes which have created so much hardship for the family profiled in Dvorak's article are also at work in a constellation of discourses and practices which define what it means to be a young person or a parent today including but certainly not limited to school zero tolerance policies, developmental psychology, age-based curfew laws, and movie, videogame, and television ratings based on age. These discourses and practices do not exist for the purpose of subordinating parents qua parents. On the contrary, despite the fact that individual adults and individual parents may oppose some of these restrictions on young people, these discourses and practices are the products of the efforts of adults (including parents) as a political class to subordinate young people as a political class. Adults, in particular parents and teachers opposed to these discourses and practices, may be harmed when they attempt to act on this opposition but from the perspective of this network of ideas and the regulations targeting youth which these ideas support, these adults are something akin to collateral damage. Adults in these incidents are not punished qua adults or qua parents but as traitors to adults and/or parents as a political class who dare to defy commonly held social expectations that young people must be kept, to the greatest extent possible, under the thumb of adult control.<br />
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No two social systems of oppression are the same but there do tend to be common impulses undergirding them. One of the main ways in which almost every type of oppression operates is to place burdensome restrictions on the right and/or ability of members of the oppressed class to appear in public. From the infamous "ugly laws" of the late 1800s and early 1900s targeting Americans with disabilities to the legal restrictions placed on contemporary Saudi Arabian women to prevent them from appearing in public without a male guardian to the anti-African-American Jim Crow laws of the antebellum American South, marking certain classes of allegedly inferior persons as unfit to appear in public is a common tactic used by oppressor classes against oppressed classes. Whether the rationale be phrased in terms of protecting members of the oppressed class (as in the Saudi case) or in terms of protecting the rest of the public from members of the oppressed class (as in the case of Jim Crow), the message is that members of the oppressed class do not belong in the public sphere with the rest of us. (Interestingly, both rationales tend to be used in attempting to justify ageist restrictions which attempt to remove youth from public space. The former discourse tends to be used more often in reference to the youngest youth while the latter discourse tends to be used more often in reference to preteen and teenage youth.) Indeed, it is true that there is a group of people in our country who live in a deeply oppressive dystopia of sorts but that class is not defined in reference to one's status as a parent. It is defined in reference to one's youth.<br />
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In order to show why it is that the notion of a "parenting police state" is something of a red herring in this discussion, it makes sense to look not only at those situations in which parents find themselves harmed qua parents due to certain attitudes and actions but also to explore situations in which parents qua parents are allowed to get away with what strikes most reasonable people in our culture as highly questionable behavior. How can we explain the fact that parents can find themselves in legal trouble for allowing their minor children to be seen unsupervised in public a couple of blocks from home but that many American parents can avoid outside interference when they deny their children medical care under the flimsiest of religious pretenses or pull them out of school to brainwash them into support for a white supremacist cult (to take two especially egregious but not uncommon examples)? Clearly something else is at work here apart from a social obsession with policing the conduct of parents. That something is ageism directed towards youth. In a true "parenting police state" miscarriages of justice like that in Maryland may unfortunately continue to occur but you probably would not also be allowed to get away with abusing and/or oppressing your child in some of the most egregious ways of which we are aware in our culture by doing things which most adults in our society correctly consider to be examples of terrible parenting. However, if we understand both sides of the coin as instances of systemic ageist oppression directed at young people then all of these things begin to make a lot more sense.<br />
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Petula Dvorak is to be commended for helping to start a public dialogue on these issues. I am glad that she wrote and published the article to which this blog post refers. However, by ending her analysis with the superficial notion of the "parenting police state" Dvorak makes it difficult to truly understand the phenomenon which she so rightly opposes and seeks to shed light on. We need a youth liberationist theoretical framework to accomplish this task so that we may begin to really undo the harm caused by the sorts of situations which Dvorak so passionately and right-thinkingly draws attention to in her article.Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-70602043578344513282013-09-10T04:47:00.000-04:002013-09-10T04:49:07.798-04:00The Problem with the Ideology of Unschooling The ideas expressed in this post have been germinating in my mind for perhaps a little over a year now. In this post, I aim to provide a constructive critique of many of the assumptions that I see guiding many members of the unschooling community and how I feel that some of these assumptions are problematic not so much for reasons frequently found in the mainstream of education policy and parenting discourse but from a solidly and radically youth rights perspective as well. It is within this spirit that I ask the reader to engage with this post. In other words, the things I find problematic about the ideology of much of the unschooling movement I find problematic mostly <u><b>on youth rights grounds.</b></u> I do not find the elements of unschooling ideology I set out to critique problematic because I fear that they are too radically pro-youth liberation or for reasons of political expediency. In fact, in my experience most unschooling parents are far more conservative youth rights advocates, if they are youth rights advocates at all, than I try to be. Rather, I fear that elements of unschooling ideology stand to disempower or even endanger young people in ways that youth rights supporters by definition oppose.<br />
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First of all, the idea of unschooling gives parents tremendous control over their children's lives. For all of their problematic aspects, most traditional educational institutions allow young people something of a scope of autonomy (however limited) beyond the reach of their immediate families and they also provide youth with exposure to people of diverse backgrounds and belief systems of the sort whom their parents may not associate with. Unschooling gives parents far more power and control over their children than the traditional division between school and home allots to either parents or school personnel. Unschooling parents have far greater power to surveil their children than they would if the child was spending time away from the parent at school. Furthermore, it is difficult for a young person who spends virtually all of her time around her parents (or those people the parents both know and explicitly endorse the child associating with) to develop a strong sense of independence, identity, and autonomy. Most disturbingly of all, unschooling gives the most dangerous parents even more scope for abuse of their authority whether it involves indoctrinating their child into questionable political or religious beliefs or allowing sexual, emotional, or physical abuse to occur with impunity. With no adults in a child's life besides those handpicked by the parent, it's much easier for serious violations of young people's rights to occur at the hands of the parents themselves.<br />
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Secondly, it is important to note that some young people enjoy school and many more would enjoy it were the most oppressive aspects of the traditional K-12 schooling experience done away with. In the contemporary United States, very few young people have any choice in where they go to school and what they study there. Everything from talking without permission (even outside the classroom) to wearing certain items of clothing to using the restroom without permission to carrying necessary medications in one's purse to self-defense of one's person are prohibited for most youth and oftentimes these things result in harsh punishments with little due process. Even in a society in which young people were completely liberated, many youth would choose to attend school for the same reasons many adults pursue careers as scholars. By presenting a version of educational choices in which the options are either unschooling or schooling in its present form, unschooling advocates often demonstrate their inability to imagine a system in which school could be a far better and less oppressive place for the youth that did want to be there. This is concerning for philosophical reasons, but also for practical ones. Many individuals advocating for unschooling refuse to help work towards policies which would make schools more just.<br />
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Up until this point, most of my objections towards unschooling could not be said to apply to free schools. While these schools do not follow a set curriculum and simply allow young people to learn and play at their own pace, they provide a scope for youth autonomy outside the parental gaze and could be said to provide a third way between unschooling and traditional schooling. However, the final criticism of unschooling I about about to expound upon could be said to apply equally to free schools and unschooling. In a less direct but still extremely important way, it is a criticism grounded in youth rights concerns and the value of youth autonomy.<br />
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I once knew a man who had attended a traditional private school until dropping out and attending a free school in his late teens. While he greatly enjoyed the experience, he once related to me the tale of a young man he had known in his free schooling days who had attended the school from early childhood on. While the man I knew raved about his free schooling experience he told me that his friend felt less positively towards the free schooling philosophy because he could not read until he was twelve years old despite having no learning disabilities or other circumstances which would possibly delay a young person in another sort of schooling environment in acquiring literacy skills. While some might reply "But this young man learned to read eventually!" and be satisfied with that, I myself continue to be concerned about this aspect of unschooling and free schooling.<br />
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As a supporter of youth liberation I, like all of us committed to this philosophy, want to create a world in which young people are more free than they currently are to manage their own affairs and participate in important community decision-making. If we are serious about young people having a greater scope of autonomy in voting, making medical decisions, managing their own finances, practicing a religion of their choice (or not), advocating for their rights within the legal system, and participating in other things which a youth liberationist perspective stipulates that young people should be participating in, how are they going to be empowered to do so if many of them are not basically literate or numerate? Traditionally women, people of color, ethnic minorities, poor people, rural people, immigrants, and people with disabilities have sought greater access to educational institutions because they realized that learning to read, write, add, and subtract would make them less powerless vis a vis more powerful groups and individuals in their lives. Why do we think that not accessing these same institutions and the knowledge they have to offer is going to make an already disempowered group more able to represent their own interests individually and collectively?<br />
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I would like to close this piece by saying that I do oppose compulsory education and I believe that unschooling, home schooling, and free schooling are the right choice for many youth. I also believe that these options have both advantages and disadvantages vis a vis the more traditional schooling framework in its contemporary form. However, I think that this is an issue we all need to be thinking and speaking more critically about. When unschooling and free schools are discussed in youth rights circles, they are almost always presented as the paradigmatic educational options that radical youth rights supporters need to rally around. I have even heard of youth who desire to attend more traditional schools spoken of by people in the movement as if they are suffering from some sort of false consciousness or as if, by wanting to learn in a traditional environment, they are somehow consenting to the most abusive and oppressive aspects of traditional K-12 schooling, even though these aspects of schooling usually have very little if anything to do with schools' pedagogic mission. (In most cases I would argue that these oppressive and abusive practices in fact undermine and even subvert schools' pedagogic mission.) I hope that this post starts a dialogue on these important issues within the youth rights movement itself. Young people, like adults, deserve a variety of educational options which respect their dignity and autonomy as well as their unique individual strengths, weaknesses, goals, and desires.<br />
Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-77981563180680305762012-12-18T09:21:00.001-05:002012-12-18T09:29:11.313-05:00Youth Online Privacy and the Paradox of Protection As the Internet has grown to be a hegemonic feature of the lives of most people in the developed world, we have come to hear a great deal about the need to protect the online privacy of young people. The specter of pedophiles and others that supposedly seek to prey on children is invoked to justify yet more onerous restrictions on the right of young people to take advantage of the many positive opportunities for friendship, education, and entertainment that the Internet affords to people of all ages. These restrictions, we are told, will protect young people from potentially sharing incriminating information about themselves that could hurt them with employers, educators and admissions officers in academic programs, and others. We are also informed that these restrictions protect young people from adults (like the aforementioned child predators) or other young people (like students at their school who may wish them ill) who may seek to harm them in some way.<br />
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Parallel to this development is another interesting trend taking place. This trend is not discussed in the same tone of public concern and outrage as that expressed by those talking about the former issues, although it is far more pervasive and I would argue more damaging in many cases to young people because it involves a breach of their trust by people they should ideally be able to rely upon. The trend to which I refer is that of parents sharing damaging and confidential information about their children online.<br />
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The Liza Long incident, which has generated widespread public interest, is of course an extreme example. Few parents take to the web to compare their children to mass murderers. But all too many parents, including those who love their children and claim they wish to protect them, take an all too casual attitude to sharing embarrassing or even damaging personal information about their children online. Because the children have no choice in who their parents are; because they have no legal recourse to demand that these violations of their privacy cease; because many members of the public do not even acknowledge the harm accruing to these youth - I would argue that this is a far more oppressive phenomenon than the ones typically brought up when our society discusses issues of young people's online privacy.<br />
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Much of what we see parents doing to violate their children's privacy rights does not strike us as all that problematic at first glance as it has become increasingly common due to the rise of online forums, social media websites, blogs, and the like. Nonetheless, if we attempt to see things through the eyes of the child, we would rightly find much of this appalling. No one would want pictures of them crying while getting a shot at the doctor's office, for example, shared widely on Facebook with people that are no more than mere acquaintances of their parents. No one would want people they live with and rely upon for emotional, financial, and other types of support to share anecdotes about them on a blog which paint them at their worst.<br />
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It seems to me that our society has struck fundamentally the wrong balance when it comes to protecting young people's rights online and it is a balance that, as it stands now, has far more to do with controlling youth than with protecting young people from the most serious breaches of confidentiality and some of the most problematic types of harm. Through age restrictions on social media websites, Internet filters, and the like we impede the ability of young people to make new friends, learn new things, and derive enjoyment from the online world. At the same time, we allow parents and other adults in a child's life (some, although by no means all, teachers will take to social media websites to share unflattering information about their students) to potentially damage their children's reputations and betray their trust while we sit idly by. This is the wrong calculation. <br />
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Social media can be a wonderful tool for parents. They can share pride in a child's accomplishments and with that child's consent, both parent and child can enjoy the positive feedback they get from friends, relatives, and others. They can help their child to keep in touch with family friends and relatives around the world who can develop a connection with the child as he or she grows up that would have been impossible in days past. All of these things are positive developments for people of all ages and this blog post is by no means an indictment of them. However, when sharing information about a child that could be potentially damaging or embarrassing or that simply divulges information the child does not want shared with whomever it is being shared with, we need to respect that boundary. We talk a lot about protecting children from random people on the Internet. Perhaps we need to talk a lot more about protecting children from their web savvy parents. Until we are willing to do so, it is obvious that we are much more interested in controlling young peoples' online interactions than we are in protecting them in any meaningful sense.<br />
Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-36579555968740917202012-12-16T14:07:00.002-05:002012-12-16T17:40:21.032-05:00A Response to "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother" <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps many of you have seen a post that has recently gone viral in the wake of the heartbreaking and senseless tragedy in Connecticut. The name of that piece is "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother" and the author of the piece is self-described "anarchist soccer mom" Liza Long. (Contrary to normal policy at this blog I am not linking to this piece as I do not want to give this woman another forum to publicly bash her child and violate his privacy.) As the actual Adam Lanza's mother was killed in a horrible act of violence by her obviously troubled son, this is of course not an article that truly reflects the perspectives of the mother of a mass murderer - it is instead a relatively unknown blogger's attempt to capitalize on the tragedy that has befallen this family in order to tell a story about her own family. While it is impossible to say without knowing much about either Lanza's family or this woman's son what similarities do or do not exist between the two situations, it is obvious from a youth rights and a disability rights perspective that there is a great deal that is problematic within Long's family and a great deal of it has to do with Long herself. While it is easy for many people (especially parents) to sympathize with the perspective that Long endorses, reading the article while keeping in mind her son's perspective makes it obvious that Long's words about her son may be less than reliable.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> The essay begins with what the author dubs an "affable, reasonable" request to dictate to her son that he wear the color pants of her choosing. When her son objects to this request, a request that most adults would find bizarre and offensive if made to them under similar circumstances, he lashes out at her in a way that she uses to bolster her claim that her son is mentally ill. She then proceeds to tell her son he is "grounded from electronics" and when her attempts to dictate his in no way socially unacceptable use of his property inspire further (I would say quite reasonable) anger in him, she chalks it up once again to her son being "mentally ill."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Before we analyze this article any further I would like my adult readers to contemplate for a moment that an arbitrary authority figure in their lives sought to dictate to them what color of clothing they could wear or when and how they could use their property in socially acceptable ways. For us, our belligerence would be deemed reasonable and appropriate but for this young man it bolster's his mother's claim that he is mentally ill. Clearly a sense of personal boundaries and a desire for self-determination is seen as a healthy sign of self-respect in adults but in young people like Michael (the name of the young man in the article) it is interpreted as a sign that he is off the deep end. (As the article continues, we even hear of the mother's taking her son to a mental hospital against his will.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> The article continues with the mother proffering more proof of her son's supposed mental illness. Some of this, if true, is compelling. For example, she states that at one point he attempted to pull a knife on her. She also goes on to state that various psychiatric and neurodevelopmental diagnoses have been tossed around, including Autism, to ostensibly explain her son's violent outbursts. This is where we learn that the individual writing this piece is operating from a place of not only ageism but ableism.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> While it is worth noting that Autism is a neurodevelopmental disability/difference as opposed to something which makes people into mindless killers, Long states at one point that her son has a "sensitivity to sensory stimuli." This is common for many people on the Autism spectrum. I tend to think that it is quite possible that Michael is simply a bright young person trapped in an oppressive situation with a controlling mother that refuses to respect his basic autonomy, that takes away his only outlets for self-expression and letting off steam (like videogames), and that doesn't respect his needs for the kind of sensory environment that his disability may entail. In a similar situation, many of us would likely feel trapped and lash out too, perhaps even violently. Just reading this article makes it obvious that there <i>may</i> be more to the story than Michael being a violent, irrational lunatic as his mother portrays him to be. Certainly if my mother compared me to mass murderers and sought to impose arbitrary restrictions on my perfectly acceptable behavior, I could be reasonably expected to lash out.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Another obvious concern is the fact that, if Michael is as troubled as his mother claims him to be, it seems highly unethical for her to be sharing his psychiatric problems with the wider public at all, especially since she is not using a pseudonym for herself. If this young man is so imbalanced that he requires the type of psychiatric help she claims that he needs, surely he cannot be helped by having his mother compare him to mass murderers to a wide internet audience of strangers. Medical and mental health professionals are bound by a code of ethics to keep their patients' medical and psychological issues private. Certainly we should ask the same of parents dealing with their children's private emotional turmoil. While I can choose my doctor or therapist and choose to interact with them as more or less a free agent, I cannot choose my parents and therefore one could argue that the moral duty upon parents to keep their children's medical and psychiatric histories private is a duty even more incumbent upon them than it is upon doctors, nurses, therapists, and the like.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> For all of this, the most damning evidence about the character and unreliability of Long comes in other posts she makes about her children, posts which have nothing to do with mental illness or the issues raised in "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother." In one post entitled "The Room of Doom" she begins by talking about the difficulties attendant in natural childbirth. The relevance of this is at first blush hard to determine except that it gives her one more occasion to rant about the grief the four children she chose to have have brought into her life. She tells prospective parents to get a puppy instead of having children because "the puppy won<span style="font-size: small;">'t</span> grow up to be a teenager." You see, Long doesn't wish to accommodate the needs of an autonomous human being so she would rather have a dog. She goes on to bash her son (whether the same son she speaks of in the Lanza piece or another son I could not tell). She goes through his room, attempting to throw away possessions of his that he found to be of value and then speaks ill of him for his support of President Obama. Her patronizing attitude towards her teenage son is summed up in this gem of a quote: "Liberals,
by the way, are not silly. At least not the ones I know. In an election
season that is already shaping up to be one of the ugliest on record, I
think we all need to focus on bringing respect back to the public
debate. It’s okay for reasonable people to disagree about politics, and I
am grateful for the perspective my liberal friends share with me (but
you’re WRONG! Big wasteful disincentivizing government is not the
answer! Sorry, couldn’t resist. And yes, for the record, I stuck my
tongue out). Teenagers, however, are not reasonable people." You see, because her son is a teenager nothing he has to say is of value unlike the supposed wisdom spouted by Long's adult friends.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> So, my friends, keep in mind as you look for essays and articles to help you make sense of the tragedy in Connecticut that this is not what Long is offering. She is instead a child-hater and a teenager-hater, someone whose words give one the impression she deeply resents having children and probably should not have had them, someone who does not wish to respect her growing children's autonomy, and someone whose underlying assumptions about disability are deeply problematic. She is a third rate writer and a fifth rate parent (as anyone is that publicly bashes their children on the internet) capitalizing on a tragedy in order to find a greater platform in order to bash her children some more (something she was doing long before the tragedy in Connecticut occurred). Don't give her this platform. While the Adam Lanza article touches on many important aspects of our nation's mental healthcare system (and this is definitely a conversation worth having as a society) certainly we can find a better catalyst to discuss these issues than an embittered individual who wishes to use a nation's horror at violence against children to vent her rage at her own.</span></span> Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-60723808539625187602012-12-10T07:56:00.000-05:002012-12-10T08:11:00.835-05:00The Problematic Nature of Viewing Parental Rights as Individual Rights In the context of the upcoming Supreme Court case addressing the issue of same-sex marriage, there has been a large degree of speculation about how Justice Anthony Kennedy could be expected to cast his vote. <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kennedy-scalia-20121209,0,6506575.story" target="_blank">In an article from the Los Angelos Times</a> Kennedy is quoted as saying that he is a strong believer in the rights of individuals to "make personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education." This quote was passed off in the article as a testament to Kennedy's belief in the rights of individuals to make decisions about their life free from government interference and nothing more. And while to most of the article's readers it likely seemed fairly unproblematic, the level of Orwellian doublespeak in such a statement is actually quite striking if one simply takes a moment to examine it critically.<br />
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It is truly bizarre that in our political culture as well as in the wider society, choices about "child rearing and education" are seen as individual rights of a sort with the choices that an individual makes about her own lifestyle, family, relationships, and body. While the decision to marry someone of the same sex or to use contraception are truly personal choices that chiefly affect the individual in question (as well as other individuals who have freely consented to be a part of these decisions), choices about child rearing are choices imposed on an individual - a socially, politically, and economically powerless individual - by others. Framing choices about how one raises her children as individual rights of the same sort as the others that Justice Kennedy mentions inverts the concept of individual rights. It is indeed the antithesis of individual rights because it involves allowing some individuals state-backed power over other individuals.<br />
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I by no means intend to single out Justice Kennedy for this problematic statement. It reflects a mentality that is all too common among educated and intelligent individuals across the political spectrum. Nonetheless it is a deeply wrong-headed mentality.<br />
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With such a statement, Justice Kennedy highlights all the ways in which minors are viewed by the law and the wider culture as parental property and mere extensions of the adults in their lives without liberty and justice interests of their own worth protecting. Minors may have an interest in avoiding religious indoctrination foisted upon them by the adults in their lives. They may have an interest in avoiding the type of education their parents wish they would pursue. They may have an interest in making medical decisions their guardians disapprove of. They may have an interest in associating with individuals their family would prefer they not associate with. All of these possibilities are erased by Justice Kennedy's conflation of the individual right of someone to engage in sexual relations with the partner of their choosing, for example, and the right of a parent to force a lifestyle choice of any sort (like attending a certain school) upon their children without the child's autonomy interests being taken into consideration.<br />
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Choices about parenting are not "individual rights" of the sort that we cherish in this country and other free societies. They are a denial of the rights of the most powerless members of our society. Even if one does believe that children are best served by a certain level of paternalism (a position I object to but that is beyond the scope of this post) it is best that one be honest about his belief that this is what is best for a child and that he be willing to set more stringent parameters for when that assumption can be overridden as opposed to framing almost any choice a parent makes on behalf of another person as an "individual right."Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5151802530357480504.post-71231709738779273272012-08-31T17:00:00.002-04:002012-08-31T17:40:31.189-04:00Remembering Shulamith Firestone and Carrying Forth Her Youth Rights Feminist Vision<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Shulamith Firestone, <a href="http://www.thevillager.com/?p=7172" target="_blank">who died recently</a>, did not use the words "youth rights feminism" to describe her worldview, but it was certainly the view of the world she presented in her second wave feminist class <i>The Dialectic of Sex</i> (published in 1970). Firestone was a radical who believed that what was natural was not necessarily human - she advocated for artificial reproductive technologies to free women from the burdens of biology and for contraception to give women more control over their bodies and their lives. (In particular, she supported the creation of artificial wombs and the abolition of pregnancy which she described as "barbaric.") She advocated for a classless society in which resources were distributed fairly. She spoke out against racism and called attention to the ways in which African-American men often failed to speak to the interests and realities of African-American women. She wrote about the ways in which women are conditioned to view culture through a male lens and thus lose the ability to authentically experience the world as women. But her most radical idea was probably the one that has been paid the least attention - that childhood in its current incarnation is oppressive to both children and women and must be radically reconstituted.<br />
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In the space of the thirty pages of the fourth chapter of <i>The Dialectic of Sex</i>, entitled "Down with Childhood," Firestone begins by seeking to prove that childhood as we know it is a social construct designed to serve patriarchal ideals. Drawing heavily on the work of historian Philippe Aries, Firestone traces the advent of contemporary notions of childhood to the rise of schools and the nuclear family. She then lays out the case for children as an oppressed class - she decries the age segregation and repression of educational institutions, bemoans children's economic powerlessness, laments children's sexual repression, and lambasts the educators, psychologists, social workers, and other adults tasked with managing children and their lives. She sees children as an oppressed class - one whose oppression rests in both their physical limitations and their enforced subservience to adults. Finally, Firestone connects the oppression of children to the oppression of women. She attacks the ideology of motherhood which stipulates that children are delicate flowers in need of constant supervision and identifies this view as serving the interests of the patriarchy, not the interests of mothers or children. She contends that the supposedly special bond between women and children is "no more than shared oppression."<br />
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Against the backdrop of a feminist landscape in which childfree feminists frequently resort to ageist attacks on children to justify their choices while other people tell women they're unfit mothers if they're not having natural births, breastfeeding for years at a time, and wholly giving themselves over physically and psychologically to their role as mothers, Shulamith Firestone's vision is needed now more than ever. In a world in which children are increasingly cut off from the rest of the world, where legislation and school zero tolerance policies affecting youth grow more restrictive and confining, and where the socially prescribed demands on mothers grow more onerous, where most American feminist activism on behalf of children both here and abroad is more concerned with paternalistically controlling young people than liberating them, Firestone's vision of an anti-sexist, anti-ageist society is a light in the darkness, showing us that there is a better way than the visions of childhood and the family presented to us by both the mainstream culture and the majority of third wave feminism. <br />
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Because of her radical vision of freedom for children and women (as well as poor people and people of color) Firestone will always be someone I have the greatest respect and admiration for. She was a part of the generation of feminists who bequeathed a legacy of greater reproductive freedom, more opportunity in the workforce, and a less constraining image of what it means to be a woman to people of my generation. While that work is far from over, we have come a long way from where we were and Firestone and many of other women (and a few men) from that generation are the main reason why. But youth rights is the unfinished business on Firestone's agenda where we haven't come that far at all - in fact, in most ways we have gone backward and it hurts not only children but parents (especially mothers) as well. That is the agenda of this blog and the cause I am the most passionate about.<br />
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On a personal note, Shulamith Firestone was one of the first thinkers on youth rights issues that I ever read. After encountering a number of misogynistic supposed youth rights supporters as well as many supposed feminists who were all too eager to deny the autonomy they cherished for themselves to those younger than they are, Firestone's work was a revelation. We've all seen the bumper stickers, buttons, and the like that say "Pro-Woman, Pro-Child, Pro-Choice." Firestone was truly all of these things in the most radical and liberating way possible. When I label myself and other pro-woman, pro-youth individuals as youth rights feminists, I see us as working in a tradition that starts with Shulamith Firestone. Rest in peace, radical sister. Kathleen Nicole O'Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00353839989315839105noreply@blogger.com0