Gypsy 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. For those unfamiliar with the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Wikipedia provides a good synopsis. 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 The Act 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.

   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.

   The Act 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.

A Conference Presentation and a Distillation of Why I Am an Unapologetic Radical Youth Liberationist

Jackson Howard Wagner, me, and Alexander R. Cohen. Great friends and comrades.

   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.

   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.

   "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."

   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.

Me and my wonderful host, Kathryn Gonda, at the Bowling Green State University Philosophy Conference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Farson: 1926-2017.

     

We Live In A Deeply Oppressive Dystopia But It Isn't A "Parenting Police State"

Image description: A white sign featuring a red triangle. In the center of the triangle are the black silhouettes of a male and female youth holding hands. The caption beneath the triangle reads "Free range children."

   
   Recently The Washington Post published a story which has been getting a great deal of attention as of late. Entitled "'Free-Range' Kids And Our Parenting Police State," 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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

Youth Rights 101: Why I Focus on Youth (Hint: They're Our Society's Most Oppressed Subject Class)

   Some people may wonder why I focus so disproportionately on youth issues. After all, young people are not the only people oppressed, either collectively or individually, in our society. Structural forces and individual prejudices often conspire to keep women and people of color from being as successful as many white males. Heterosexism is still inscribed into our nation's law codes and animates the belief systems of many people. The situation of disabled and elderly Americans bears many similarities to that of youth (albeit with some key differences). People of size are increasingly scapegoated under the guise of a "war on obesity" that conveniently doubles as a war on them. Rural people are oppressed both by the condescending attitudes of non-rural people and the very geographic realities of rurality. The poor economy is an increasingly oppressive force in the lives of more and more Americans, including those who would have once been known as middle class or even wealthy. And individuals of all demographic groups are oppressed by the military, medical, and prison industrial complexes as well as social mores which prize conformity over critical thinking and individuality. So why focus on youth?

   I focus on youth because minors are the only group of individuals in our society that almost everyone - left or right, religious or secular, educated or ignorant, authoritarian or libertarian - is openly comfortable treating as a subject class. Youth are the only group of people in the United States for whom there is widespread consensus that segregating them from the rest of society, denying them legal rights, keeping them economically dependent, and turning arbitrary authority for them over to other people is not a necessary evil but the best possible way we individually and collectively can hope to relate to them. I focus on youth because the ills of sexism, racism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, sizeism, rural oppression, poverty, and the military, medical, and prison industrial complexes are complicated and exacerbated by the status of minority. I focus on youth oppression because it is taken for granted and therefore invisible despite its ubiquity.

   I focus on youth because the critical theoretical eye that has problematized the idea of biologically essentialist gender roles and racial identities has not problematized much of the ageist pseudoscience surrounding discourses about child development. I focus on youth because those who decry the warehousing of our elders and people with disabilities in nursing homes and assisted living facilities do not draw parallels with the warehousing of our youth in schools and other institutions. I focus on youth because most libertarians see no contradiction in talking about arbitrary and oppressive state power on the one hand and using the phrase "parents' rights" on the other. I talk about youth because a commitment to human liberty and social justice demands youth liberation and those who claim to support human liberty and social justice rarely acknowledge this. I focus on youth because there is a more organized effort in our society to extend liberty and dignity to animals than to human children. I focus on youth because ageism is one of the greatest unexamined black marks on American society in the early twenty-first century. I focus on youth because if I don't few people will. And as long as all of these things are true I am a radical youth liberation supporter first, last, and always.

Youth Rights 101: What Is Ageism?

   Youth rights supporters talk a lot about ageism as it pertains to young people. Ageism affects the elderly as well (sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different ways). Ageism, like all other prejudices, doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is gendered, it is sexed, it is raced, it is classed, and it is experienced differently by people according to body size, disability, and physical appearance. It manifests in different ways depending on the cultural context of an individual's community (i.e. ageism looks different in India than in the United States; it looks different for a rural Southern youth than it does for one in New York City). However, ageism is a universal feature in the lives of young people because it is systemic and institutional. It is also a nearly universal feature of most individuals' conception of the world in most societies. But what is ageism? How do we know it when we see it? How do we name it when we experience it? How can we identify ageism so that we can take steps to purge ourselves of its influence on our words and actions?

   Ageism, like almost all other prejudices, manifests itself in different ways. Much as there are different ways to be sexist, racist, ableist, classist, sizeist, and heterosexist, so there are various ways to be ageist. Much as racism or sexism, to take the most familiar examples, are not just one thing but many things and may manifest in different ways in different contexts, so ageism has many dimensions. These types of ageism may overlap with one another in places but they are all distinct enough phenomena to deserve mention. For the purposes of this post I will only focus on the ways in which these types of ageism affect young people but many and possibly all of them could be applied to senior citizens as well. 

·         Normative ageism – Normative ageism is perhaps the simplest kind of ageism to understand. It is much like garden variety sexism and racism in its manifestations. It is simply the assertion that individual capabilities, interests, strengths, weaknesses, and the ability to exercise rights is tied in an uncomplicated way to age. Generalizations about “all teenagers” or “typical children” as well as statements prescribing normative behavior solely on the basis of age (i.e. “preventing teen pregnancy,” “stopping underage drinking,” etc.) fall into this category.

·         Cultural ageism – Cultural ageism involves the attitudes taken by members of one generation towards another generation which devalue their mores, technology, pastimes, entertainment, etc. only because it is different than that which the previous generation is used to. Instead of judging generational differences based upon universalizable values and/or standards of quality (which can be a healthy hedge against relativism) cultural ageism judges one generation by the standards of another in such a way that the one being judged always comes up wanting. Examples of cultural ageism include complaints by older people about the popularity of video games or the common trope that young people today are too sexually promiscuous. Another side of cultural ageism can involve valuing the pastimes typically associated with younger people less than those typically associated with older people simply because the pastimes of older people are deemed more respectable and mature. For instance, taking a middle-aged man’s collection of stamps more seriously than a child’s collection of toy cars could be a form of cultural ageism.

   

·         Paternalistic ageism – Paternalistic ageism is the idea that minors (and sometimes even young adults who have outlived minority status) require older adults to make choices for them and to dictate their actions because, the thinking goes, they are too immature to exercise their own judgment and their autonomy is not worth respecting. Laws and practices forbidding people under a certain age from choosing their own home environment, watching “too much” television, fraternizing with the individuals of their choice, and choosing what academic subjects to pursue are examples of paternalistic ageism.

·         Pedophobic/ephebophobic ageism – Pedophobic ageism denotes a fear and hatred of children while ephebophobic ageism denotes a fear and hatred of adolescents. These types of ageism encompass the ideas that young people are perpetual troublemakers, dangers to their communities, always up to no good, and a burden on their teachers, parents, law enforcement officials, and the rest of their communities. The ideas that teenage hormones are out of control, that gang violence perpetuated by youth is a constant menace to all communities, that young people dress too provocatively, that small children are unruly and in need of constant supervision no matter what their behavior suggests, and that utilizing any means necessary to control and instill obedience in youth is a worthy goal are common manifestations of pedophobic and/or ephebophobic ageism. Perhaps the most pointed and notorious example of ephebophobic ageism is the existence of “troubled teen” residential facilities (also known as gulag schools, torture schools, behavior modification facilities, and youth residential programs). Young people sent to these facilities are generally subject to extreme psychological and physical abuse directed towards them with the intention of making them more obedient and amenable to adult authority. The ideology driving these programs is that of youth as dangerous miscreants who must be turned around and made to respect adult authority by any means necessary.

·         Economic ageism – Economic ageism refers to the myriad ways in which young people are discriminated against in the labor market and in terms of government assistance. Economic ageism affects minors but also those in their twenties and sometimes even those in their thirties. Economic ageism is a complex phenomenon which is worth discussing in far more detail than I can cover in a post of this nature. However, it is worth pointing out some key examples here. The prevalence of unpaid internships for young people as a substitute for meaningful employment, the skyrocketing costs of college tuition, laws forbidding individuals under a certain age from working, laws keeping young people from controlling the money they earn, and the push for more and more formal education in order to break into the middle class are all examples of economic ageism.

·         Scientific ageism – Scientific ageism denotes the ways that biology, psychology, and psychiatry are used to perpetuate ageism. For example, studies on the “adolescent brain” which perpetuate stereotypes about teenagers as being impulsive, foolish, and immature are a form of scientific ageism. Research on the “developmental stages of children” also often fall into this category, as does much of the social panic surrounding the contested idea that young people are reaching puberty earlier than before and that this is necessarily harmful as it supposedly causes them to mature beyond what is “appropriate” for their years. Psychiatric diagnoses which seek to pathologize the behavior of young people (i.e. attention deficit disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, etc.) are examples of scientific ageism as is the currently faddish obsession with childhood obesity. Scientific ageism uses the discourses of science to legitimate a political project aimed at denying young people their civil and human rights. This has precedent in the ways in which scientific discourses have been used to provide justification for sexism, racism, heterosexism, sizeism, classism, and ableism (issues discussed in more detail in this post).

·         Puritanical ageism – Puritanical ageism is often (although not exclusively) religious in nature and its chief aim is preventing young people from engaging in the use of intoxicating substances, having consensual sexual experiences, or consuming media with violent, sexual, or other controversial themes. Recently, with the new obsession with childhood obesity, puritanical ageism has expanded to encompass a concern with what foods young people choose to eat. Puritanical ageism is a phenomenon of both the left and the right.

·         Sentimental ageism – Sentimental ageism is sometimes marked by the overly romantic ways in which many adults view youth. Children are seen as innocent, sensitive, closer to God and nature than adults, pure, asexual, and cute. Sentimental ageists often tend to view children as less complex than other people and to see them as fundamentally “other.” Sentimental ageism is harmful in large part because it involves discounting the actual thoughts and feelings of actual children in favor of an idealized version of children and childhood. Sentimental ageism of this variety is not as commonly directed at adolescents. However, it sometimes manifests in the sentiments of adults who find teenagers to be necessarily more creative, playful, and able to learn than older people. Sentimental ageism is also operating any time someone refers to childhood as “a golden age” or “a carefree time” or to adolescence as “the best years of one’s life.” In addition to the utter falsity of these statements – as evidenced by the fact that many individuals are quick to acknowledge that their youth was not among the best years of their lives – such statements serve the purpose of delegitimizing youth oppression and trivializing the concerns of young people. Sentimental ageism of this sort is perhaps the most pernicious variety of ageism because it generally serves as an excuse for not acknowledging young people as an oppressed class due to the logic that children and teenagers are on the whole content with their lot and that the double standard actually serves their happiness.

·         Personal ageism – Personal ageism denotes an attitude held at the individual level which places more value on relationships with and opinions held by older people than those held by younger people. It can manifest outside of the family by ignoring or negating the contributions of younger people in a variety of business, educational, and volunteer settings. It can also involve a refusal to form friendships based on equality and mutual respect with younger people. It can manifest within the family when family members take the preferences of older family members more seriously than they do the preferences of younger family members. Personal ageism involves the attitude that the only proper relationship between a minor and an older person is that between an authority figure and a subordinate or between a mentor and a mentee. It precludes the possibility of genuine respect and reciprocity across generational lines.

·         Institutional ageism – Institutional ageism refers to the ways in which educational, legal, familial, religious, political, social, cultural, medical, economic, and other entities discriminate against young people on the institutional level. The status of minority, guardianship, compulsory schooling, the juvenile justice system, status offenses, legal age restrictions, and behavior modification facilities are all manifestations of institutional ageism.

   Ageism is a complicated phenomenon and these are just a few of the most common ways in which it manifests. However, when you see these types of ageism in action you can rest assured that ageism is indeed the phenomenon that you are observing.

   What do you think? Are there other examples of ageism you can think of? How do various forms of ageism work to legitimate the oppression of youth? I can't wait to hear your observations in the comment section!

No One Has All the Answers But At Least We're Asking the Right Questions

   When one chooses to publicly identify with a cause that most people do not support or even have much understanding of, she will find that others frequently begin asking her where exactly the borders of her philosophy are and on what side she would come down concerning various complicated hypothetical situations. This is frustrating to youth rights supporters because none of us have ever claimed that we have all the answers about anything. To paraphrase Richard Farson, it is impossible to be a truly great parent in a society fundamentally organized against youth and parenting, like all other human relationships, is a dilemma to be lived as opposed to a problem to be solved. While youth rights supporters can propose many more concrete solutions in the realm of politics, economics, and the law than in the realm of intergenerational relations, there are still controversial issues which pose a challenge to youth rights theory and call into questions the limits of support for youth liberation. This is true of all ideologies and belief systems (think of the hand wringing within the feminist movement about how the movement should handle the issue of sex selective abortion). It in no way fundamentally discredits youth rights as a philosophy or a movement. So while none of us has all the answers, what I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt, what all of us know as youth rights supporters, is that almost no one outside of our movement is even asking the right questions about the ways our society has chosen to relate to young people.

   Every major framework that our society uses to understand young people is deeply flawed. These frameworks may have some redeeming features, but they are fundamentally beyond reform. This is because what all of these frames share in common is the idea that children and adolescents are passive entities who exist in any meaningful sense only in relation to the adults in their lives. Whether they are there for adults to "educate" or "protect" or "punish" or "control", they are not perceived as autonomous agents in their own lives and interpersonal relationships. They are always painted as profoundly other. Where almost all adults are concerned, things are done to and for youth, rarely done with youth, and never done by youth (unless they are teenagers and they are doing drugs or playing hooky from school or engaging in sexual activities that adults disapprove of, in which case they are a social problem to be pathologized and controlled and this goes double for female youth, poor youth, and youth of color).

   What does this have to do with the kind of questions that most adults are prone to asking about youth as opposed to the questions that youth rights supporters of all ages ask about youth issues? Well, the frame through which we analyze an issue greatly affects the type of questions we will ask regarding that issue. Thanks to the LGBT rights movement, the frame for dealing with LGBT people has gone from "How do we cure homosexuality, transsexualism, and bisexuality?" to "How do we support individuals with minority sexualities and gender identities?" There are plenty of similar parallels in other movement histories and you are probably thinking of some right now as you read this.

   One of the most striking examples of this dichotomy is within the realm of mainstream education policy discourse. The questions that experts in the field primarily ask treat students in the K-12 school system as the absent referent in a policy discussion which one would think would center their voices, concerns, and lived experiences. However, this is the exact opposite of how most discourses in education policy deal with young people. Very little critical analysis is paid to the effect of zero tolerance policies, the lack of due process, and other forms of oppression faced by almost all youth within American schools. (You can read more of my work on student rights here.) Very seldom do those in the education policy world ask themselves how teachers, administrators, and others can help students to learn the information that is most relevant to them in a setting that feels comfortable to them. Instead all of the questions asked are about how to raise test scores, how to handle "disciplinary problems," and how to get parents (never the students themselves) more involved in determining the direction of the student's education.

   Another example of this phenomenon at work is in the realm of the sensationalized treatment of the "school bullying" issue. Now, were the behavior many "bullies" direct at young people directed at adults it would be termed "assault" or "battery" or "harassment" and so the term itself is infantilizing. Additionally, the frames proposed by adults (and some youth) to deal with the problem of school harassment and violence overlook the structural features of the environment which create the problem in the first place. Youth on youth harassment and violence within the K-12 school system is systemic. It is not an outgrowth of normal child development or supposed adolescent immaturity. It is an attempt by members of a subject class to exert control within the context of a deeply oppressive environment. If you put most adults into a situation they did not choose to be in, with people they did not choose to be with, doing things they did not choose to do, with no due process rights, without a financial incentive in the foreseeable future, with authority figures they had to constantly grovel before in order to gain permission to eat, drink, use the restroom, or get up from their desks, I would be shocked if their behavior was much better than that of many youth within our school system. There is a simple solution to youth on youth harassment and violence within our schools. It is to make our schools less oppressive and restrictive and to allow students a choice in the matter of whether or not they go to school and where they go if they do choose to attend. It involves doing this in a way that is sensitive to the unique needs of poor, rural, inner city, disabled, LGBT, and other marginalized youth. It would be quite an undertaking, but it would solve the problem in time. Instead politicians, principals, parents, and even some youth propose hokey school assemblies on why it's wrong to make fun of people in wheelchairs or why reaching out to those who are left out of the popular clique is the right thing to do. While this is ineffective, it is rarely very harmful. However many people concerned with this issue actually make the situation worse by proposing zero tolerance policies against "bullying" that are so vague that they penalize youth acting in self defense, make the schools more oppressive and dangerous places to be, and strip students of even more due process rights. Confronting the problem of youth on youth harassment and violence requires a radical paradigm shift that most parents and teachers are uncomfortable with so they fall back on "solutions" which reinscribe the oppressive circumstances they were ostensibly set up to ameliorate. Hence adults ask how to force students to by nicer to one another as opposed to asking why adults are forcing students to be around people they don't want to be nice to in the first place.

   So as you can see, youth rights supporters don't have all the answers to problems affecting young people in our society (although we have come up with some fairly good ones). What we are doing is the difficult work of deconstructing ageist paradigms which lead us to make unwise assumptions about youth and to make harmful decisions on their behalf.

Why People That Ought to Know Better Condone Youth Oppression

   As a youth rights supporter, one notices that many otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people are deeply and often casually ageist. While sometimes this is couched in quite possibly sincere concern for youth well-being (however problematic that may be) much of it actually expresses open hostility towards children and older youth. Many wise people who by no stretch of the imagination could be considered radical youth liberationists have said that you can tell a lot about the character of a person or a society by how they treat children. What one quickly realizes is that for all of our talk of liberty, justice, and equality, most Americans are still quick to mistreat those with no social, political, economic, or legal power simply because they can.

   The reasons for ageism towards youth are nonetheless more complex than simply noting that power and privilege corrupt adults. Refusing to acknowledge ageism serves many practical and psychological purposes for adults. In this post I am going to explore these purposes in more depth in order to help all of us recognize them when we fall into these erroneous patterns of thinking.

   First of all, denying young people the full measure of their humanity makes life much easier for the adults tasked with taking care of or otherwise involving themselves with the youth in question. When adults convince themselves that young people don't really know their own minds or are incapable of experiencing meaningful emotions or cannot express concrete preferences about things that matter to them, it makes the job of a parent or teacher or babysitter or nanny much easier. Instead of engaging in the difficult task of helping youth to make wise decisions about the world that take their needs as well as the needs of others into account, this way of thinking allows adults to simply manage young people. In a society as profoundly organized against youth (and to a lesser extent mothers and other people caring for children) it can be profoundly difficult to adequately meet the needs of the very youngest youth in particular. This type of objectification of children is a way for parents, teachers, and others to feel okay about the decisions they are tasked with making on children's' behalf.

   Secondly, denying the ways in which ageism oppresses children is a way for most adults to avoid facing the traumas and injustices of their own youths. When one recognizes the extent of the injustice that most of us faced as youth at the hands of teachers, parents, relatives, and other adults it is almost always profoundly distressing. We are forced to recognize that at best some of these individuals were deeply misguided while others were perhaps downright sociopathic. In order to preserve our pristine image of these individuals, we pretend as if our suffering did not matter or that it was even for our own good. Many adults thereby perpetuate the cycle of youth oppression because they refuse to acknowledge that the injustices that affected them when they were younger were indeed injustices that ought not be repeated.

   Another reason that many otherwise intelligent, reasonable people believe that ageism is acceptable (while most other types of prejudice are not) has to do with the ways in which the psychiatric, medical, psychological, educational, political, artistic, and legal establishments legitimate ageist attitudes. This is not to make the bizarre claim that these institutions are actively conspiring to oppress youth. It is to say that even the well-educated and successful among us are formed by their social context and thereby usually perpetuate narratives about childhood and adolescence that are taken seriously primarily because they confirm the prejudices of most people in our society. The myth of the "teen brain" (which has been refuted in depth by psychologist Robert Epstein) is just the latest in a long line of attempts to justify the oppression of subject classes with pseudoscience. Today it is primarily fat people and young people whose bodies and minds are deemed deficient as a pretense for denying them rights. In days past (and to a lesser extent today) it has been women, people of color, people with disabilities, the elderly, poor people, and LGBT people. The idea that children are somehow deficient in their reasoning capacities, that children go through distinct developmental stages that are tied in an uncomplicated way to age, and that young people lack the cognitive capacity for self-determination serves a political agenda that makes our society in some ways more convenient for adults to live in with children but less just for children themselves.

   So, having seen the fallacies which cause otherwise intelligent, just people to embrace ageism, how do we give up our convenient fictions about young people and embrace a more just social order? Does giving up ageist prejudices mean that the lives of adults will become unlivable? Not at all. The mother who worries herself sick because of the idea that her children need constant supervision, the school teacher who is fed up with playing the role of police officer as much as the role of educator, and the million other adults charged with the task of playing the proverbial judge, jury, and executioner to young people would all be more and not less liberated than they are today under a radical youth rights regime. But in a society in which adults are charged with total responsibility for young people, objectifying and oppressing them makes carrying out this responsibility much more convenient. The current regime which oppresses youth and the adults in their lives is also not a norm that one can unilaterally opt out of, making the current cycle of youth oppression so vicious and difficult to break.

   However, whatever our age or relationship to youth, we can begin pushing for a society that is less oppressive for youth, parents, teachers, and everyone else with a stake in the welfare of young people. We can recognize that the impossible choices we are forced to make in our dealings with young people are primarily the consequence of an unsustainable and irrational social order. We can recognize the psychological and practical needs that our prejudices towards youth fulfill and we can then choose not to give in to them. If we are currently (or previously have been) subjected to ageist oppression we can learn to see this as a reflection on our society and not on ourselves. But only by recognizing where the appeal of ageist discourses and beliefs lies can we begin to undo the fabric of ageism and age apartheid.