The Basics of Youth Liberation
'Child' and 'Adult' are social constructs, in the same way that race, gender, ect. are social constructs. These constructs are legally enforced by things like drinking age, schooling requirements, mature ratings, and of course, age of majority
Children are an oppressed group. While we are children, we are effectively the property of our parents, going so far as to be disputed in divorce hearings. Children's rights to bodily autonomy, free movement, as well as education, are restricted to the preferences of their parents. This oppression of children by adults as well as it's ideological backing, is called Adultism.
Adultism and the family structure facilitate the sexual, physical, and social abuse of children. Most child abuse is done by people within their family structure, or adults within other systems of childhood oppression (churches, schools). The pedophile does not exist - that is, both the term in the concept are constructed as to not be useful to youth liberation. It is a construction built to enforce the oppression of children, and prevent sympathetic adults from forming solidarity with children-not-their-own.
Childhood is a fundamentally intersectional oppression, because everyone is at some point a child. Some basic examples, which do not attempt to cover every form of oppression.
Racialized children are often adultified - made to act 'mature', and treated as adults for the purposes of reporting and the law. In my home state of Louisiana, children who have committed a selection of violent crimes (and the policing of this is racialized) are tried as adults. The media mimics this - a black boy shot by the police is made into a man in the headlines.
This phenomenon is brought to the extreme in the imperialist projects of the United States. The children of Gaza, a large part of it's population, are on one side made into terrorists, denied their personhood as well as their childhood, and are, on the other side, made into symbols of the atrocity, or sympathetic faces to plead for donations. They are dehumanized either way.
Girls are faced with misogyny constantly in their childhood. They must contend with the same street sexual harassment as women, often compounded by sexual assualt from their parents in the form of speculation about their sex life and over-intimate policing of their bodies. Older girls are aldultified, made to be mothers to their younger siblings, and sometimes to their parents.
Disabled children are ignored by doctors, assumed to be faking pain or incapable of reporting their own symptoms. Their access to medicine and treatment is restricted by their parents. Often, they are treated by their parents as a burden that must be suffered, or a punishment.
Because adultism is so naturalized - that is, the social construct of the child goes so unquestioned - the oppression of children is used to rhetorically support other systems of oppression. Women, Disabled People, Racialized People, Trans People, Fat People, and certainly other oppressed peoples my mind is blanking on, are all faced with infantilization - made less mature, denied bodily autonomy, ect., in the same way as children.
The most obvious version of this is with the guardianship of disabled people, where they are placed back in almost exactly the parent-child dynamic, but it also occurs on systemic levels, where large swaths of people are made to seem more emotional, less 'rational', or in racialized terms, more 'savage.'
On the other side of this phenomenon, people in positions of societal power will often infantilize themselves to deny their culpability in oppression. A prominent example on this website is the oft-repeated refrain 'the american education system didn't teach me about X' - here the subject treats themselves as adults treat children, beings incapable of taking action to learn about something on their own.
To Adults: the first and easiest thing you can do against adultism is to listen to the children in your life - but that is a platitude. Beyond listening, you must take them seriously, and consider what they have to say. You must advocate for them to be heard. You must exist in solidarity with them
To Children: It is hard enough to survive as a child. Find what companionship with other children you can. Trust yourself to judge when an adult is safe, and when they mean you harm. If you can, organize with your peers. Read and learn what you can to make a better world.
The war in Palestine is a war on children. Please donate what you can.
