It's easy to get behind policies about protecting kids.
But, quick question: why just kids?
I agree that there are definitely issues which specifically impact children, and not other demographics. Major discussions need to be had about the ethics of public education and guardianship. But no current child protection policies are actually focusing on child-specific issues. Take age verification, for instance. There's been a massive push recently to ban children from social media and other online platforms. This is in response to very valid concerns: many social media platforms use highly predatory algorithms designed to send people down rabbit holes, often perpetuating misinformative, harmful, or self-harmful content, in order to profit off engagement via advertising. All of this sounds pretty awful, and I could totally understand a parent not wanting a kid to be exposed to this sort of thing.
But, quick question: why just kids? I also don't want MY data eaten by a predatory algorithm that's going to send me down an unsafe rabbit hole to farm my engagement for advertising profit. That sounds terrible! Why is the immediate solution embraced by various world governments NOT about regulating harmful business models like this? How on earth does banning children from the platform solve this problem at all? Ok, you're four paragraphs in now. Let's look at a different scenario.
Up until the early 1900s, many children in the US worked. Child labor is mostly remembered today as being horribly unethical, with children forced into work due to financial insecurity, then required to work long hours in highly unsafe conditions. This is true, and organizations devoted to bringing these unsafe practices to light were able to heavily restrict child labor to keep these kids safe. Ok. Cool. Why just kids? Unsafe labor conditions were and continue to be a serious problem, putting workers of all ages in serious danger. People are still forced to work long hours on difficult jobs due to financial insecurity. While progress is being made on these issues, and labor unions have come a long way, I fail to see how banning children from the workforce was supposed to make this any better. Sure, it exposes less people to the problem, but that's not even faintly a permanent solution. There's a reason that activists trying to speak out about big problems like this have chosen these plans of attack. It's very simple: hurting children is bad for PR. It's easy enough for people to dismiss adults who fall victim to problems like this as being "stupid" or having "brought it on themselves"-- but it's a lot harder for people to take this perspective when kids are the victims, because cultural perceptions dictate that kids are innocent and cannot possibly deserve to be hurt. It's amazing what an activist can accomplish if they point out that serious cultural problems Hurt Kids Too.
...well, it would be. As I've just laid out, it's very easy for messages like this to get lost. "Facebook's algorithm is designed to hurt you for money" becomes "This includes recommending teenagers content focused on self-harm" becomes "Facebook is unsafe for teenagers specifically" becomes "The Internet is unsafe for teenagers specifically" becomes "Let's ban teenagers from the internet." Which is very convenient for Facebook, of course, because now they get to keep their horrible predatory algorithms and there are no sweet little media-friendly kids getting hurt!
The more this happens, the more it solidifies the cultural perception that children NEED to be protected. That there is something inherent to the concept of the child that makes them simultaneously more vulnerable and more incapable than the adult. This is really bad.
Let's take another example of this phenomenon. Something that isn't a problem at all. Trans people often really struggle to obtain the healthcare they need, going through long, intensive processes to "prove" that they are capable of making decisions about their own body. Getting gender-affirming care at all can take years and become incredibly draining. Conservative advocates have been fearmongering about and restricting this process for quite a while now, but they achieved something very significant when they brought kids into the equation. The rhetoric shifted from "here's some reasons I think other people shouldn't be able to make decisions about their own bodies" to "KIDS ARE GETTING MUTILATED" and it was very successful. Even despite the fact that kids were almost never getting surgery, many places have outlawed puberty blockers-- claiming that taking a medication with a long history of use, the entire point of which is to give someone enough time to make a considered decision, is itself a decision too serious to be entrusted to a child.
This was only possible because of how children are perceived: both vulnerable and incapable.
If you're trying to change something you don't like about society, this is the easy answer: grab a group of people, or a medication, or a policy, or a company, or a board game, and say: "Look, it's hurting children." The subtext here is very important. You need to make sure it comes across that children are being hurt because children are incapable of protecting themselves, and therefore must be protected. You need to make sure it comes across that this is a bad thing for children to be exposed to because it's an external influence that parents have no control over. You cannot paint parents as fallible in any way because they are going to be your voters, and therefore the Problem must be something they cannot fight. At the end of it all you will have scared many thousands of parents and you will seem to have hit that Problem hard.
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"Ok, Kiki," you're saying now, more than ten paragraphs deep into a very long post, "but, like you said before, taking the kids out of the room doesn't actually fix the problem." I stand by that! No, it doesn't! BUT IT SUCKS FOR KIDS!
The worst part here is that nobody seems to want to acknowledge what activism like this actually does for kids. What does it do? Good question! Segregation!
Taking kids off the internet is going to socially isolate them as never before. The height of the pandemic was already an awful time for younger kids especially, whose school-based social connections became untenable because of their reduced access to communication. Those same kids, teenagers now, are getting their communication access pulled AGAIN, because someone used them to explain how a predatory algorithm was harmful and now Facebook doesn't want to look bad. Some social media platforms are introducing kid-specific spaces, which I'm sure is an incredible new way to separate a marginalized demographic into a smaller group and bombard them with targeted advertising and even more specialized versions of the predatory algorithm, until the platform inevitably gets pulled AGAIN and deprives a new generation of a social life.
To be clear, social media sucks, but it's also a useful platform for people with reduced communication access. Kids usually don't have the mobility or the freedom to visit friends in person, and friendships can die purely because two kids go to different schools or have different schedules. Kids can also find it more difficult to make new friends in person, since they have very few ways to expand their social circle. Children are a highly isolated demographic already, and things like this hit them hard.
This is not even discussing issues with information access. It may sound silly to bring this up given I've been talking about social media this whole time, but, guess what apparently counts as social media? YouTube. Obviously YouTube is a very complicated site with a lot of communities, but it can be a fantastic educational resource, especially if it fits with your learning style. I only survived high school physics because I was able to look up lectures and practice problems on YouTube. Many kids today won't be able to do that! And, on a less academic level... this means they won't be able to find answers to questions about their lives, their bodies, or their safety. This is not "protection" in any sense of the word. It's censorship, but it's censorship that specifically targets a demographic already having issues with information access. It's becoming more and more of a cultural norm that parents should be able to decide what kids are allowed to know, and this is going to get a lot of kids hurt.
I said earlier that I don't see how "child protection" policies solve any problems. Ok, well, I don't see how they protect children either!
Now that I've really gotten you in, let's look back at labor. How do child labor policies affect children? Well, the same way you'd expect: banning someone from employment makes financial insecurity worse.
(I do have to note here that I don't support child labor as a solution to a parent's financial insecurity, but that has nothing to do with children and everything to do with the fact that I don't think people should have to work in order to survive.)
Children have little to no financial independence. This means that what a kid gets to eat, wear, own, and sleep on is dictated purely by what their parent decides. Parents have every ability to withhold or confiscate something a child wants based on a child's behavior, and they do so regularly. Often, kids only have the opportunity to get themselves things they want when they manage to impress their parents somehow, and even then they have very little choice in the matter. Nobody should have to feel like their ability to express themselves and/or own property is limited by whether or not someone likes them today.
Also, and this might sound unbelievable, but some kids want to work. I definitely did! There are plenty of reasons someone might want a job besides just the money and the experience. Lots of people like their jobs, and kids are capable of doing that too. Unfortunately, a kid who wants to work either has to go through a complicated process to gain the right to do so, which only works in certain places for certain types of jobs, or the other option: volunteer.
This is what I did! I just worked the same job that the adults around me were working, for four years, and for two of those years I wasn't paid. This is kind of the literal definition of labor exploitation. There is no conceivable way you could convince me that these laws, in place to "protect children", were protecting me.
Of course, in certain states, kids do have the opportunity to work-- for reduced hours and often for less than minimum wage. That's right, minimum wage doesn't apply to children! Or, instead, if you really do need the money, many businesses will employ you illegally, which of course means they ignore all other labor regulations as well and will pay you a pittance to work in seriously unsafe conditions. Fun fact, banning something doesn't mean people will stop doing it-- it just means it can't be properly regulated.
I can't deny that child labor laws are pretty good at keeping kids out of unsafe situations. But, as a consequence, a lot of kids get put into even more unsafe situations and exploited for their labor.
Surely there's a much better way to solve this problem. Surely there's a way to protect kids without harming them. And there is-- but it's going to require that "children's issues" are acknowledged as unjust rather than unfair. It's not tragic and awful for a child to be exploited or mistreated like this so much as it's a legitimate human rights violation.
Let's solve these problems on a larger scale. Let's NOT pretend that kids are the only people affected, then stand by while this justifies further restriction of their rights and denial of their humanity. Safety and freedom should not be mutually exclusive, and we should not accept children's freedom being compromised to improve the OPTICS of their safety!
Stand by kids in internet spaces today, so you can stand by kids in public spaces tomorrow. Don't let fearmongering distract you from ethics. There are so many things I could put here, but I think the most important of them is this: Children's rights abuses deserve human rights solutions. This is not that.
[Please, please, don't decide you need to add something about predators. I am so sick of every discriminatory policy being justified through the specter of predators. EVEN IF strangers were the perpetrators in a faintly significant proportion of child abuse instances; EVEN IF the mistreatment of children was solely a result of cartoonishly evil internet creatures and not a culture that portrays them as unworthy of autonomy; EVEN IF children didn't already face massive amounts of belittlement and bigotry on the internet from the very same people who claim they need to be protected at all costs; EVEN IF restricting someone's ability to ask for help was a remotely acceptable cost in this hypothetical scenario; EVEN IF there was a way to define a "child predator" that couldn't be manipulated to include queer people and whoever else is an easy target this week; go ahead and tell me how CONCENTRATING CHILDREN IN "CHILD-ONLY SPACES" is supposed to fix this "catastrophic problem"!!!! There are so many other issues children face that you could be learning about and advocating for. Are you sure you want to help kids, or do you just want someone to attack?]
