Book Review: Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex

  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 The Youth Rights Blog 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 Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex. 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 Harmful to Minors, 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 Harmful to Minors is a powerful book.

   On the whole, Harmful to Minors 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.

   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.

   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.

   Having voiced my criticisms of Harmful to Minors, 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.

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.