RAD YOUTH LIB: Dismantling the roots of all oppression.

Chapter 4. Solidarity among young people, killing the "Adult".

Chapter 4.

"Solidarity among young people, killing "the Adult"

"Differences of power are always manifested in asymmetrical access...The parent has unconditional access to the child's room; the child does not have similar access to the parent's room...the child is required not to lie; the parent is free to close out the child with lies at her discretion. The slave is unconditionally accessible to the master. Total power is unconditional access; total powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible"

-Marylin Frye.

I repeated more than once that children do not need adults in this book. This assertion is obviously controversial. The human infant is biologically dependent. But they don't necessarily have to be dependent on an adult. The social construction of childhood offers us an universalized, ageless, genderless, Child devoid of ethnicity (but imagined as white). Said Child is usually conceived as being a toddler or a very young child. The image of angel that children have been attributed belongs only to them. But other children should also be expected to be said Child. When they fail, they're violently punished. Why? Because they tell another story of "childhood". The story of knowing, sexual, dependable, capable, children. The idea of children relying on each other makes us fearful, we mask this fear as fear of them getting hurt, but it's fear of the demise of our "total power", our "unconditional access" to children. We know how normalized infanticide has been throughout history and still in present day in certain contexts. We know the youngest of children have been the most mistreated creatures on the planet by the adults who were supposed to be "caretakers". Despite this, we have no problems spreading moral panics on teenage mothers, we have no problem imagining the plight of the youngest children in child-led households in the global south. Of course we don't care that the reason why children of teenage mothers report more problems is because of the social marginalization of teenagers. In fact, not only "minors" not own anything of their own, not even a dollar is truly theirs, no matter how rich their families are (this is why Janus Korczak compared the child to the housewife who depends entirely on her husband's income, and tolerates to be abused for this reason), people younger than 25 are the group most likely to live in poverty in the US (16.7% of women, 12.4% of men) (Statista Research Department, 2022). Globally, the group most likely to live in poverty is children. UN Women writes, "Children make up 30% of the world's population but comprise 50% of the extreme poor" (UN Women, 2021). There is also a gender bias starting from adolescence on. Among adolescents more girls are likely to live in extreme poverty. Since in any country, an individual's age is the most reliable indicator of their likelihood of living in poverty, how come has Oldman's proposal of analyzing "childhood" and "adulthood" as economic classes not been lended much credence? No voices have ever been raised against adults' monopoly of economic resources. The central reason why the younger siblings in child-led households struggle is the fact that child labourers are universally underpaid as compared to adults. I've already mentioned how the unrealistic idea of "eliminating child labour" has taken precedence over that of bettering their conditions so that their economic subordination can remain shielded from criticism. Aside from the fact that most are either forced to earn for their parents or labour without pay for them, "The average monthly earnings for three-fourths of child workers was less than 2,000 cedis (about $1.25), which is far below the national minimum wage of 12,000 cedis (about $7.70)" (International Labour Organization). Fortunately some sociologists recognize the true reason why children caring for each other scares us. "Children or young people who are not passive and dependent, such as child workers and teenage parents, evoke strong reactions because their activities are deemed to be incongruent with their chronological stage, transgressing the assumed activities (and stages) of childhood" (O'Dell, 2010). Of course I am not suggesting forced separations of parents from their children so that they will be cared for by younger people. I'm suggesting an environment where the concept of "parents" won't exists and where the most reliable authority on the care of an infant will of course be the person who was one most recently. When I say children do not need adults, I'm not rejecting interdependence as a whole, but interdependence that just sounds like ageist "complementarity" between the roles of "children" and "adults". Younger people can need older people, just as they might need people of the same age as them, but surely "children" (the social construction) do not need "adults" (the social construction). Not only is this conceptualization of interdependence ageist, it's also unrealistic. Young people care for their elderly or disabled parents all the time. The image of a responsible young person and an adult who depends on their care is deeply unsettling to ageist power structures (despite being a part of it, young people are pushed into caring just because they are the children of their parents and they don't receive any retribution or support for doing so). This is why the young carer is usually depicted as victimized and the elderly/disabled adult as a "failed" adult. I pointed out how quickly adults can be demoted in the hierarchy, like when they defend anti-adultism. Disability nullifies adultity. This is why in an ableist society, disabled adults are often virtually "minors". Unsurprisingly the findings of this 2010's article "Constructing 'normal childhoods': young people talk about young carers" are "A key theme arising from the interview data analysis is the construction of a series of normative assumptions about 'normal' childhood through which young carers and their disabled parent are viewed as non‐normative and deficient". But why interdependence between young people should look different than typical adult-child relationships seems unclear in today's world. It is, after all, a world where abuses committed by older children on younger ones seem as commonplace as those committed by adults on children, age is the most important category demarcating hierarchies between children. Even in kindergartens, we can see older children exercising their privilege over younger ones, excluding them from their games, and forcing them to play in smaller more restricted spaces (Konstantoni, 2002). The same applies to gender, sexuality, race and ability. But we need to ask something to ourselves first, how do inequalities blossom between children? Unsurprisingly, because children watch adults while being told they're superior and because adults enforce them on children. Age segregation in schools. Dress codes that enforce gender norms. Systemic racism, as highlighted by Kozol, and ableism. A parent saying "you're in charge of him now" to an older sibling when he is left alone to take care of him. A parent saying "don't be such a little girl" to a boy who is being inconvenient with his crying. A parent muttering about illegal immigrants while watching the news and grabbing their child away anytime they cross a person of colour who doesn't match their standards of respectability. A parent worried sick that they're neurotypical child might not be, or their straight child might not be. As children grow older they realized dominating others is the best way to be "adult", and "adult" is the only way to be if you want to be human. Just like, as I remind in one of my pieces, all violence is adult violence, all hierarchy is adult hierarchy. And it would do well to quote this article again: "Youth adapt to the ever-present threat of being watched by internalizing adults' standards regarding appropriate development. Once youth have internalized the adult gaze, they begin to police one another in its absence, forming networks of observation and control within their peer groups and exercising normalizing judgment to maintain the order of those networks and the norms that drive their operations (Conner et al. 2016, 22-26; Foucault, 177-84). Young people integrate adult expectations into their identities and monitor their peers for deviations worthy of punishment, which often takes the form of bullying (Lesko 2001, 125-26). This process is frequently structured by multiple factors, including age, race, and gender, the effects of which may be internalized by youth. Lesko explained adolescents' tendencies to assimilate to the language of adults in a manner that closely resembles Fanon's description of the effects of colonization on the psyche: "the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets-i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being" ([1952] 2008, 2). Thus, the adult gaze of acknowledgment and approval can feel falsely liberating to youth as it seems to affirm their humanity (Fanon, 89)" (Hall, 2021). In contemporary schools you can see so many strict hierarchies just like in the prison system, because fundamentally schools are prisons. Just like in prisons strong connections need to be forged for survival, and just like in prisons where the youngest, disabled or queer inmates suffer the worst abuse the same holds true for school. Just like how workplaces are sexually threatening for youth, or for that matter, families since incest is so widespread 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys report experiencing it (Fraad, 1996), schools are too. "Hostile Hallways: The AAUW Survey On Sexual Harassment in America's Schools" reports that 83% of girls and 79% of boys report sexual harassment, and I can't imagine the international picture to be brighter. Before any reader would like to bring up "Lord Of The Flies", that misopedic panegyric in praise of adult control and authority and filled with the prurient adult gaze on the denuded bodies of boys, was written by a man who tried to rape a girl of fifteen and delighted in the power he had over children. She was, according to him "depraved by nature" and "already sexy as an ape". Dionysiac child ideology justified this. ("Author William Golding tried to rape teenager, private papers show". Wainwright, 2009, The Guardian). And, roughly 20% (for girls) and 10% (for boys) of that sexual harassment revealed in the AAUW survey is committed by teachers, but it's probably an underestimation. In this chapter we are discussing youth-on-youth violence because it is the theme of the chapter, and we are discussing how adult supremacy is the cause of that too, and therefore we are not mentioning the normalized abuse from adults that we tackled in the other chapter. If the definition of bullying included teachers, all children would be bullied. If the definition of domestic violence including children, no house would be free from it. I remind this once again. Enforcing inequalities among youth is also one important task for adults, both to reproduce hierarchies and call it "socialization", and to break up solidarity between youth. Often childhood sociologists will claim that different children have different interests, but that's because adults want them to. All children would benefit from the death of the Adult. From the wealthy American middle class home to the Manila slum. These children may not have much in common on the outside, but they're united by the hatred the Adult has for them and for their dreams of freedom. Just looking at prisoners will unveil to us why children insist with other children on the traits that make them superior to the other instead of uniting and tearing the prison and it's guards down. And prisoners have strong age hierarchies. In a world that still has prisons, I have been fascinated by one article, "The Pitfalls of Separating Youth In Prison: A Critique of Age Segregated Incarceration". The article claims age segregated prisons reinforce age essentialism. Now this book will sound to the reader as a total defence of separation, because I found myself disagreeing. Prisons should be burned, but while they exist, the purpose of age segregation can be justified because of the probable misopedy of the older prisoners. It's not a coincidence that the "worst" juvenile delinquents can be sent to adult prisons. They're being sentenced to being tore to shreds by more than just the misopedy of the state, but also to that of the people. And of course, to sexual violence, the already high risk increases by five units in an adult prison (Schiraldi and Zeidenburg, 1997). When there are no boys, as Susan Brownmiller chronicled in her classic, prisoners invent them, singling out the weakest inmates. In short, that article seemed like liberal feminism denying the preponderance of male rapists. Youth needs to seek solidarity with the similarily oppressed. Privileged youth has much to gain in abandoning the crumbs their masters grant them and uniting with their peers. They have much to gain from stopping aspiring towards adulthood and from wanting to be the Adult. Not even the most privileged child in the world is treated as more than property. A film struck me when I first saw it. It's "Zero for Conduct", by Jean Vigo, sadly an adult and made in 1933. Media has some shining example of youth solidarity, but usually consigned to the realm of fantasy, adults repackage radical aspirations into something they can profit from. But this one was grounded in the reality of many children going to school in France in the 30s. It didn't shy away even from depicting sexual harassment, as experienced by the character of Tabard. There is nothing more than adults fear than youth uniting to take them down. It's no wonder the justification teachers give for the oppression they enact is that there are more children than adults in the classroom. Korczak detailed this fear. He too, the great friend of children, couldn't help but share it a bit. He too hadn't killed the Adult he deep down was. There is a beautiful youth liberationist song called "Kill The Father" by Sharp Knives. Here's to allegorical, and literal since it's in a lot of cases justified, patricide. Freud knew that killing our oppressors was a drive innate to all of us in childhood, but he viewed it as bad and thought it was necessary to repress it. Rochefort, in her "Enfants d'abord" wonders why there isn't an adult counterpart to the famous Oedipus Complex, and that's because our child killing culture celebrates and encourages the drive to kill the Child. The life of the rape victim Chrysippus was expandable. The youth liberationist should study cases of children uniting to defend each other against adults, the newspaper, despite their often ageist reporting, can help us when they tell us these stories. "Whether overtly or covertly, children often gain support, information and assistance from each other rather than from adults", writes Kitzinger, "Diane and her sister sustained each other with "jokes" about killing their father and Rowena's brother helped her to rig up a shotgun against their stepfather designed to fire when he opened the bedroom door". This is what interdependence should be. If you're a child and own some crumbs, throw them on an adult's face, not on your peer who needs them more than you. It's the only way to get free. Youth solidarity is more rewarding than being the Adult. And it's safer. It strips adults of some of the unconditional access they have over your mind if not your body. It's maybe the one and only thing a child could do to rebel. And it offers us a peak through the future of a world where children depend on one another and can cast the Adult out, once and for all.