RAD YOUTH LIB: Dismantling the roots of all oppression.

Chapter 2. Why collaboration with adults is not possible.

Chapter 2.

"Why collaboration with adults is not possible"

"The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken"

-Lloyd de Mause.

"Adult power over children is so absolute that in a sense all children are abused and all adults abusers"

-Judith Ennew.

I'm sure many readers of this book will see it as utopian. I'm also sure many of them are convinced it's possible to unite with adults and persuade them of the importance of the fight against adultism. Now, that is truly utopian. Many activists repeat this talking point, that adults have to be made aware of adultism and encouraged to fight against it. I'm not sure if they have ever interacted with any adult. Newsflash: Most adults are fully aware that children are treated as subhuman. They just think it's okay. Adult abuse is not a product of ignorance. Adults know and delight in the fear they instill in children. What adults mean when they deny the existence of adultism is not that children are treated equally and discrimination against them doesn't exist; it is that children are absolutely powerless and they absolutely lack civil rights, but that is the way it has to be, and will always be and that it's a good thing. Children do not feature in any acts interdicting discrimination, and what the UNCRC refers to when it discusses children's right to be safeguarded from discrimination isn't about discrimination against children as children because, of course, the conclusion that would be drawn is the abolition of the status of minor, which is precisely the opposite of what the highly protectionist Convention aims for, protecting the property of Western adults, which are the children of the globe (The fact that the UNCRC is a colonial project should never be glossed over - this should not be taken to imply a cultural relativism towards child abuse taking place in the global south, adult supremacy may look different in different countries, but its aim remains substantially the same everywhere. This means that the UNCRC seeks to other childhoods that aren't sufficiently white. Working children, children who care for others, independent children, and street children are all seen as "problems" to be solved. While exploited, these children do not embody the "super pet", to quote Holt, image white adults hold dear, and by existing outside "the child's place" they refute the hegemony of adults in particular freedoms and domains, one of these is undoubtedly the public space, from which children in the global north were forcibly cast out. They destroy that image most glaringly when they take responsibility for others as caretakers - adults or children. Some children in the global north also do so, as young carers and teenage mothers, which will be crucial in my analysis. It's no wonder moral panics tend to be constructed around these figures, particularly teenage mothers, where we can see the interception of adultism and misogyny in the aggressive policing of adolescent female sexuality). I would question the use of the words "protectionist" and "protection" itself, these provisions are not protective of real children, but of the dolls adults think children are or should be. They do not even interdict corporal punishment entirely. So much for protection. After all, the opposition between protection and liberation remains a false dichotomy. Adults have never protected children, children have always relied on each another for their protection, because after all, adults are what children need protecting from. Just observe the way children protect themselves by helping each other in schools, when away from teachers' (always ready to make children pay for any act of solidarity) prying gazes. And while many endorsers of the Convention would like to see the end of that kind of discipline, in the meantime, they promote "positive discipline", a "gentle" tyranny is still tyranny. Equal rights would protect children, the right to have money, own personal property, leave their abusers (and not to be taken from their family and given to worse adult owners as a punishment for even experiencing the abuse in the first place, which is only resorted to in cases of abuse when the children's lives are seriously threatened anyway and isn't even a possibility for majority world children). More than that, empowerment, strong communities of children, and children as leaders would protect children. And more than that...separation. But would separation protect children? Yes. Because children living alongside adults would, first of all, never get "equal rights" and they will never be "empowered", and I can confidently state that if adults claim otherwise, they shouldn't be trusted. We saw it happening before. The children's liberation movement was co-opted by adults, men, in this case, who wanted the right to use children sexually (or better, the right to brag about doing so because existing institutions already protect child rape if done in silence). And bear in mind that it wasn't anything close to a fight for the destigmatization of child sexuality. It was genuinely framed that way. They questioned why forcing children and disregarding their consent in non-sexual contexts is encouraged while doing so in a sexual context is viewed as abhorrent. They had a point, but not in the way they thought. The way adults override children's decisions is rape culture. What they wanted was the collectivization of children, not their liberation. NAMbLA's (I write the name correctly here, as it's telling on what they really thought were the proper roles of men and boys) members were unsurprisingly almost all men. There were exceptions, like Mark Moffet, who was so brainwashed to believe that he deserved his sexual assault, and Michael Alhonte, who was highly critical of the organization and fully conscious of the adultism that permeated it. What follows is those past and present advocates for the adult's right to flaunt his sexual as well as social superiority over children who make the crux of the argument their perception that power dynamics between adults and teenagers aren't so intense after all, comparable or even less intense than those between adult men and women, that it is the teenager who exploits the adult, that they are the predator, that their minor status actually makes them less vulnerable and not more and so on. They were unsurprisingly almost all men partly because children largely do not see the possibility of having sex with adults, their oppressors, as a worthy goal. They were paralleled by those who hoped for more capitalist exploitation of children after their emancipation and romanticized the work of children in the past or in impoverished countries, without questioning the traditional association: child, apprentice, servant, slave, inferior. They both employed the language of child liberation, but they expected that the end of the privatization of childhood would turn children into public property, as they perceived it as unfair that only parents have a right to sex and labor from them. What the "childlovers" and those who spread moral panics have in common is the narcissistic (curious that adults made Narcissus a youth when this defect is so prominent among them) conviction that the first thing children would want to do with their freedom is to submit to them sexually. They both believe that such is the biology of children. In a similar way those who aimed for a return to widespread capitalist exploitation of children in the West as well believed that if children are to live without parental discipline they would need that of their bosses. In reality, the first thing too high a percentage of children would do with their freedom is get a gun and kill their rapists (and indeed, their bosses). It speaks to the common contention that someone must own a child. Parents do this when they imagine youth liberation means their children would be "given" to another owner or the state. "Who owns a child?", they own themselves, they always did, they always will. And many anti-adultists aren't free of this mindset. They constantly reassure us that "free schools" don't mean no adult involvement! "Abolition of the family" actually means more family! To oppose adultism doesn't mean "abandoning children"! This is why they see engaging adults as an important aspiration. I admit I used to believe that too. Many articles I've written referred to adults supporting youth, how we would never succeed without adults, and how adults can lend a hand. I admit I bought into some common clichés about children. But the past months brought me back. I had a profound reflection on adult violence and I concluded that there are no other alternatives than, yes, abandonment. Of adults by children. The most common form of violence in the world is adults hitting children. Children are also the only persons it's legal to hit in about 90% of countries. It's only illegal to hit 14% of the world's children if you are a parent, but the number rises to a much higher 65% if you are a teacher (Global Initiative to End all Corporal Punishment). Parents are very jealous of their belongings and do not easily tolerate other adults putting their hands on what's theirs. In the words of Judith Levine, "for in the romance of parent-child unity, the school is the illicit lover" ("Father Knows Best", Judith Levine). Like in moral panics about child sexual assault, it's never about the child's well-being; it all goes back to ownership. Children are objects of disputes between adults over who gets to hurt them and/or strip them of their liberty. Regarding those countries in which hitting children is illegal, they likely don't enforce that. It's impossible to enforce that. No one would call the police on a child's parents for a slap, or frequent spankings, too, for that matter. This would mean the incarceration of the parents and, as stated before in this chapter, because minor status makes it illegal for children to be free, the child's passage to worse owners. Realistically, it's illegal to hit 0% of the world's children if you're a parent; statistics reveal that globally almost all parents hit (World Health Organization, 2021), and probably 20% of them if you're a teacher, considering comments under news articles about a teacher assaulting a student are mostly victim-blaming (it's never called that when it's about children) while under articles describing the reverse situation (much fewer) are calls for execution. I think we can throw out of the window any illusion that some form of minor status helps children since research on the harmful effect of hitting children abounds, and yet no country can successfully prohibit it because of minor status. Science provides us an endless list of problems caused by hitting; there is enough evidence to affirm that it's the cause of most evils that plague society. But what solution do studies provide? Asking adults to stop. Yes, just that. As if it would work. After spending their whole childhoods being hit and now having the possibility to inflict it on someone else, surrounded by people who encourage them to, they're just supposed to stop. How about we remove the possibility of them perpetuating the cycle? "Oh no, that would endanger children", really? The "advocacy" is absolutely not about realizing Rousseau's adult supremacist utopia of making children believe adults aren't the enemies, right? I have a very low opinion of "positive parenting". I genuinely believe that choosing to have children when they're still being treated like this is a morally questionable decision. It doesn't matter how "positive" your parenting is; the child still can't leave. It's usually believed that hitting is the only form of harm, when 36% of the world's children have experienced severe emotional harm (World Health Organization, 2017). But 90% of parents reveal they somehow verbally abused their child in the previous year ("Is yelling at your kids as bad as spanking?", de Geyn). Teachers may be statistically as guilty of this as parents. If we apply the standard of what is considered abuse in adult relationships, all children are abused. "Treats you like a child" is considered a sign of abuse in relationships, and of course it is; being trapped in a home, with other people deciding any single aspect of your life for you, an impossibility to escape, being ordered what to do at every single moment, and being often hit or yelled at by someone physically bigger than you...It hardly gets more abusive than that, well, except when in addition to that, you have to work under a brutal boss who is actually more like a jailer and threatens to fire you if you don't also keep working for them during the evening after a workday of six to eight hours. Sometimes I feel sure of myself that one day we will look back at this horrified, remembering the way we treated a third of all people as one of the greatest tragedies of the human race. But it should have already happened a long time ago. The situation was only worse in the past, as chronicled by Lloyd de Mause. "That's how it went with many other oppressed groups," I thought, but then I realized that none sat there awaiting the mercy of the class oppressing them. They got their rights with force. But adult supremacy is much more subtle and manipulative. Adults are calling themselves "adult allies" before the movement has even born. Not that I do not appreciate adults who risk their reputation with other adults to challenge adultism, but most when they negotiate how "far" this should go with other adults and reassure them, "No, we're not talking about exactly the same rights" are not being supportive. A real "adult ally" would call themselves a "youth liberationist", never advocate for anything less than full liberation and realize youth doesn't need them. A real "adult ally" wouldn't even think of speaking for youth using expressions like "Children don't want to be the same as adults, they just wish they had more of a say!". I always wished I was "the same as adults" because that meant being treated with dignity. So it is an understatement that most adult allies are incredibly disappointing. Of course, the voice of an adult advocating for full liberation should be amplified and not the voice of a child advocating for "limited paternalism" (a term coined by an adorable "adult ally", Freeman). But I'm talking about something else, I see an epidemic of adults appropriating youth liberationist language to defend UNCRC level "child rights" in recent years. Holt wrote, "forget students' rights and get yourselves the rights of citizens", in a post-UNCRC world, the line could read, "forget children's rights and get yourselves the rights of citizens". The easiest problem to spot in this exhortation is the "get yourself", children would have if they could. In the 70s, they tried, but adults who claimed to be allies derailed and started focusing their attention on the Convention. Right now, it's time to split hairs. A "child citizen" is an illusion; adults laid down the city's foundations. It needs to be burnt down. Children are entitled after a dark history to live away from adults. Not only do children not need them, but adults are actively detrimental to children's lives. The horrible maltreatments and the ordinary suffering they inflicted and continue to inflict on youth mean that for children, adults imply pain. Children only experience true love and protection from each other. They know the adult's love is conditional and transforms into aggression as soon as the child doesn't live up to their expectations. Exactly how the "adult ally" turns their back towards you when you start making those "extreme demands" liberationists keep getting reproached to this day. But on the other hand, those "extreme demands" are inalienable rights for adults and represent the basic requests of the first wave of the feminist movement. Adults would react with an armed insurgence if those rights were taken away from them. It's time to alienate these people if our movement is to be truly born. It's time to do away with the childhood conditioning of being accommodating toward adults who loathe youth. It's time to represent an actual threat. Adults raged when they were told they didn't have the right to kill a disobedient child, adults rage now that they're being told they can't beat one; adults will rage when forced to set youth free. But I don't care about their rage. After all, part of the rage is caused by the knowledge that the next generation won't have to suffer as much as they did and that they won't get a chance to be the ones wielding the rod on these children's bodies. Let them rage. We won't stop for the 1 billion children who experience violence (World Health Organization, 2020) and for all the rest whose hardships under adult supremacy are not customarily called "violence" but rather "nature". Whenever an adult's intimidation makes the slightest doubt arise that I'm beating on a dead horse, I think of them. We were all entitled to the world I fight for. It's way too soon to even just think of "adult allies" in these terms, especially when they have such a terrible record of manipulation and reactionary tendencies. For many of them, saving face with other adults clearly matters more than genuinely aiding youth; that's why they feel like it's their place to discern between the rights children should be allowed to have and the ones that they shouldn't. This is also why the "rights" framework is inadequate. It's adults who determine what rights children get. Liberation is what I aspire to. Children seizing power for themselves and living free lives beyond the panopticon of the adult gaze and outside those systems made with their exclusion in mind by their oppressors. "They should be lucky what we want is equality and not revenge," it has been said of other situations in which an extensive history of violence and discrimination has been documented. This isn't even the case for children. "They should be lucky what we want is for you to stop beating us and not revenge". And this is exactly why there isn't space for this type of "equality". Equal rights under unequal conditions aren't truly equal rights. Adults are children's "unequal conditions". It's time to live apart. Children have a history of collective trauma tied to adults; I'm sure everyone can recall how they felt around adults as a child. Every day, you hear children saying they won't do something because they're scared of their parents and teachers. Scared. Fright dominates adult-child relations, not love, never unconditional love. It can't be healed, "adult allies"' idea of "healing" adult-child relations does not mean anything for the 300 million children who experience "violent upbringing" (even more outrageously violent abuse than what's the standard) (UNICEF, 2017), (and for the 246 million ones whose violence they experience at school is recognized) (UN, 2016), who have bruises on their bodies and are verbally tormented by adults that are endorsed by the state and by society, because no amount of healing could erase the fact that those adults can. There is nothing to stop them. And any form of retaliation will make the adults escalate and they will be assassinated or institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital, juvenile prison, or "troubled teen" (concentration) camp. They can do all those things. No one stands up for the child who hits or otherwise hurts an adult, and it doesn't matter whether or not they had no other choice. In America, where carrying weapons is considered a constitutional right, of course, youth are the only ones barred from doing so. They're the only ones who would actually need them too. Perhaps they would get some respect then. Most of those who carry are adult white men instead so that they can point them at their queer children. But avoiding bloodshed is preferable. "Adult allies", children will heal without you because that's the only way children can heal. There isn't any other way. Adults never wanted it any other way; if they did, they could have at least tried to mask the depths of the subordination of children. Until now, there has been an indissoluble pairing between childhood and pain. We can no longer lie about what "childhood trauma" truly is, an experience no child is exempt from, the experience of being a child among adults. We're all traumatized by having all experienced treatment that would be instantly classified as abuse if done to us now, and this has disastrous effects. A world without trauma is a world where children possess the tools to defend their space from adults who would wish to colonize it again and traumatize them again. This includes adults who might seem to have good intentions at first. It's important for a youth liberationist to doubt, especially since relations between children and adults are partly seen as based on the child's blind trust. Children suspecting adults wouldn't clearly be enough to dissolve adult supremacy, but it could undermine it in many ways. Consider how common it is for adults to silence children who doubt. "When you're older, you'll understand". So much truth is hidden in that phrase; adults who know that their supremacy seems unjustified in children's eyes, assure them that when they experience "adulthood", a condition that depends on the subjection of "childhood", they will need to justify it. Adults not only punish children for doubting, but they also reward them for not doubting. This helps them in the process of destroying solidarity between children, children will want rewards from them, and they will abandon their peers. It's surprising how many children view adult supremacy as just "common sense" but can't explain why it is without referencing something an adult has told them, "because my mother said...", "the teacher explained us...". Adults who aren't academicians say something like, "But I was such an idiot when I was a child" instead, misopedy is so universal that children experience it even from their future selves. The "adult ally"'s ultimate goal is to nullify our attempts at forming a movement from the inside by eroding children's suspicions toward them. I will never forget a review of Laura Purdy's "work," chiding her for being too harsh and therefore enflaming rather than pacifying liberationist sentiments. I would argue that the "adult ally" is just a classic adultist but smarter, a classic adultist who understands that if adults remain so unabashed, someone will get tired. Is the future of adultism to be cloaked behind less hostile language and thus becoming even more insidious? Not if we make it clear that we won't have anything to do with them. Adults always know what they're doing, "adult allies" know no other group would settle for their "compromises". Adults are welcome to walk with children, but they have to know to walk behind and with their heads down; the thought shouldn't even cross their minds that they could reach an agreement on what children are or aren't allowed to do. If you want to walk with them, the deal is simple: forsake your reputation, do not expect to get anything out of it, and do not try to reconcile what's impossible to reconcile. Refuse to be an "adult" and be a person at last.

Adults fear children in the same way monarchs feared those they governed; explicit comparisons were drawn between the monarchs and the people, parents, and children. History teaches us that the push for a constitutional monarchy in revolutionary France failed spectacularly. That's what "adult allies" are doing now. We put an end to the "divine right of kings" centuries ago, and "parental rights" will soon follow suit, hopefully through anarchism. But we must not set for the little adults who claim to want to collaborate grant us, or we will have lost before we started.