Saying “Do” Instead of “Don’t”

I’m reading a book called “Nonviolent Communication” right now (more on the book later), and one of the author’s recommendations is to ask for what you do want people to do, describing specific actions they can take, rather than asking people not to do things or being vague. I’ve observed that in social justice circles, there seems to be a lot more focus on telling people what not to do than telling them what to do. Actually, I see a lot of articles along the lines of “we know it’s hard to always be told what not to do, so here’s a list of things you can do” … where most of the “do’s” end up being “don’ts” in disguise! I can understand it–a lot of the time in social justice it seems the issue is that people in positions of privilege are doing some harmful thing that we’d like them to stop, like using slurs or acting violently, and there doesn’t seem to really be a corresponding “do”. But I also feel like it tends to be seen as safer to condemn X than promote Y, since if people later examine the thing you’re talking about and find additional problematic implications, it’s safer not to have endorsed any particular course of action. And I think that attitude in particular holds back progress. (Of course, here I am, saying that you shouldn’t make people feel unsafe endorsing courses of action. Whoops.)


Young People Should Get To “Fix Society”

One of the arguments sometimes advanced against voting rights for people under 18 is that everyone grows up, so people under 18 just need to wait for their concerns to be represented.

I could write a whole other blog post on why waiting to have your concerns represented is not at all the same thing as having your present concerns represented, but in this post I’ll just say it simply isn’t true.

Some people don’t live to 18. Some people don’t live to 18 as a direct result of the conditions people under 18 live under.

Leelah Alcorn was a trans girl who died by suicide after being denied the ability to transition or even delay puberty, and being isolated and emotionally abused by her parents. To quote I Support Youth Rights:

Leelah Alcorn should have been able to begin transitioning, regardless of how her parents felt about it. They should have had no say in the matter. Regardless of her age.

Leelah Alcorn should have been able to stay in school and in contact with her friends whether her parents wanted her to or not. They should have had no power to stop this. Regardless of her age.

Leelah Alcorn should have been able to opt out of the religious “therapy” she was being subjected to. Her parents should never have had the ability to put her into it against her will in the first place. Regardless of her age.

Leelah Alcorn should have had the ability to get away from such hostile parents, who valued their bigotry and intolerance more than their own daughter. Regardless of her age.

Leelah Alcorn should be still alive and happy, in total control of her own body, mind, education, and life.

Instead, she was kept so miserable and powerless that she saw no other way out than suicide. Because her parents’ “right” to raise their child as they see fit was more important than her life.

Just like far too many teens before her.

Leelah was 17 when she died, and her last words were “Fix society. Please.” Not only did she suffer a deadly lack of basic human rights and autonomy because of her age, she and others like her lack any political voice with which to change the situation. I hope that there are very few people out there who think that it was right and just that Leelah was barred from voting her entire life.

The Big Children’s Rights Post, Part 1

I guess I’m kicking off this blog with a pretty hard-hitting post. I’ve had this manifesto on why children’s rights is a necessary movement sitting on my computer for ages. This first part attempts to highlight the scope of violence against children, and in future posts I’ll ask what we can do about it. Content warning for violence, abuse, and rape.

Most people, I think, understand that children face more of most kinds of violence than adults do. And I think most people want to see children protected from violence and suffering. But it’s difficult to get at the root causes of the disproportionate violence that children face without understanding that the social norms we take for granted disempower children and put them in harm’s way. A lot of people seem to assume that children’s different capabilities (less upper body strength, for one thing) are the only reason why they face such disproportionate violence, but I hope by now feminism and the disability rights movement have given the lie to such ways of thinking. I invite readers to instead consider the possibility that our social norms might enable or even encourage this violence, and more importantly, the possibility that we might be able to change those norms to create a society that respects children and diligently guards their human rights.

First, the ugly facts. Children are abused, raped, assaulted, and murdered at higher rates than adults are. People under 18 make up about a quarter of the (US) population[1] but 44% of sexual assault victims[2]. In fact, about two-thirds of “teenage pregnancies” are caused by adult men[3]. As regards assault, there exist specific laws to exclude children from legal protection when their attacker is their parent, or someone acting in loco parentis such as a teacher. An Italian study found that 85% percent of people report having been hit by their parents by the time they reach adolescence[4], and even after the age of majority, younger people are more likely to experience assault[5]. Children are killed by their parents at the rate of about 1600 per year, and murder is the fourth leading cause of death among children. The overwhelming majority of these murders are committed by their parents. In the rare cases in which a minor kills a parent, their sentences are typically much harsher than parents who kill children, despite being minors[6].

(An aside: I haven’t done intense research into the accuracy of all these numbers; I’m sure a fuller investigation would lead me to make adjustments to the specific figures. But they’d probably go up more than down. For example, if you were to carefully examine the validity of the stat that “children are 44% of sexual assault victims”, you might notice that it’s probably an understatement of the problem. A child is much more likely than an adult to be in a situation where they are unable to get away from their rapist, and thus face repeated sexual assault rather than a single instance of violence. And like any other marginalized group, children face a lot of violence that isn’t ever recognized or documented to begin with.)

Of course, it’s not just the “big crimes” (it never is). Children face countless “smaller” violences every day. It’s legal and socially acceptable for adults to make permanent, purely cosmetic alterations to children’s bodies without their consent: ear piercing and intersex genital mutilation are two examples[7]. Several laws exist for the express purpose of allowing young people to be paid less than the minimum wage. A young worker may be paid as little as $4.25 per hour for the first three months of employment, and other laws exist to allow students to be paid less than minimum wage[8]. (And the type of paid labor that young people tend to perform, such as babysitting, is even explicitly exempt from federal minimum wage laws[9].) Children are denied the right to own property–even property given to children without passing through the hands of their parents can be stolen, tampered with, or destroyed if the parents so choose. Using spyware to invade another person’s privacy is seen as acceptable when the victim is a child[10]. Children are also subject to coercive schooling, which I’m sure on its own will be a topic for many future posts. Children who attempt to leave their living situations become “runaways”. If they are spotted by law enforcement, they may be dragged back to their former living situations without their consent. Non-parents who feed, house, and care for these children may be charged with a crime depending on the state law. And to top it off, children are barred from voting, and thus have no political voice with which to end any of these injustices.

Not only are parents legally allowed to physically assault their children, they can do so for virtually any reason. This results in countless ordinary freedoms being denied to children. The division of household labor is typically performed without children’s input or consent. Children can legally be prevented from leaving their own houses, even temporarily. Children can be prevented from having “unapproved” friends–in fact, they can be wholly denied a support network outside the family if their parents so choose.

The list could go on and on, but I want to address one particular point first. These smaller violences are certainly harmful in and of themselves: if someone forces you to go to school at 7:00am when your body is telling you you need to sleep until 8:00am, that’s harmful to you. But many of these smaller violences directly engender situations where more severe abuse can flourish.

Please take a moment to read this post about why victims of domestic violence stay with their abusers, and think about how being in a child’s situation would compound all those issues. The whole post is worth reading, but I’ll copy a few examples here:

2. “I’ll die without her.”
He lives in his girlfriend’s apartment. He’s unemployed, or minimally employed, and has no education or good experience on his resume. He has no friends besides her. He’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t know how he’ll get food without her help, much less navigate all the challenges of life. And if he leaves her, he’ll be leaving everything–she’ll destroy any of his stuff that he leaves behind, stalk him so he can’t stay at the same job, and even kill his pets. If he leaves her, he’s certain that he’ll end up living on the streets.

8. “Run away? Call the cops? I can’t even get away with sneezing!”
Her boyfriend controls every second of her time and every inch she moves. Whenever they’re apart she has to call him and check in constantly; whenever she leaves the house she has to tell him where she’s going and how long and why; he doesn’t let her think without telling him about it and getting his approval. And he enforces this–reading her mail, listening to her phone conversations, showing up randomly at her work or when she’s with friends (if she’s allowed to have any). When she’s not allowed so small a rebellion as using the wrong word, really rebelling against him seems impossible. She figures he’d catch her if she even thought about trying.

13. “I’ve learned to live in her system.”
He knows all the rules by now. As long as he always treats his wife with the utmost politeness and gentleness, and always has dinner ready before she comes home, always is up for sex when she wants it, and always lets her make the decisions, things are okay. He actually feels pretty safe when he’s being “good.” So it doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with the relationship, because it goes great so long as he does as he’s supposed to.

And the most important point:

The one thing that isn’t on the list, anywhere, is “the victim is just weak and stupid.” Victims of abuse come in all types and lots of them really are flawed in big and small ways–but their reasons for staying with their abusers are not “just stupid.” They’re complicated, insidious, and saddest of all, sometimes right.

If you can’t legally leave your house, if you can’t own property, if it’s legal to assault you, if you would be paid less than minimum wage if you needed to work, if you must daily attend the school where your abuser has access to you–you are quite likely to become a victim of abuse. It’s not children’s fault, nor their inherent nature.

Children are not just weak and stupid.

By now it should be obvious that we as a society have an enormous problem regarding the way we treat children. I’m going to leave it at that for today–after all, the first step is admitting you have a problem. In my next post, I hope to address some of the ideas that pervade our language, media, and culture that devalue children, and offer concrete suggestions for ways to turn the tide.

[1] See for the statistic. In comparison to the rest of the world, the US has a relatively small youth population, as its birthrate is lower than the world average.
[3] Mike Males and Kenneth S.Y. Chew, “The Ages of Fathers in California Adolescent Births, 1993,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 86, No. 4, April 1996, pp. 565-568.
[4] (Under bullet point 7, the author of this article cites the Journal of Psychopathology 2007 for this statistic. I was not able to translate the Journal from Italian, so I am relying on the word of the author of this article.)
[6] (see the citations in this post)
[7] The mistreatment of intersex children is truly abhorrent. See for more information.

About this blog

Hi all, and welcome to this blog. I have this nagging feeling that I’m going to end up jumping headlong into every topic without explaining myself and make things confusing as heck for my readers, so I hope this post can at least lay a bit of groundwork for y’all.

Everyone wants to make the world a better place, including me. I’m going to be writing mainly about two things–children’s rights and consent culture–in the lofty hope of advancing that goal. To me, those two subjects are pretty clearly intertwined–the basic principle of consent culture is that people get to decide for themselves what makes them happy and what doesn’t, and there’s no group of people to whom that right is more often denied than children.

If an immediate reaction of “wait, but it’s different when you’re talking about children” sprang to mind, that’s okay. Bear with me. I’ll be saying lots about that before you know it.

I’ll also probably be covering a mishmash of other topics. And since I’m transgender and currently vlogging my transition, I’ll be cross-posting those videos here.

Thanks for reading!