Is Calvin human? and other annoying questions: "Calvin and Hobbes," zoology, and the oppression of children by patriarchy
2009 April
People who aren't too familiar with Amerikan culture, but know a few things about Latin America, may recognize the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic as the "Mafalda" of Amerika. "Calvin and Hobbes" is centered around a young child, Calvin, who expresses grown-up ideas with childish language, childish ideas with grown-up language, and precocious ideas with precocious language. Immediately distinguishing "Calvin and Hobbes" from "Mafalda" is Calvin's cute stuffed animal, Hobbes, who comes to life as an imaginary companion for Calvin and with whom Calvin converses. This provides opportunities for gags and witticisms on the part of both Calvin and Hobbes, who is similarly spoken. By contrast, Mafalda interacts with more friends who are children. Both Mafalda and Calvin are precocious, but Calvin in a more fantastical way. Hobbes is animated only when he is alone with Calvin in a panel, but Calvin superficially appears precocious with intelligence and knowledge unremarked by any of the adults in his life, speaking to adult characters in a precocious way while also evoking a stereotype of an unmotivated, unintelligent and ignorant student. Compared with "Calvin and Hobbes," "Mafalda" has more political content and allegory. In the Amerikan context, "Mafalda" would be more controversial than "Calvin and Hobbes." Calvin imagines adults, including his teacher, his principal, and his parents, as aliens from outer space, but adults in the comic strip express their own perspective on Calvin with which parent readers of the comic strip would identify. The comic strip ended more than a decade ago, but "Calvin and Hobbes" lives on in anthologies, textbooks, presentations, etc.
MIWS found the strip below amusing after commenting that young people who are oppressed, but have limited mobility and are deprived of intellectual resources, would have difficulty participating effectively in a First World communist organization ("An introduction to "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"").
Calvin and Hobbes lay it down on U.$. citizenship and imperialist country parasitism.
The idea of children's exclusion and their political behavior is not just a matter for amusement or something academic. People will recall that a photo of Marion Delgado, a small child who allegedly put an object on a track that derailed a train, made the cover of New Left Notes (caption: "Bring the war home! : With a defiant smile, 5-year-old Marion Delgado shows how he placed a 25-pound concrete slab on the tracks and wrecked a passenger train").(1) The Weathermen, which claimed to tie youth oppression issues to opposing the Vietnam War, invoked Delgado in some of its actions and internal communications. On a more real level, Weatherman supposedly had middle-school-age supporters who attended Weatherman events, some of them homeless. The Marion Delgado thing with the Weathermen is a joke for some people today, but there is a level on which communists need to take Delgado seriously, not as an individual requiring a biography (which has been contested), but as a focus point for ideas about youth, some subtle and implicit, that need to be dealt with theoretically. The "Calvin and Hobbes" strip is more challenging to this writer as a puzzle, though, so I will tease out more themes from it.
There is no such thing as supra-class humor, but this writer has a sense of humor and subjectively finds most "Calvin and Hobbes" strips funny. If a strip weren't funny or comprehensible in any way, if the reader found herself wondering "what was that about," one might wonder if Watterson were attacking a small subset of the population allegorically. Obviously, there is allegory in many humorous "Calvin and Hobbes" strips, but it is allegory that could be understood by millions of people. Use of allegory that could not be understood by millions of people would have undermined and poisoned Watterson's whole comedic project. [May 20, 2009: After this was written, MIWS was surprised to learn that Watterson had discussed the private meanings of some of his strips in one of his cartoon collections. For example, a strip in which Calvin and Hobbes are going to sleep and Calvin says something about meeting Hobbes in his dreams is inspired by the death of Watterson's cat. Watterson discusses instances in which fans could have formed their own meanings different from what Watterson was thinking. Some of Watterson's thoughts and experiences would not have been observed by a single soul, so the implication is that private meanings are irrelevant. Watterson's comments are probably most interesting to fans curious about Watterson's biography, not using the comic strip itself for entertainment, introspection, or catharsis. Also, MIWS notes that Watterson disagrees with trying to nail down the nature of Hobbes as a toy with imaginary behavior or something else, but will not go back and change anything in this article. Calvin's own reality is more interesting. MIWS asks for Watterson's forgiveness. And intriguingly, in the same collection/commentary book, MIWS found a strip clearly supporting its hypothesis that "Calvin and Hobbes" relates to a difference between representative democracy and participatory democracy.]
In another "Calvin and Hobbes" strip, Calvin is reading a book. "It says here that "religion is the opiate of the masses." What do you suppose that means?" Calvin asks Hobbes. In the next panel, a television set with a thought bubble replies, "It means Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet" -- a reminder that more than a century and a half has passed since the 1840s, when Marx made his "opium" remark, and a suggestion that the church has become less prominent in the superstructure of class society. One could conclude that Watterson was not totally unaware of Marxism, that Marxist readings of his comic strips are possible. The above "Calvin and Hobbes" strip brought to mind super-profit-sharing between First World exploiters, as well as some Euro-Amerikan youth rights movements emphasizing legal equality with adults, but this writer is not really saying that Watterson was a Maoist. (Suggesting some ambiguity, in one strip Calvin's father criticizes consumerism in connection to Christmas and the adulteration of "spirituality," while in a following strip Calvin seems to ridicule a Keynesian aspect of Christmas consumerism, but has Calvin's father as possibly subscribing to those ideas. "As the wage earner here, it's your responsibility to show some consumer confidence and start buying things that will get the economy going and create profits and employment." "Here's a list of some big-ticket items I'd like for Christmas. I hope I can trust you to do what's right for our country." Dad: "I've got to stop leaving the Wall Street Journal around.") This writer does not know the historical context of the strip, but it is more likely that Watterson is commenting on Amerikans' civic life -- that Amerikans already have a "voice" in their government, but are too self-indulgent to use that voice. In the strip, Hobbes is reading a newspaper. Or maybe Watterson is just making a joke at children's expense by suggesting that the idea of political rights for children is so ridiculous as to be laughable. In any case, there is nothing in the above strip that country-first John McCain would disagree with. (From another strip illustrating "Calvin and Hobbes"'s critique of the media: Calvin: "I know more about the private lives of celebrities than I do about any governmental policy that will actually affect me." Calvin: "I'm interested in things that are none of my business, and I'm bored by things that are important to know." Hobbes: "The media aim to please." Calvin: "Maybe the economy should be discussed in cheap motel rooms.")
Just considering this strip, it seems unlikely that Watterson is making an allegorical attack on the oppression of children, but the whole discourse of "rights" is Liberal in the first place -- an attempt to find accommodations for various groups preserving capitalism. Passengers or no passengers, there was no precedent within Liberalism for a non-national actor's derailing a train, so the Weathermen's use of Marion Delgado as a revolutionary icon was appropriate. Bourgeoisie fighting colonialism had derailed trains before the 1960s, and the 1940s, but (leaving aside that Delgado was a Mexican and therefore also potentially a symbol of Mexican liberation) for someone within a capitalist society to derail a train is out of bounds according to Liberalism. The question arises, though, what does the Weathermen's use of Marion Delgado have to do with ending the oppression of children specifically. The answer may be "nothing."
The term "youth"
Rather than pretend that the mobilization of youth necessarily has something to do with youth empowerment, people should admit that Barack Obama had a "youth" thing going on in the campaign season, but that Obama's use of youth had absolutely nothing to do with ending the oppression of youth. The significance of this is the need to distinguish youth mobilization tactics that could be used by the imperialists, from a revolutionary program to end the oppression of youth.
In MIWS's definition, "youth" includes young children. Against MIWS, some would say that "youth" begins at adolescence. According to one dictionary, "youth" refers to an adolescent male. That right there indicates a problem with traditional ways of thinking about youth, because obviously nobody would openly say that they are concerned with only adolescent males or that only adolescent males are oppressed among younger people. The association of "youth" with adolescent males is originally because of restrictions on females' mobility. Patriarchal ideas about females ironically lend themselves to the use of "youth" as code for males where society needs to address so-called delinquents on the street with implied male characteristics.
Despite the specific origins of "youth" as meaning an adolescent male, that meaning of "youth" is very much related to the definition of "youth" as adolescents, male and female, in many discussions of youth oppression. Relative to people younger than themselves, adolescents have more mobility. They have a taste of freedom and are more assertive about what they want. Young children who do not have as much mobility and are not as assertive end up being excluded from the concept of youth, the implicit and oddly self-fulfilling rationale being that young children have not proved themselves able to function as individuals in Liberal society.
Approximately 25% of the U.$. population was younger than eighteen (2005-2007 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates), according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By lazy first approximation, adolescent males younger than eighteen years might be 3% of the U.$. population. If the issue were just 3% about to reach the age of majority, this writer could better understand the lack of enthusiasm of First World communists to study the youth question in depth. But what accounts for this lack of attention when First Worlders have such an intense and pervasive unease about children, in particular, who are not their own?
Zoology
When England still had a proletariat, Marx remarked on the oppression of children by their parents, by which he meant parents' putting their children to work in factories. Today, the proletariat is located in the Third World, but because of national oppression of the Third World one might suspect that the oppression of children by patriarchy would not be in the forefront of the Third World masses' consciousness. Some of the imperialist countries doing the oppressing have internal colonies, but one would expect a line on children to develop in the oppressor nation context. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2005-2007 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates), people white-alone, "not Hispanic or Latino," were 65% of the U.$. population.
Historically and in the Euro-Amerikan context, the most obvious place to look for a Maoist scientific line on youth would be the Revolutionary Youth Movement of Students for a Democratic Society. Revolutionary Youth Movement I (RYM I) more specifically would be a natural place to look as its youth focus was even greater than RYM II's, but MIWS has shown that Weatherman's ideas about youth were limited, and also that the idea Weatherman rejected the white working class as an already-existing labor aristocracy is a social-democratic myth that one could only fantasize were true. MIWS now takes a step back from the Weathermen to consider what, if anything, was promising in Revolutionary Youth Movement II's (RYM II's) line regarding youth.
One sentence this writer has agreement with is: "The ruling class would like to portray youthful rebellion as simply a generational or biological phenomenon." (Mike Klonsky, Noel Ignatin, Marilyn Katz, Sue Eanet, and Les Coleman, "Revolutionary Youth Movement II," New Left Notes, vol. 4, no. 24, 1969 July 8) The point is that the bourgeoisie treats everything youth do as being of no particular social significance. Against this, Klonsky et al. were saying that developments particularly impacting youth were giving rise to youth rebellion. Nonetheless, there is a difference between a slogan or a primarily negative critique, and a theory. This writer finds that RYM II in that RYM II article was unable to escape from a fundamentally biological outlook on youth. RYM II talks about youth rebellion in connection to "all that is fresh, alive, vital, and growing," but there is no recognition that youth experience any particular oppression as a group in either class or capitalist society.
When Mao Zedong told Chinese young people in 1957 that the world and the future belonged to young people, "full of vigor and vitality," that had a particular meaning. The dictatorship of the proletariat was less than a decade old. Stalin was gone. There were feudal superstructural remnants in China. The proletariat had state power in China; at the same time, there was a danger of counterrevolution. The proletariat was faced with educating a new generation for a society that was still being created. All of this is in contrast to the situation in the First World, where the proletariat does not have state power. Also, the First World is not facing revolution by people who may have concerns about the restoration of feudalism or colonialism. At least, the majority of First World so-called communists do not see a joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations as the form of proletarian dictatorship that might exist in the First World. First World imperialist nations do not have a proletariat, and the proletariat is not in a position to lead majorities of youth in those nations.
Even by the time he died, Mao had lived most of his life under feudalism. In a feudal country or a country just coming out of feudalism, to say that so-called youth problems were biological could have been a bourgeois advance over feudalism -- a matter of (supposed) science. To use the most provocative example that comes to mind, some of what criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, of racist and misogynist repute, wrote on youth, discussing the epidemic potential of crime among youth and even childhood as recapitulating an earlier stage of human species development, was actually an advance in comparison with the moralist ideas of people without scientific pretensions. In Euro-Amerika, today, the biological view of youth serves as a means to garner support for reactionary leaders and elect U.$. presidents, legitimize the increasingly moribund juvenile justice and child social work fields, childhood education, and child psychiatry, justify intensified surveillance and control of children, and selectively criticize militant Third World movements with youth participants. Amerikans purporting to compliment youth to hitch them to various causes do so in terms not much different than Lombroso's in Criminal Man (see chapter 24, "Moral Insanity and Crime among Children," Edition 3, in Criminal Man, Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 188-192). They put a positive spin on some of the same things, supposedly in youth's nature, that Lombroso discussed, but the effect politically may be worse than when Lombroso's work was first read in the late nineteenth century.
Young people are not born being less conservative, unless "less conservative" is to be understood in a purely negative way: less political. It is true, though, that humans are born with no knowledge and no ideology. Ideology in particular is a social concept, but underlying the statement "humans are born with no knowledge and no ideology" is a biological fact that is true of any organism with sense organs. The concrete contradictions among humans relevant to that biological fact are shaped by social circumstances. Contrary to the impression created by some to recruit people on the basis of identity and uncomplicated ideas, Mao in same book (the "red book") quoted by RYM II did not have only flattering things to say about youth. In one context, Mao says young people are "least conservative in their thinking." "This is especially so in the era of socialism." But in another context, Mao says that it is a challenge for young people in particular to carry on the revolution after the seizure of power because they have not lived through the most violent, long, tortuous and painful struggle against the enemy -- suggesting that young people could present a threat of counterrevolution depending on circumstances. "That is why we must constantly carry on lively and effective political education among the masses and should always tell them the truth about the difficulties that crop up and discuss with them how to surmount these difficulties." Mao was not telling young people to not be uptight and selling revolution as something personally rewarding for laid-back people.
Contradictions between old and young are not exclusive to Homo sapiens. They are found in non-humyn species. Furthermore, there are populations of non-humyn species that have learned-behavior passed down from generation to generation culturally. For this reason, this writer prefers to speak of "zoology," rather than "biology" or "sociobiology," in demarcating social from non-social theories of youth. If the way someone talks about youth cannot basically be distinguished from how people talk about a species of bird or reptile with innate and culturally transmitted acoustic behavior, one should think "zoology."
Among the biological disciplines, this writer has no objection to zoology in particular. But if people are going to talk about youth in just zoological terms in the guise of flattering youth, others should realize what they are doing -- that it is zoological and potentially paternalistic. Discussion of groups of humyns in zoological terms always has the potential to be paternalistic, because the zoological outlook distracts from any changeable social relations and structures that may underlie an observed behavior or condition.
All kinds of writers have dealt with the impact of industrialization and urbanization on youth, most not claiming to be communist and even fewer claiming to be against the oppression of youth as a group. Again, to go beyond a zoological, or ecological, theory of youth requires conceptualization of youth as a social entity. An ecologist tactic is to tell the public stories about how the offspring of a species is hurt by humyn activity. One could argue that certain policies impact the children and ultimately the whole populations of so-called "developing" countries, but then again most people in the First World who would emphasize such a point are in denial about the vast majority of international exploitation. It is a concern that is not concretely connected to ending social oppression.
Returning briefly to the definition of "youth" as an adolescent male, the continuing concern with a general prudishness/prohibitionism as an alleged central facet of youth oppression reflects to an extent the higher sex drives adolescent males tend to have for whatever reason, compared with adolescent females. The underlying point in common between some anti-Communist, anti-Catholic and anti-Islamic movies is that authority (Stalin, Jesus, or Allah) gets in the way of adolescents' and particularly adolescents males' sex lives. This should be categorized under zoology or a related domain, because people believe non-humyn species also have a right to have sex. Sure, that has patriarchal connotations in the humyn context, but that is a problem of applying zoology to humyns consciously or implicitly. (For that matter, anthropomorphism is regarded with suspicion today, but how many people have really broken from a zoological approach and method in studying children, even if they do not make comparisons to animals.) In movies, zoological ideas obtain an impetus from a kind of softcore pornography (the 2008 Mexican movie seen globally "Voy a explotar" being a too-obvious recent example).
The paramount impetus for the Revolutionary Youth Movement was U.$. conscription during the Vietnam War, particularly as graduate and then undergraduate student deferments were ended and as the draft lottery was implemented (though the draft lottery had contradictory effects). Before the draft lottery, the draft more-disproportionately affected young people who weren't in college. (There was a basis for organizing working-class young people in that way. The implication of not organizing non-college young people on the basis of the draft could have been racism, against internal colony people or the Vietnamese. On the other hand, the basis of opposing the draft before the draft lottery could have been a fear of Black revolution. Nixon was campaigning to end the whole draft in 1968.) There is no draft in the United $tates today as there was in 1969. Mike Klonsky, SDS national secretary at the time, was writing against the II-S student deferment in 1968 ("Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement"), but it cannot be denied that there was a surge in the internationalist radicalization of students in 1969. If there is one situation in which one would expect a coherent concept of youth-of-some-sort to emerge, it would be a draft situation affecting younger people evenly below a certain age, but the Revolutionary Youth Movement and RYM II diluted any theoretical approach to the youth question, attempted or possible, by introducing various observations that were left unconnected except by a vague idea of ruling-class authority oppressing everyone and by a suggestion that older people are just chronologically further ahead as individuals in individualist capitalist society than younger people -- in other words, zoology overlaid on individualism. Then again, males are at their peak physically in their twenties, so a draft of males mostly in their twenties could be explained partly as zoology from the perspective of the United $tates' being an animal population.
Already in 1969 (Klonsky et al., "Revolutionary Youth Movement II," New Left Notes, 1969 July 8), RYM II was saying that the U.$. working class' conditions relative to the capitalists' were decreasing while saying that the size of the U.$. proletariat was increasing and that the number of unproductive-sector workers in the "U.S. proletariat" was increasing. Weatherman was saying the same thing, but with a less-white-chauvinist thrust. It is not surprising that today people with nostalgia for SDS are trying to stir up Amerikans, even more likely to be bourgeois than in 1969, on an economic basis while couching their white-chauvinism in a language of youth empowerment and liberation, in the same process blurring differences between various groups while denying any systemic basis for youth oppression.
The zoology of human society
Animals have a need for food, water, shelter, and space, children are taught in infant school. What non-human species do not have is capitalism. But couldn't the workers' struggle with capitalists be explained by zoology, as a matter of needing to eat etc.? The answer is "no." A zoologist could determine within a few days that humans needs to eat on a daily basis. Leaving aside the question of the extent to which class struggle in capitalism involves a struggle for day-to-day survival, such an observation would not explain why workers have to enter into class struggle.
There is a view of capitalism approaching a zoological view, and this is where, for example, critics of capitalism decry the health impact of capitalism associated with pollution and density in cities, but have no scientific view of how capitalism works or how it develops and no concept of class. While it concerns itself with something specific to the humyn species, capitalism, the view is zoological because the view is supra-class and supra-national and considers capitalism from the viewpoint of the species. The reasons for the existence of capitalism could be environmental, or they could be seven billion individual reasons. Contradictions as they actually exist in capitalist society go unrecognized. Where revolutionary solutions should be, there are idealist solutions reflecting a mostly descriptive approach. There is nothing wrong with invoking species interest, zoology, or evolutionary zoology, in agitation, but they should be called what they are in theoretical discourse.
How a disease spreads among humyns in a capitalist city is not something entirely beyond the reach of a zoologist ignorant of details of class and gender in the city, particularly if the city is large. No doubt the most perseverant zoologist concerned with a certain chronic problem could even arrive at a scientific view of society. A zoologist studying the "habitat" of an oppressed nation for a long period of analysis might even arrive at a scientific view of imperialism; one could imagine a fantasy non-humyn, extraterrestrial zoologist studying humans in her situation. When it comes to youth, the kinds of cross-population analyses a zoologist might do seem unlikely to shed light, particularly now that people in Third World nations are in a position of generalized domination by the First World; simultaneously, intra-population differences are less easily season. A zoologist might be prone to fixating on children in the First World, whom Maoists have suggested are a "child aristocracy,"(2) confusing them with the majority of the world's children. For additional reasons, related to evolutionary biology, this writer suspects zoologists would have difficulty discerning any societal relation oppressing children, the situation of offspring being closed related by adaptation or equilibrium to the situation of a given population. The struggle against the oppression of youth is part a struggle against all oppressive structure, and for a population to advance as far as uprooting the oppression of children may necessitate its bringing itself close to its own destruction. Seeing through the apparent stability of children's relations in society requires a dynamic approach open to considering history in places geographically distant from (the bulk of) the First world -- most obviously China and the Soviet Union -- for alternatives to the present realities of childhood.
Animal rights
To return again to the unfortunate definition of "youth" as an adolescent male, adolescent males on the street are actually often metaphorized as wild animals: on the prowl, in packs, etc. This raises an interesting problem: if animal control services supposedly have humane practices, what treatment might females and younger males experience if adolescent males are on something like animal control surveillance.
The obvious alternative to zoology as an object of critique is Freudism and its derivatives. There are direct, purportedly scientific comparisons of children to non-humyn animals, but intellectually Freudism has more currency than zoology (which is not typically a delineated ideology this context) in contemplation of youth. Rather than go deeper into Freudism than the Maoist Internationalist Movement has done, this writer considers another source of occlusion in First Worlders' thinking about children: zoology.
There is no shortage of people who know that abuse happens, know that it is prevalent (in the case of sexual abuse, against females, or at least a portion who are not in the constant care of parents, care which has significance for responsibility), and who would stop abuse if they saw it happening in front of them. Most people never see sexual abuse of children happening on the street even when they have experienced sexual abuse themselves. If it is physical abuse, a little interest taken will make it stop long enough for the passerby to think twice about whether it would be worth going to the police. Something that people do witness more frequently in the First World than child sexual abuse is abandoned pets. There is a category that many people think suffers abuse and has rights, but is not an oppressed social group: animals. Thus, there are "animal rights."
If communism is an application of social science, then animal rights may be to zoology what communism is to social science. Various ideas about children's rights need to be separated from -- or identified with -- animal rights. Subjectively for this writer, there is nothing wrong with animal rights in the abstract, and most of the presumed consequences of ending capitalism and imperialism for animals will be good for both animals and people, but animal rights should be called animal rights in order to clarify non-animal-rights questions.
There are different animal rights, so that there is a subset of animal rights called "companion animal rights," pet rights. In the opposite direction, zoology as a science is used in the protection of rights of slaughtered animals to minimize pain or nervous system activity, which may require an understanding of an animal's particular biology.
As a starting point for this theme, if one takes the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (the CRC) and subtracts from it the ideas found in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the DHR), little is left that could not be found in discussions of pet rights; even "education" is mystifyingly (in a supra-social way) tied to "development." The clauses in the Convention referring to things that non-human animals couldn't do (e.g., "Provide for appropriate regulation of the hours and conditions of employment") are either derivative of non-children protected groups' interests or essentially related to protecting the biological and psychological development of children as formative adults. One could argue that the United Nations at least grants children "human rights," but the very existence of a separate document for children implies that children not only are not individuals, but are not yet fully human. At the same time, the Convention inscribes the family and the school as being essential to proper childhood. The CRC ostensibly adds to, but also removes from, the DHR in the context of children. The DHR does not explicitly list age among the distinctions ("Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex . . . ") without which everyone is entitled to human rights.
The Convention, which both reflects and institutionalizes older people's power over children, and the Declaration together will be confusing for people who are trying to work out a theory of children's oppression, but are predisposed to Liberalism. Within a Liberal framework, a status for children as being somewhere between animal and human is justifiable. The Convention and the Declaration represent a Liberal accommodation between the First World and the Third World on an international plane.
Pets and consequently pet rights are not at the top of the Third World masses' priorities. Compared with lesser rights, some animal rights will look good for children. Instead of parasite-rich-country people chastising the Third World masses for not giving their children glorified Border Collie- or poodle-level animal rights (in the First Worlders' eyes), First Worlders should realize that they reinforce the oppression of children by paying more attention to alleged injustices against animals while leaving the category of children mired in a limbo resulting in a lack of advance. There is a general lack of social science and progress in the First World at this time, but there are particular reasons for the state of thinking on youth.
To the extent that children have more rights than animals do and zoological language and ideas are just used to grant those rights, that could be an advance. (More tangentially, though zoological language and ideas encompass more than what is called "animal rights," presumably whatever animals have under animal rights children should be able to have. This writer is not interested in coming up with excuses to focus on animal rights, but progress for animals could have potential to result in progress for children.) What actually happens is that the rights that protect children from the "abuse" of adult power always either come with further restrictions for children with a widening of paternalism, or stabilize and reproduce existing structures that generate the abuse in the first place. Of course, the supposed protection of children's rights takes various forms in interactions between the state and the oppressed -- the bourgeois and imperialist monitoring and management of the families of the proletariat and oppressed nations -- but the state in present societies also functions for the interests of patriarchy as a whole in relation to children. It is a patriarchal state and acts like a grandfather might toward a father, who has a son and daughter. (The concept of parens patriae in the legal context suggests itself, but the assertion this writer is making here is that the state in contemporary societies reproduces the patriarchy.)
In the First World, the status of children is such that more energy goes into thinking about vegetarianism and how (non-human) animals are oppressed. There are books on how to train, raise, and live with, pets in a caring and compassionate way, and there are similar books for children under the rubrics of parenting and education that don't necessarily reflect an interest in ending or preventing children's oppression. To the extent that oppression of children is dealt with, it is mostly oppression in terms of various protected groups: workers, religious minorities, females, ethnic minorities, etc. Ideas about nurturing and respecting children as emerging individuals mask class and nation realities, differences, and similarities; failure to raise children in this way is treated as a sign of oppression of humanity in the abstract. As the science of teaching and learning, pedagogy (particularly in the ahistorical and non-revolutionary context it is commonly understood) has nothing intrinsically to do with children's experiences of oppression or children's well-being outside school, though often involving sentimental ideas about childhood. Educationists and fashionably various other people who do not all even claim to be politically left propose bringing "critical thinking" and "inquiry-based learning" into education. Some ideas should just be regarded as white-nationalist or patriotic -- certain methods and skills, problem-solving, collaboration, etc., are viewed as being good for the nation or country -- but to the extent that they overlap with the idea of children as having a right to explore and discover or embody a theory of child development, they often represent a developmentalist biological or psychological view of children, emphasizing a special biology or psychology of children and development priorities.
People with diverse positions and strategies view some or all of animal rights as being realizable and take actions in accord with that view. First Worlders aren't destroying life and property on behalf of children, except the "unborn" facing abortion. In common between animal rights activism and anti-abortion activism is the seemingly indisputable helplessness of those seen as requiring assistance, which provides opportunities for incontestable heroism in the minds of those doing the helping. So, there is an odd situation where some suggest that particularly adolescent males have rights, while others suggest that, among the young, only the "unborn" are worthy of intense anxiety. Oppression of other young people younger than eighteen is discussed as "abuse" of supposedly normal situations and relationships.
Some claiming animal liberation attack research facilities destructively. Others claiming rights of the unborn attack abortion providers, to help the helpless. Meanwhile, adolescents asserts an ability to help themselves to a degree, but to the same degree they are seen as individuals with agency, oppressed by not being allowed to exercise it. Between the utterly helpless and having budding Liberal agency are young people who have "abuse" that is seen as having gone on for thousands of years and being destined to go on for thousands of more years.
Treat young people as people -- that's a provocative, but warm and fuzzy slogan that is also fuzzy in having no concrete content. It's the best that Liberalism can offer, but what Liberalism can offer is not enough. Though social environments of children have changed dramatically over even just the past few hundred years, present social environments of children are seen as being basically permanent, with the consequence that abuse is treated as a permanent feature of the species, and thinking about children is carried out within a kind of animal rights refinement project and oppressor nation paternalism refinement projects in imperialist countries with internal colonies.
Freudians have an intervention that involves more people spending time on the couch with a psychoanalyst. An extended discussion of psychoanalysis and what is means for the patriarchal oppression of children is necessary and beyond the scope of this article, but it is important to notice something about child sexual abuse in particular and popular culture. With the Catholic Church clergy child sexual abuse scandal involving even adolescent boys and multiple cases like Mary Kay LeTourneau, something that one could have expected to come out of all of that was a theoretical attempt to deal with the child sexual abuse of boys recognizing that female and male children were in a similar situation and not just as an extension of the father's oppression of the mother. Instead, there is anti-Catholicism, in a context (the First World) where the Catholic Church is not the dominant church, and the church in general as a social structure is not more important than the family and the school in the lives of children. Secondly, stupid pseudo-feminists, not clearly separating a critique of male right from the situation of "adolescent" male victims of abuse by people in positions of trust and power, have spent much time complaining about the media's and males' treatment of LeTourneau's former student as if male victims of child sexual abuse had some kind of gender privilege, more access to sex than female targets, and the media's mild treatment of LeTourneau were too complicated to deal with. The most that some have said about the media is that it reinforced the nurturer stereotype (positioning LeTourneau either inside or outside it) or the femme fatale role, or feminine stereotypes in general. In other words, woman is the victim even if a male child was abused. (In film, television, and media, adolescent and preadolescent boys are frequently represented as being fortunate to have sex with adult women. There are even jokes sexualizing breastfeeding and about boy infants as making sexual advances on women. Refusing to focus on the adult aspect of child abuse by adults separately from the male biology of perpetrators, purportedly feminist narratives on child abuse incidents contribute to these representations.) Now, there is media discussion of "sexting" (transmission of sexual content, especially pictures, by cell phone) between students. The context is different, but so-called feminists are talking about that in a similar way, claiming that people are too anxious about girls' sexual expression.
The fact that pseudo-feminists seek more gender privilege for First World females is interesting in its own right and a phenomenon of a gender aristocracy, but most interesting for the present article is the zoological implication that child abuse is going to go on forever, as if child abuse -- by being innate behavior or culturally transmitted behavior emerging spontaneously -- were inherent in the human species, and at the same time external to human social relations, like animals. Any "feminism" in the First World that, by relegating to ignorance a category of bodily domination, would have child abuse go on forever is not worth supporting. At this point in their development of struggle against oppression, the masses on a real level are correct to think in pejorative sexual terms of female-identified so-called feminism in contexts where "feminists" seem singlemindedly concerned with liberating female sexuality. Males, some of whom may be asexual, have experienced childhood abuse by female adults. The attitude that First World alleged feminists are overly interested in sex separately from avoiding it in coerced relationships cannot be boiled down in a simple way to only misogyny and sexism. In the same vein, the denial of abuse of male children by females may have relevance to difficulty in ending misogyny.
Zoological pseudo-feminism against children's liberation
Among biological adults, at one point gender oppression -- its direction and distribution of privilege -- closely paralleled female and male biology. Today, more people with male biology are gender-oppressed, because the gender oppressors are concentrated in the First World. Yet, in the majority of what calls itself "feminism," the category of woman is still located in female biology or feminine appearance. The continuing fixation, even among postmodernists, with anatomical and hormonal biology and appearance, if not chromosomal biology -- and vice versa -- in non-transgender contexts such that people cannot conceive of Third World adult males as being gender-oppressed by First World females has had additional effects, pertaining to children. (Indeed, a role of contemporary postmodernism is to preclude contemplation of children as a new subject of feminism.) Now that the parallel between gender oppression and biology is mostly gone on a world scale, much feminism has become zoological, and this affected thinking about children, among other things.
To be clear, the zoological outlook doesn't hurt everyone. It hurts children's prospects for liberation, but it could benefit the First World gender aristocracy even when it is applied to the First World gender aristocracy. MIWS will illustrate zoology again and talk about why some of the gender aristocracy's zoology-based demands undermine children's liberation.
Something that architecture and urban planning students might think about typically is the height of a drinking water fountain, can a child reach it. Let's stay out of "Star Trek" land and contemplate what was possible in even Karl Marx's time. One solution under the constraint of having only one fountain is to have stairs or some kind of incline around the base of the fountain so that people of different heights can reach it. It is possible, though, that stairs or a slope would be dangerous. A compromise may be desirable: a fountain low enough for a five-year-old to reach. But then that might be bad for adults with bad backs, so let's take it up to a height an eight-year-old could reach.
The kinds of compromises that go into having one drinking fountain or even two fountains reflect zoology, the reality of human growth. There is a sense in which drinking fountains involve discrimination. In an ideal society, though, a random ten-year-old in the vicinity would be able to lift a five-year-old up to a drinking fountain without there being any relationship or situation with a potential for abuse. One could reason that in a society without class oppression, gender oppression, and national oppression, a majority of the existing abuse in connection to a five-year-old persyn's wanting to use a high drinking fountain in a public place would be gone.
In the long run, drinking water fountain height is not a utilitarian problem, which would be a Liberal way of looking at the situation. If a children's advocate focused on drinking fountain height, sink height, toilet seat height, urinal height, shelf height, etc., but did not focus on the surrounding social environments, he or she could be accused of having a zoological concern, essentially wanting the biological reality of bipedal mammals' development to disappear. Similarly, alleged feminists in the First World who keep returning to female-biology people's reproductive biology in their thinking and practice are suspect as having a zoological preoccupation.
In the First World, most female adults have the individual freedom to leave relationships and to not enter into relationships in the first place. Most female adults are able to talk with other female adults about what pregnancy and living with children is like. Most female adults have access to contraceptives. For females in general, not just those over 18, the average ages at first pregnancy and first birth were in the mid-twenties as early as a few years ago (a change from decades earlier). Additionally, for certain reasons, the population of whites is decreasing absolutely. The fertility rate is below the replacement rate, pointing to an overcoming of any biological or social imperative for expanded population reproduction. The fertility rates of non-whites are decreasing. Society is learning to live with fewer births. Some contraceptives aren't reliable; access to abortion isn't equal; planned pregnancies can have problems and unexpected (but not unpredictable) health consequences; and hundreds of thousands of females (a fraction of females who have been pregnant in the United $tates, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia) may have heart-wrenching stories about a difficult pregnancy or an uncomplicated pregnancy in difficult circumstances. Given what female adults in the First World do have, though, a preoccupation with pregnancy-related problems of adult females (particularly those who are heterosexual and decide to have vaginal intercourse) within the framework of present First World society, and at a time when a reversal of fertility rate changes is unrealistic, could be a zoological fixation veering toward a complaint about biology itself, if not tailing the Democratic Party. There are more abortion rights activists in the United $tates than critics of the romance culture, which the gender aristocracy rather supports and seeks to refine on an informal basis while pursuing overall enjoyment of different kinds of heterosexual relationships with penetrative sex (in some places in the United $tates, undergoing out-migration, there may be more of a struggle over fertility, but the latest generation of U.$. self-identified feminists is focused on something more along the lines of being able to have risk-free potentially unprotected sex with men met at fraternity parties and night clubs). Both females and males are responsible for pregnancies, but outside of science fiction at this time the fact that only females can bear children is unchanging. Males can be taken down a few notches socially, but the zoological differences between females and males pertaining to bearing children will still exist. In addition, though the amount of responsibility females have relative to males, and discrimination against pregnant females and their confinement, is determined by social relations, the freedom of pregnant female individuals at different points in the course of pregnancy will concretely and for zoological reasons be potentially different than the freedom of male individuals who participated in the impregnation. With the best health care available and a support system, pregnancy would still impact pregnant females' daily activities at some point.
Pseudo-feminists stuck in word games will object to MIWS's speaking of the "zoological" in the context of pregnancy and abortion, but they are themselves at the forefront of pushing an approach centered on females' biology. Implanting uteruses in males is not realistic at this time, but vasectomy is an easy operation, and sperm could be stored in locally controlled facilities. Yet, sterilization of males (which would free impregnated females from having to deal with all kinds of competing pressures) with planned use of stored semen is a minority position within feminism. At the same time, there is a lot of heterosexual sex going on in the First World that is not connected to reproduction. It can be inferred that instead of requiring their male partners to have vasectomies or use other advanced male contraception, First World females want easier access to sex and quasi-prostitutive relationships that they could avoid. Male sterilization would be easier to accomplish under socialism. Already at a point where it can choose not to be in relationships and choose to fight for socialism if it wanted to, the gender aristocracy of First World females seeks to exercise its gender privilege (relative to children and Third World people) instead and has fixated its gaze domestically on resolving with abortion rights the long-run zoological consequence, pregnancy, of coitus between chromosomal females and males without upsetting its alliance with First World males. It is easier for the gender aristocracy to adopt the bourgeois rhetoric and ideology of Liberal individualism than use state power to end gender oppression and handle suspected inequities in reproduction matters by restructuring relationships and institutions. Short of revolution, separatism, whether lesbian or heterosexual-celibate, is to be preferred to zoological heterosexual pseudo-feminism utilizing Liberal individualism.
MIWS is not saying that children's liberation is through stopping abortions, and MIWS is not saying that children's liberation is through the population's dying off -- suicide of the whole species -- or through the population's aging as a result of low birth and death rates. Neither should there be pressure on females to become pregnant -- pressure to which pseudo-feminism contributes by neglecting its social origins and disdaining collective struggle over, and collective solutions to, reproduction questions. Rather, zoological pseudo-feminism centered on biology and particularly female biology in the First World context, sets itself against children's liberation in several ways.
1) Without addressing the oppression of children by parents and other adults, children are consistently discussed as burdens to mothers in particular (not just as fetuses) and biological parents in general -- even though it is now socially possible for most First World adult females and males to avoid having babies. 2) At the same time, choosing to own children is an alleged right of people with female biology. If a female-biology individual decides to give birth to and own ten, twenty or five children, she is considered as having a "right" to do so, and society is not to have anything to say about, and any interest of any kind in, the culture and the technology making possible a high birth count for one female. If society does, whether or not it imposes a legal restriction, it is threatening the autonomy of female-biology individuals. The totality of reproductive choices of female-biology individuals has no bearing on society and especially nothing to do with exploited Third World female and male workers who are allegedly against choice. Feminism is the perfection of female individuals' choices, is the stated or unstated principle. According to most of this "feminism," capitalism, First World living standards, and most of the basic arrangements and institutions of the present society (including those relevant to children), are here to stay (meaning that the demands of the "feminism" are not preconditions for a future society), yet society may neither discourage nor encourage child-bearing and certainly not in any way that constrains female-biology individuals' freedom. 3) The ownership of children by less-gender-privileged lesbian and gay people is discussed as a "right" and a biological imperative. Again, children have merely a zoological role, here as offspring for people who have a certain zoological requirement for adoption -- when in a socialist system "adoption" might be meaningless with the emergence of new forms of social organization and child-rearing. On the other hand, some alleged feminists purporting to represent the interests of biological mothers in adoption and custody dispute contexts (either separately from or in congruency with the children's interests) are involved in slowing down progress on equal adoption rights for gays and lesbians. 4) The whole debate on single motherhood and its consequences for children regards children only as developing subjects. 5) First World adult females with partners and children are said to be unable to leave abusive relationships, because they cannot support the children by themselves. Regardless of the situation of the children themselves, the implicit assumption is that they are tied to the mothers. Children are cast in the role of needing to be supported, and there may be an unspoken zoological rationale for treating mothers and their children as inseparable (breastfeeding or something else). Supposedly, First World alleged feminism has broken with the idea that there is a natural bond between biological mother and child, but the idea shows up in various contexts despite the sophisticated ideas of theorists dealing with divorce and child custody issues and trying not to reinscribe gender stereotypes and ideals.
Supposedly, twenty-first century First World feminism is (in its focus) past a protracted stage of struggling and acting within the roles of mother and wife, and past the stage of opposing forced wifehood and forced motherhood (except when it comes to First World pseudo-feminists' needing to build for war against Third World peoples). An examination of the Web site of the white-nationalist U.$. National Organization for Women (NOW), though, finds NOW putting forward U.$. adult females as protectors of children, standing in between the child, and the father or the state. In the case of the state, the state victimizes children by denying them benefits and services. The underlying idea, sometimes masked as concern for children's rights, is that children are a burden to parents. The well-being children may actually be an issue, and as MIWS has discussed so-called children's rights encode a set of developmental and paternalistic concerns anyway, but additionally so-called children's rights are partly ways to free females to work in a fluid capitalist economy and engage in leisure activity. NOW seeks benefits and services for First World children to better the lives of First World females. (It does not have a section even for "children's rights," but NOW's Web site has a section for "diversity," linking integrationism to the gender aristocracy in multiple ways.)
Ending the oppression of children will have benefit for females who actually are burdened by bearing, carrying or living with children. However, children increasingly need to be the starting point of discussion of patriarchy in the First World context, not an afterthought. The order in which children and females have been discussed needs to be inverted in the First World, which has a privileged female adult gender aristocracy, most of whom are in fact patriarchs partaking in and propping up gender oppression with First World males.
Despite throwback or backward-looking "feminists" still talking about children as a burden on Euro-Amerikan adult females who didn't get pregnant when they were minors and conflating individual and minority cases of real hardship with the majority situation, the development of feminism has shifted attention away from females' relationship with children as mothers. Feminism continues to claim to represent, and be represented by, females in particular. But a (revolutionary) feminist theoretical contribution is still needed to handle children's oppression, which is autonomous of class and nation. Some feminists with XX sex chromosomes may be reluctant to address children's oppression not because of a belief that children are tangential to feminism's subject (which may be the case for others), but because addressing the topic may seem to put them in a maternal role that they are trying to avoid. This writer's suggestion to such people is that they either get over that and deal with children's oppression scientifically, or work to curtail female identity politics and epistemological objections interfering with the recognition that male-biology individuals can be feminists, and not just feminists, but leading feminists. If feminism is really beyond a stage of exalting the mother as maternal, fathers should be able to be "nurturing," too. Inequality in caretaking objectively exists, but if it is not easy for females to tackle children's oppression and oppose gender roles simultaneously, children's questions cannot wait until there is sex equality in caretaking or the family has already disappeared. (Nearly a century ago, Alexandra Kollontai said the family was on the way out the door, but it underwent a resurgence in Russia.) Really, one should be thinking of children's liberation as symbolic repudiation of both the father and the mother, but for people to accept that fathers can be "nurturing" would be an advance if feminists' avoidance of the mother role prevents them from dealing with children's oppression adequately.
Ms. Magazine has no problem calling male Barack Obama a "feminist" on an Amerikan female chauvinist basis, which apparently means Obama is some kind of militant internationalist feminist for threatening to overthrow leaders in Muslim Third Nations and carry out wars in Muslim Third World nations. Citing Obama's being raised by his mother as a piece of evidence, Cecile Richards is hopeful and calls Obama a "woman's man." The bright side: At least, GQ-sexy straight black men can now be feminists. It's unfortunate that Obama is a pseudo-feminist, a reactionary, and one of the most evil persons on the planet.
Anti-authoritarianism
People need to eat. Younger people were born young. These are both practically facts of physics, thermodynamics, on which social systems set themselves and on which various things develop. The biological substrata, the facts of life, don't change. Groping for something more specific than the obvious (youthfulness) -- some people regurgitating the rhetoric of Students for a Democratic Society have attached themselves to "authority" as the locus of youth oppression.
"Calvin and Hobbes" presents a sanitized vision of the family in which tension exists, but abuse seems impossible, even ongoing verbal attack. While perhaps being cathartic for parents frustrated with their own children, "Calvin and Hobbes" contributes to a mystification of child abuse. People may see their own families in "Calvin and Hobbes," but to the extent that the comic strip seems real the origins of abuse are obscured to the same extent, because abuse is not present in the comic strip. What is apparent is that Calvin has various seemingly whiny complaints about authority. Some strips ridicule Calvin's demand for his household to be a democratic microcosm of society.
Since the state is a patriarchal state overseeing the oppression of children, First World oppressor nations don't have a proletariat making progress, and furthermore neither the majority of "Marxism" nor the majority of intellectual "feminism" has much of substance to say about children's oppression, this writer can understand why First World oppressor nation young people would be attracted to anarchism, with its focus on authority and the lifestyles of individuals (being more visible and tangible than any revolutionary upsurge on the part of First World oppressor nation workers). The majority of First World "Marxism" addresses young people in a paternalistic and flattering, but belittling way and does not correctly or persuasively handle authority questions in relation to children or "youth." Some so-called Marxism packages itself as being "anti-authoritarian" for adolescent youth -- a crass brand or marketing strategy, not a scientific line -- but anarchism makes authority one of its central concerns. Authority is obvious, because it is everyday and projected by individuals. Those individuals and that projection exist within certain social environments that have specific bases, are located in the midst of several contradictions, and can be eliminated only with a strategy based on a theory and an analysis.
In the First World, "authority" is usually an excuse for apathy or reaction. Calvin in "Calvin and Hobbes" must do what his parents and teachers tell him to do, but "my parents made me do it," "my professors made me do it," "my church made me do it," "my cult made me do it," "my president made me do it," "my commanding officer made me do it," and "my government made me do it" -- made by an adult each of those is potentially an excuse for an easygoing life, either going with the flow or engaging in symbolic opposition to the status quo. "Anti-authoritarianism" should stop when one reaches adulthood. Then again, while reflecting a reality of childhood, "anti-authoritarianism" isn't particularly informative for young people either.
As a strategy, anti-authoritarianism -- intensifying the existing rebellion of youth against whatever they are rebelling against -- might be polarization: a generational polarization. Advocates of anti-authoritarianism won't put it that way for fear of alienating older people on whom they are dependent for support, but that would be the strategic content specific to anti-authoritarianism. Fighting corporations or government agencies could be called "anti-corporate" or "anti-state," rather than "anti-authoritarian." Corporations and government agencies may be particularly important forms of authority to anarchists for stated or unstated reasons, but anti-authoritarianism as an orientation doesn't specify a target.
Not only was there the draft in the United $tates in the 1960s and the early 1970s, there was a relatively new threat of nuclear world war that seemingly could be blamed on adults in various nations (the United $tates and the Soviet Union, at least) and classes. By the 1980s, supposedly 30% of high school seniors agreed or mostly agreed that annihilation of the species was likely within their lifetime.(3) Researchers have suggested that fear of nuclear war affects young people's life decisions and results in impulsiveness and resentment of those with power (ibid.). In the 1960s and 1970s, fear of nuclear war could conceivably have given rise to generational polarization resulting in opposition to both U.$. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. It would be interesting to look at comparable statistics on young people's perception of the threat of nuclear war today, but it is unclear what generational polarization would result in today in the United $tates other than getting behind young, hip, basketball-playing Barack Obama to attack Islamic nations. Obviously, Obama knows how to play the generational/youth game.
Generational polarization may or may not be the way to go at a given time, in the struggle to end children's oppression and other oppression. Rather than suggest such a contingent strategy by using a slogan against authority and confusing that strategy with youth liberation, MIWS would prefer that young people become revolutionary scientists and practitioners like everyone else. If they currently lack the capability, they should do what they can to study, or develop the ability to study, social issues. This writer is aware of some "free schools" offering mathematics classes, but where those schools are unavailable and people's excuse for not learning math and other useful tools is "authority," then some places may just not be ready for a scientific communist movement. The influence of super-profit, of promises of the parasitic good life, of television producers, of video game, skateboard and paintball company marketing, and of MySpace-type semi-pornography, should not be underestimated.
Youth who learned that ending widespread oppression does not require theory or study and are being attracted to any movement ("anarchist," "communist" or "left") on a loose anti-authoritarian basis are probably being deceived by older "youth" or adults, consciously or unconsciously, in order to use them in organizations lacking formal structure. Youth in the First World have time to learn with each other and don't need flatterers.
Authority as such
In a running joke in "Calvin and Hobbes," Calvin petitions his father as if he were a monarch. Calvin openly airs his grievances, but does not always question his father's right to rule. One time, Calvin does propose replacing his father with someone else: replacing a king with another king. One argument given in favor of monarchy is that it is clear who is in power, and people know who is responsible for things. Monarchs can be overthrown and replaced with other monarchs if necessary. Liberal democracy purports to offer more benefits than monarchy while still providing a formal structure for government, superimposed on a society where power differences still exist. The joke in "Calvin and Hobbes" has Calvin's father as an obstacle to Calvin's engaging in democracy in a society supposedly without a monarch, as if democracy could be practiced in a household. There could be a comment somewhere there about the difference between representative and participatory democracy, since Amerikan adult readers already have representative democracy.
Calvin puts pressure on his father, drags his feet, and sulks, but he goes along with whatever his father and mother ultimately decide, while they are watching and in the short term. Calvin knows who the boss is.
First World females have made gains in terms of power. Less obvious to everyone is that First World females are a privileged minority of the world's females and what First World females' gains mean for the distribution of gender privilege in the context of Third World females and males and First World children. In college, students receive training in criticizing "sexism," "racism" and "classism" in language and the ideas and actions of individuals, but there has not been a comprehensive account of the implications of First World females' power for First World females' gender privilege. This has a bearing on children's oppression, because though children were oppressed even when First World females were not oppressors (of Third World females and males), the failure to examine adequately First World females' authority over children is more important today in the reasons why children's subjugation and oppression is denied.
In the 1980s, attention to single mothers increased in the United $tates. Responding to anxiety over single mothers, U.$. feminists have defended both single mothers and single motherhood, sometimes ignoring the imprisonment issue. Though single motherhood is not ideal to many of the single mothers (wasn't a highly gender-privileged choice), a consequence of defending single motherhood is that it becomes more difficult for those invested (despite criticism of the Madonna-whore dichotomy) in female identity as if females were particularly virtuous to approach the question of children's oppression. To take the often-sensationalized example of child abuse, single mothers are implicated in any child abuse that happens in the household. If "something happened" and the mother was the only adult around, the mother's responsibility can be inferred. The only factual dispute may be over the role of any children in the family other than the abused child. Similarly, the increased independence of female teachers has implications for child abuse -- how it is perpetrated, gendered, and unrecognized.
It is logistically easier for a single mother (like a single father) to molest and physically abuse male children than it is for a married father, living with his spouse, to molest and physically abuse female children in a private single-family home. Instead of papering over that or talking a bullshit language game about how pointing that out is "sexist" or anti-feminist backlash, scientific feminists need to deal, even if just for the sake of female children abused by mothers. In conversations about female abusers, backlash is a possibility, but there are theoretical and analytical questions that cannot be avoided indefinitely. The physical and sexual abuse of female and male children by female adults cannot be denied in the recent empirical child abuse literature, but First World "feminism" is involved in covering it up for First World female-biology adult advancement. If pseudo-feminism is the ideology of the gender aristocracy, which seeks privilege for itself and not liberation of all females and gender-oppressed people, part of the privilege the gender aristocracy seeks and which pseudo-feminism builds for is the kind of access adult males have to children. Pseudo-feminism works for adult females to obtain that access and perpetuates that access for adult males, too. The actual numbers involved in female child abuse could be anything; this article doesn't get into them, but the point is that, whether the discussion is concrete or abstract, pseudo-feminism discourages attention to the topic, even if female child abuse might be explained by class- or gender-related "stress," or "displacement" (familial abuse being a classic Freudian example of displacement, though one seeming to locate spousal abuse outside a patriarchal system).
In the introductory chapter of one of the few theoretical feminist books on child sexual abuse addressing female perpetrators, Emily Driver writes:
"Women rarely sexually abuse children and yet, in the few cases that have come to light, public outrage against female abusers reflects society's contradictory expectations of women. . . . Almost without thinking, we calmly accept his violence as part of the continuum of male aggression, whilst saving our rage for Myra's refusal to nurture and protect. . . . And when a mother is plainly guilty of neglect, our angry response can prevent us from noticing that we are operating a sexual double-standard -- we take it for granted that men abuse, and yet expect women to refuse to accept this."(4)
This illustrates how the denial of child abuse committed by females could be carried out at the level of theory initially out of what may be a concern with real sexism -- in this context disproportionate anger at mothers for not preventing abuse, while in actuality their husbands may be the ones doing the abusing or are more abusive and people's agitation over female child abusers may reinforce the nurturer gender ideal and distract from more-likely or more-common child abuse by males. This writer agrees with Emily Driver in principle where she writes: "We often see these women as colluders, forgetting that collusion implies equal access to information and power." (p. 9) If females have less power, at least within a family, their complicity and participation in child abuse in that family may be less clear. They may themselves be subject to abuse that they would have difficulty ending in the short term. The problem is that Driver is writing in the late 1980s, and two decades have passed since the founding of the National Organization for Women, for example. Today, it is 2009, and two decades have passed since Driver wrote. The question arises, what has changed in terms of adult females' power in two decades or four decades. Scientific feminists cannot keep saying the same thing decade after decade as if nothing changes. That is dogmatism. Besides employment and income gains (absolute and relative) of mothers in general and female adults in general, the number of "white" single-mother families in the United $tates increased by nearly four million between 1970 and 2008 to 6.1 million, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, 6.1 million being 20% of total white families in 2008 with children under 18.(5)
Given an imaginary "Calvin and Hobbes" where Calvin's father is absent and there is only Calvin's mother, pseudo-feminism would say that there must be a Father around somewhere. It could be a stranger on the street; it could be the government; it could be society personified as a male; it could be the father in prison with a long sentence, but somehow still an oppressor; but it cannot be the mother. The relationship between mother and child continues to be wrapped up in an aura of sentimentality that is backward and perpetuates the nurturing-mother role for females. Most First World females are free not to be mothers, but when they are mothers, the nurturing-mother image is available for exploitation by First World pseudo-feminists. Female child abusers themselves use traditional ideas about mothers, and about females in general as vulnerable innocents, as a shield from scrutiny and criticism and to excuse abuse. Helping these abusers are pop-Freudian ideas about boys as fantasizing about sex with their mothers, but not actually experiencing (or disliking) sexual abuse by their mothers.(6)
In the actual "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip, Calvin's father often appears distant, self-absorbed, and aloof. The father's relationship and interactions with Calvin, even when he is indulging Calvin, present an appearance of pure formality -- just doing a job, with resentful affection. Both feminists and anti-feminists critique the "emotionally absent" husband. Though Calvin's father's formality is just a matter of his personal disposition in a position that could be occupied by a father more emotionally involved, what Calvin's father could represent is an advance in comparison with situations where domination is less visible/more hidden and domination is blurred with caring (if Calvin's father is not just a stereotype of the father as an authority figure or provider, rather than a nurturer). Calvin knows that his father has a duty to provide him with some things. He accepts the supremacy of his father and may not expect his father to have any guaranteed moral imperative to not be abusive if there are no preventive measures in place.
In transitional socialist society, instead of orphanages or collective child-rearing initially one could imagine the existence of an extended, compulsory or incentive-based adoption program for abandoned children or children considered an excess for an individual parent or family. The authority of the adoptive parents would be formal, legally or contractually mandated. All parents could be required to accompany their children (defined according to some criteria), both female and male, at all times, except at designated events, activities and spaces from which adults are barred -- a seemingly burdensome requirement for both parents and children, but one that may be needed to combat sexism, for example, and transition to other structures and non-structures in a planned and conscious way. Though both parents or guardians in a two-parent-or-guardian household have legal obligations, children in the present society face a situation of power being distributed informally in households with more than one adult or more than one older persyn, and power being distributed informally between older people in society at large. Simultaneously, an adult alternates between what seems to be a dominating mode and an affective caring mode and takes turns with other adults to fill that role. The informal distribution of power allows individual adults to withhold from responsibility and accountability while adults as a group have access to children. In the midst of this, children have obligations to particular adults, but also to adults in general -- to be considerate, polite, respectful, trusting, grateful, and reverent. These unspecial or less-special adults have less responsibility for the children, who are not their own, and have less accountability.
In the home, the internally informally distributed power of the adults who own the children, and of older children with borrowed authority, bears a resemblance to a bubbling viscous something such as mud. There are constant surface eruptions and waves everywhere. There are openings and shifting spaces. The bubbles break, leaving craters that eventually disappear. The troughs of the waves that form, as bubbles surface and burst or ejections splash, gradually fill with the substance of the medium. There may be some vapor from the heated medium, but the surface can be described more or less as being in a dynamic equilibrium. After the gas (either originating in the medium or from another source) passes through the pool, the surface returns to an average level. In the informal power of adults in the family, and in the formal power of adults that presents an appearance of mutableness or whose exercise is flexible, the ephemeral openings and rolling spaces are those cavities in space and time where domination appears absent or domination appears mixed or diluted with pure human affection or biological necessity. There is obviously structure, but it appears volatile. But the spaces evaporate. They may re-form in a brief moment, but after they are gone, nothing of substance has been left behind: so many words and facial expressions.
Those cavities in space and time are where domination is bound up most intensely with affection -- where there is a strong aura of intimacy around power. In those spaces, abuse can and frequently does take place. For many children who are abused and seeking relief or some comfort, though, life is like trying to hop from trough to trough in a mudpot. There is a difference between the level of the crest and the level of the trough. There is some distance there, so that by jumping from trough to trough one can experience a longer fall. The perception of this difference creates an illusion that chasing after it may bring permanent or temporary relief. In the end, the child plunges herself or himself deeper into the pool, becomes mired in it as never before. Sometimes, the strategy of an abused child is just to sit in one place on the surface and ride the bubbles/eruptions and waves as they come, as though by not struggling too much for affection (which may encourage the abuser) and not struggling too hard for relief from immediate abuse, he or she will avoid descending even further. There seems to be no way out. The child can measure the difference between the crest and the trough and knows what to expect, but on the outside of the family there is a chasm beyond which the possibilities of life outside the family are unclear. Uninformed, children cannot see clearly beyond their family; past the fog may lie a worse situation.
MIWS will re-use the example of single-mother families again, not because there is necessarily more abuse in single-mother families, but because the topic illustrates an abuse issue involved in informal power and also why pseudo-feminism has limited ability to account for child abuse, pseudo-feminism here being the seeking of privilege for a minority of females, adult females in the First World. By suggesting that the Father is present though there may be no man around on a daily basis, pseudo-feminism implies that there is an informal distribution of power (both from where the parent is standing and from an overlooking perspective) between single mothers and other adults in society. These other adults could be grandparents, people in the extended family, romantic partners, the police, probation officers and other professionals or workers in the juvenile justice system, social workers, teachers, adults in the community, medical personnel, etc. It is informal because only the single mother has ongoing formal responsibility (in most cases where the biological father does not have custody) outside school, yet various other adults whose identities may change and with undefined or temporarily defined responsibilities, obligations, and powers, are supposed to be the manifestation of patriarchal power. Though legally a single female parent is the owner of her or his child, the parent engages in a power-sharing with other adults that lacks accountability if any abuse against the child does take place. "Information" about actual child abuse and "power" to stop abuse one knows is going on (to use reference points from Emily Driver's remarks on collusion) are irrelevant. If a football is thrown from persyn to persyn, each standing behind a screen obstructing all others' view, anything can happen to the ball when it is behind a screen. Everyone knows that a large number of children are abused, too many to be accounted for by attackers on the street. They are complicit. They play the game even though they know children will eventually be abused. The game is fun for everyone -- except the children passed around who are abused and a few truly powerless adults who are stuck as spectators of abuse happening behind some room and building walls. Each adult can claim to have only partial responsibility. It may not be clear even who is playing the game at a given time. It is easier ideologically and otherwise for the adults to let themselves off the hook. Some may not stay around long enough for the children to grow up and kick their ass.
Ellie Nesler has passed away at the time of this writing, a few months ago. Nesler is the U.$. woman who in the early 1990s shot and killed in a California courthouse Daniel Driver, accused of sexually abusing her son. No doubt she was a vigilante, that's just a factual matter, but there was a debate about whether Nesler was a hero and the extent and nature of her responsibility (with various, contradictory implications from a sympathy standpoint -- if Nesler was compelled, but "insane," what does that mean, etc.). The pro-Ellie Nesler film "Judgment Day: The Ellie Nesler Story" (1999, directed by Stephen Tolkin) portrays Nesler's husband and the justice system as complicit in child sexual abuse. Nesler's son himself ended up in the justice system, resulting in discussions as if the only thing wrong with child abuse were that it harmed children's natural development. The title of the Ellie Nesler movie is appropriate because the abuse happened in connection to a Christian camp; in addition, vigilantism, despite the fifth/sixth Commandment, has a particularly Christian character with Christianity's emphasis on the individual. Though Superman does not have the vigilante image that Batman has, people should do a Christian Superman vigilante thought experiment: what if all physical and sexual child abusers in the United $tates were to be killed.
Without getting into the details, the provocative background story of Daniel Driver is that he had been accused of child sexual abuse before the camp-connected abuse involving multiple children; people in his Christian church congregation had defended him from harsher sentencing by providing testimonials as to his character. This is fitting, because Christianity, with its focus on perfecting the ideas of individuals (and the ability of individuals to perfect their ideas), is suitable for both mob violence against the accused and obscuring the cultural and structural bases of child abuse. Whether or not Driver was incarcerated, child abuse would have still gone on in the community. If Superman stopped child abuse instead of rescuing cats from trees, a huge number of directly complicit people would be exposed and their similarity to those people not directly complicit would be revealed. The real vigilantism that does sometimes happen is just one outlet for guilt.
In the judicial and sentencing context, it is appropriate to note that indeterminate sentencing applied to convicted child abusers may have roots in Cesare Lombroso's movement and reflect not only Christian attitudes. Aside from a general influence on indeterminate sentencing in the United $tates, the most specific meaning of Lombroso's influence here would be that child abuse could be either hereditary behavior or a moral lapse -- so that perhaps Daniel Driver was just a white of good, civilized breeding who could easily be rehabilitated, not an innate criminal. In the wake of Nesler's shooting of Driver, ironically, Lombroso's ghost exerted itself in suggestions that there were two types of sexual child abusers: those with an inherent propensity for child sexual abuse, and those who were supposedly more situational or aberrant (relative to their own usual behavior) in perpetrating abuse. The former -- the innate abusers -- were to be eliminated from the hereditary stock of the human species through successive detections and executions.(7)
In a society without class and national oppression resulting in false accusations and biases in the justice system, the difference between the amount of actual child abuse and the amount of publicly proved child abuse could be a measure of a lack of accountability. For this reason, it is useful to look at relatively homogeneous groups and not assume that privileged groups are somehow not worth looking at in terms of children's oppression. In an affluent society where children have time available to do things other than eating, sleeping, and working, there are more opportunities for child abuse -- which encompasses more than the economic exploitation of children discussed by Marx, and the blatant prostitution, in less wealthy capitalist countries. Clearly, there are still national differences within the United $tates, but informal distribution of power over children and its concomitant unaccountability for child abuse appear in white-only contexts. The single-parent situation discussed is (among other things) a sub-category of the situation where power over children is informally distributed between the family (which could have any number of parents) and other adults in society, particularly in the school. Most children in the United $tates experience being shuttled between two institutions in particular, the family and the school, often literally by bus.
There is a formal aspect in that legally most U.$. children have to be at a school for a certain number of hours. Life in the school in particular is structured in a regulated way -- by organizational, procedural, legal and curricular parameters. At the district, school and individual classroom levels, though, there is wide latitude, notwithstanding the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, associated with standards uniformity and an emphasis on standardized testing. Within parameters themselves sometimes enforced to varying degrees, power over children is exercised in a flexible way. The extent of teachers' involvement in students' lives outside of mandated seat time can vary. The number of adults a student interacts with inside and outside of instruction can vary. Individual adults are not accountable except to other adults, with their own interests, and then not completely. The forces structuring the school system at different levels are not accountable to children individually or as a group.
There are specific informational issues. For example, teachers can gossip about students behind their backs. Students in different classes and even in the same class may have difficulty communicating among themselves about a teacher. An innovation in some U.$. schools is to require student participation in organized and monitored recess activities, leaving lunch time as the only opportunity to communicate outside a structured activity for some students. Parents, teachers and administrators can talk among themselves, without students present and about other parents and their children.
School-connected physical and sexual child abuse happens in classrooms, in hallways, off-campus, in front of other children, not in front of children, with other adults' knowledge, and even in front of other adults. Regardless, physical or sexual child abuse may be less frequent in the school than in the family. Even if child abuse connected to the school system were rare, the power distribution between the family and the school would have relevance to accountability for child abuse. To begin with, though teachers are responsible for students for time they are in her or his charge, in the time that a parent could be responsible for one child for eighteen years a teacher could be responsible for five hundred students -- and multiples of that in secondary education where a teacher may be responsible for a student only five or ten hours a week when school is in session. On average, the teacher-student relationship will probably not in any sense have the same affection, trust and interdependency as the parent-child relationship. This writer posits that this becomes important where the government surveils and regulates the family via the school and teachers have an obligation to report suspected abuse. Perversely, one effect of a reporting requirement is to encourage the hiding of abuse from visual detection especially. Since an indication of abuse is not always clear, the potential concealment of abuse may (in different ways) generate pressure for informal handling and reporting of child abuse detected by any means, an informal practice that has its own contradictions. If a student herself/himself reports abuse, on the other hand, he or she has little leverage, within the relationship with the responsible adult, to use against the teacher (or nurse/counselor/principal/social worker/secretary) if there are adverse consequences for the self-report or the passing on, or the not passing on, of the information. This is in addition to a situation where children may be poorly informed, if they haven't had prior contact with social workers, and not know what to expect if they pursue a resolution, with the school system, to intrafamilial child abuse. At least among her or his family, it is a possible for a child to withhold affection or be incompliant; there is no "principal" for a parent to go to without involving a bureaucracy. In the big picture, where children are unwilling to disclose abuse to the school system as a result of how the school system is internally structured, the school system is in effect an obstruction to accountability for child abuse.
Aside from enforcement and implementation issues in the context of report and failure to report suspected abuse, teachers send their students home every day knowing very well from statistics, despite the fact they for whatever reason rarely make abuse reports, that a significant number of their students probably will be or have been abused at home. Yet, on a daily basis teachers reinforce children's training to submit generally to adult authority. At the same time, many teachers in the United $tates, some drawing consciously from new humanistic and so-called democratic philosophies and approaches (and some unconsciously from not so new ideas promoted by Italian Catholic educator John Bosco, seen by Cesare Lombroso as exemplifying a particularized approach to handling youth with challenging behavior), explicitly represent to be the "friends" of their students, evoking an intimate informality. (First, children are encouraged to make friends with other children in the same class whom they are stuck with for at least a year -- nothing obviously terribly problematic there, but different from actively encouraging children to make friends with other children in a larger group that usually exists in the vicinity. Going further with this, many early primary school teachers for various reasons suggest to students in the same class that they should regard each other as friends. Adding to this are teachers who encourage their students to view them -- adults whom they are stuck with -- as friends. Friendship has gone from something children can choose to have or not have with anyone to something they have with an adult whom they cannot avoid, with no evident choice in the matter. Students who do not go along with this bullshit are sometimes treated as being oppositional.) This has two implications. One is the possibility of a situation where a child is both physically or sexually abused at home and sexually abused in connection to school. The other is a masking of the structure of adult power. The state is responsible for the distribution of power between the family and the school. When educators and social workers make the claim to being helpers of last resort, and to being a check on familial power by monitoring homes and children at school for abuse, that has an ideological effect of obscuring the role of the state in reproducing the conditions of child abuse. Organizationally, compulsory education derives its existence from the state. The state props up a decentralized power over children in the form of millions of families, and reproduces more-centralized power over children in the form of a fewer number of schools and classrooms. In the United $tates, there are less than 150,000 educational institutions of any kind (private, public, primary, secondary, post-secondary), about 100,000 of these being public schools. The number of staff in all U.$. educational institutions is about five million, a small fraction of the number of parents and grandparents caring for children under 18. The number of families with "own children under 18" was about 35 million in 2006, according to data provided by the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics.(8) The school system's function as an entity watching and regulating the family is a reflection of the uneven centralization of power over children in society. It does not mean the state is absent in the family context. As the school has displaced the church in society, the teacher-principal duo has replaced the priest as the dominant extra-familial, non-police, non-judicial paternal figure. Sitting at the boundary between the family and the school system, the teacher appears in a position to hold adults accountable. The teacher's claim to being a protector of children, just and methodical, represents centralized power over children as being located above the processes that result in child abuse. Children appear to originate with their biological parents and among their biological siblings -- their natural family (made natural by society). Since people are born where their biological mothers are and the state for the most part does not intervene to limit births to a geographic area, that young people are born spatially dispersed is practically a matter of zoology. By an ideological trick, society takes this zoological reality and uses it to give the decentralization of power over children among families a natural appearance and pose the school as a benign force intervening in the lives of children. In fact, both the family and the school are organized and defended by the state, and both the family and the school belong to a structure of power created by the state. Additionally, both the family and the school as social institutions reproduce themselves and have an interest in hiding and not being fully accountable for child abuse.
It is not this writer's intention to suggest that schools in the United $tates should be better protectors of children. Contradictions between the school, the family, and the juvenile court, in the United $tates -- Maoist communists would not intervene in these generally at the present stage of struggle, though in some contexts supporting families' interests over other interests may be necessary. Nonetheless, organizational self-interest issues have been been recognized in research on school administration practices, albeit in a limited way. Some principals do not report or do not proactively support staff's reporting of even familial abuse for fear of besmirching their schools' reputation in the eyes of parents and community members, who may be concerned about the community's image. The structure that does exist in the school system -- isolating schools etc. while identifying them with particular educators, parents, and communities -- acts as a barrier to the flow of information. The informality and flexibility of the practices of those in a position of power and responsibility -- the adults, who are few in number in comparison with students -- exist in compartmentalized settings.
False choice: "Lord of the Flies," Nazism, or Liberalism
Most people talking about the oppression of some or all "youth," youth empowerment, youth participation, and youth leadership, do not stand and have never stood for ending children's oppression and certainly not on a substantive basis. In the First World, the discussion of youth in political and activism contexts is dominated by development concerns; delinquency, violence and inner-city crime concerns; paternalism; inclusion of youth in projects that may not even claim to have anything to do with youth liberation or rights; tokenism; patriotism; chauvinism against people in the Third World; and a kind of age chauvinism seeking privilege for adolescents.
In any discussion of child abuse, there is a big danger of paternalism. Not only does it typically involve adults claiming to want to protect children from other adults; proposed solutions to prevent, or mitigate the consequences of, child abuse leave power structures and adult domination in place. Some advocates for youth may wonder, by what right does an anonymous Web site such as MIWS dare to openly, provocatively suggest that a policy incidentally limiting male youth's mobility and formalizing restrictions that parents already have for some children could be part of a process to end children's oppression.
By far, there is more to children's oppression than child abuse. Nonetheless, this writer has pointed to ways in which child abuse may be difficult to end without changing how things are presently organized and structured in society (particularly urban areas and specifically in the First World). Another aspect of children's oppression is inequality in how affectionate parents and children need to be toward each other, which makes child sexual abuse all the more evil when it is the only form of "affection" or "caring" some children may receive from adults. Despite the nurturer role assigned to females, adults in general are emotional parasites on children. Much of the affection that adults do give to children is not unlike unwanted affection given pets.
This writer has implicated informal power in child abuse, so it may seem that I attack the only or main means youth have of negotiating and maneuvering in society: informality. For those people who want to create in microcosm the society they wish they had lived in in their childhood (or lived in in their ongoing childhood) -- and view the liberation of youth as taking place through the expansion of that microcosm and the continuous deterioration and dismantling of formal structures --this article's discussion of informality may be difficult to accept.
Revolution is the only way to end children's oppression. Recognizing this, it is necessary to understand how children's oppression is carried out and reproduced in order to eliminate it. Even in places with an oppressed majority (not the First World), the cultural and structural edifice on which children's oppression thrives is deeply entrenched and cannot be ended in just a few years or by the spread of vague ideas about democracy or humanity. Power that continues to exist in revolutionary society should be held accountable and rendered visible so that it can be targeted if necessary. One way to make it accountable and visible is to formalize it -- either through the establishment of a custom or through codification, the latter being desirable because formalization confined to the legal system will always be clearly suspect (particularly if it is not based on the divine, as in legal systems based on sacred scripture).
If it were any other group in consideration -- not children -- the notion of formalizing the power of one category of people over another category might be laughable. The need for formalization particularly in the context of children arises because biological development is a reality, and it may not be clear to a communist party and the masses how fast or in what ways existing distinctions and relationships between adults and children should be ended, or it may not be possible in the short term. The power of adults, parents and educators in particular, is already formal in substantial part, though the power structure between adults and children is also partly informal as MIWS has suggested. The power of adults over children exists and is exercised in both formal and informal ways. As long as it exists, it should be held to account. Formalization may be accompanied by a decrease of informality in the power structure and a removal of old formal requirements and structures, and the introduction of new rules and structures restricting adults. While formalizing some things in the family context, it may be necessary, for example, to redistribute the use of streets and other areas so that children have exclusive access to more places and for longer times while adults' access is restricted or denied altogether.
Young people who at home live in isolation with people much older them and can't leave that situation in the short term (the situation of the majority of children in the First World) should have certain things guaranteed every day without opportunity for any shenanigans, including a certain amount of food, undisturbed sleep, access to the bathroom, and time by themselves. What is mandated cannot be taken away and then offered. At the same time, what is prohibited cannot be offered and then taken away. Certain kinds of physical affection could be mandated or prohibited, except for example in the presence of other people. Non-errand-related interactions outside the home between children and undesignated adults other than in the presence of designated supervisors could be prohibited. Some things should result in an automatic penalty for an adult without need for an extended investigation. If one set of rules and penalties doesn't have the desired effect, another can be tried. Obviously, certain forms of child abuse are already illegal, but there is often a subjective factor involved in a third party's determining whether something happened or was inappropriate. Also, the conditions for abuse can develop before the abuse is perpetrated.
Today, there is "child protective services" (CPS), which has been implicated most objectionably in racism and worsening the abuse of children placed in foster care. The solution to racism and some problems involving cultural ignorance is self-determination for oppressed nations currently within imperialist country borders. The problems of CPS and the so-called justice system should not be an excuse for not having a scientific line on child abuse and children's oppression, and not having ending those things as a goal in revolutionary society. With self-determination, nations can come up with their own optimal solutions for ending child abuse and children's oppression. A separate, but related question is corporal punishment of children raised in families. On the one hand, it is claimed that corporal punishment is effective with oppressed nation children, while white racists say that non-whites have a higher tolerance for pain and need for punishment and may themselves use corporal punishment. On the other hand, white racists say that oppressed nation parents are unfit. This writer is not going to sort all of that out here, but leaves open the possibility that as long as families in their present common configurations (nuclear, single-parent, etc.) continue to exist, corporal punishment may be necessary for them to "work." If corporal punishment is to exist after nations have self-determination and power has been seized by the proletariat, then why not do it under regulation and in front of two or more observers unrelated to the family. And rebuke and punish in public those who beat children in private. Children should know what to expect, and parents should know what consequences they can expect themselves. Rebuke, renouncement by the offender, and punishment or community-based reform, are better than imprisonment. If the result is "sexist" because mothers are stuck with the children, males who reproduce but don't take care of children should be punished, and other things may need to be addressed. Until there is economic and social equality of the sexes, perhaps single-parent families should be prohibited and both spouses be punished for illegal corporal punishment even if only one did the act.
Child abuse is not the only thing going on in children's lives, so ending it may not be the most decisive principle driving policies relating to children. Clearly in contemporary society, the focus on child abuse, particularly as regards extrafamilial child abuse but also intrafamilial abuse, has more to do with reproducing patriarchy than ending it. In revolutionary society, in formalizing some structures and practices there may be a danger of institutionalizing something that was already disappearing. Where making adults accountable also constrains children's freedom, it may be desirable for children to have a way of leaving formal structures.
Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor of the 1970s dealt not just with "youth," but also with "children" and "children's rights." One of the things Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor raised was the right (then and currently denied) of children to divorce their parents -- a right that most claiming to support "children's rights" today do not support. This is an example of something that might emerge in the transition away from traditional social forms allegedly functioning for child-rearing and acculturation. In revolutionary society, there should be a formal procedure, about which children are educated and trained to use, for children to leave their parent's home, and another formal procedure by which children can indicate abuse, such as a randomly or systematically administered, developmentally appropriate questionnaire.
Children as young as preschoolers are capable of verbally indicating abuse. An abuse detection system could be administered with a non-intimidating computer software program or computerized toy to lessen the human subjective factor. Some things are technically possible now that were not possible forty years ago.
Three visions are slowing down the recognition of children's oppression and how to end it: "Lord of the Flies," Nazism, and Liberalism. When MIWS says that even preschoolers are oppressed, not just teenagers, some will fantasize that MIWS is talking about parents' letting preschoolers leave the home whenever they want to do whatever they want. Others will fantasize that MIWS is talking about government agents' snatching infants from biological parents. It may seem that MIWS is against happiness itself, that it would examine affection in the family. In most likelihood, these people fail to understand that ending children's oppression is a process, Actually, MIWS does see a future where preschoolers will be able to move around off-leash without abuse, violence and safety problems, but to get there will probably require a series of transformations. It will not be like leaving children from the present society stranded in that same society without recourse to help, the way things are imagined by some.
Fears of the state's intrusion into the private sphere of the family, where the state was supposedly absent before, give rise to visions of totalitarianism influenced by stories about life under the Nazi regime and about "communist" orphanages with rampant abuse and bullying, oppressive regimentation, intense indoctrination, and children taken from persecuted parents. The family and the school are social forms subject to change by the proletarian state, like other social forms, so critiques of socialist child-rearing and education would need to be separated from a critique of the dictatorship of the proletariat in general or centralization in general. This writer proposes a path of children's liberation that is unapologetically non-anarchist, whose content is proletarian, whereas others both for and against youth liberation draw from anarchist ideas implicitly or opportunistically invoke anarchist sentiments in flattering youth.
The current practice of homeschooling, not dealt with in this article, involving millions or hundreds of thousands of children in the United $tates is a relatively new phenomenon in children's lives that should be examined in the context of children's oppression. The relationship between some homeschooling and local control ideas and anarchism is also of interest. No new critique of anarchism will be presented here. Rather, the topic MIWS would like to address is the relationship between children's liberation and contemporary civil and political rights with the goal of showing why Liberalism is or is not an impediment.
It is crucial to remember the context in which people in the 1960s and 1970s were calling for civil and political rights for young people. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a large movement in the United $tates made up of young people. Things like whether political organizing and education could be done at a high school, whether young people could be somewhere after school without a curfew, and young people's having the same rights as adults in a courtroom, could have made a difference. In North America, in April 2009, there is no large youth-specific movement facing the establishment head-on, notwithstanding one organization much of whose notoriety is due to some people still riding their Sixties reputations, and who spread confusion about the politics in the 1960s, despite selling out; this organization claims as of the time of this writing that the election of Barack Obama was social progress. Anyone in North America in denial about that and spreading illusions about North American youth, by themselves or assisted by external pressure, about to kick Euro-Amerikan imperialist ass is lying. U.$. anti-war movement organizations have themselves admitted that ongoing aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq is no longer an issue to many U.$. youth, and that Barack Obama's election took much of the energy out of the anti-war movement -- an admission oddly coinciding with leaving the wars in those countries unchallenged and dovetailing with the movement to give Obama a "chance" on war matters. Opportunist "social justice" leaders have been searching, grasping for other issues to excite youth and supposedly exploited workers in the United $tates on the national level: parasitic, super-profit-sharing "economic recovery," taxes, financial sector "money-changers" who are a minority even of the rich-by-Amerikan-standards, offshoring, Asian auto companies, Chinese bankers, OPEC -- whatever gets Amerikan racists riled-up -- and exploiter economic and bureaucracy control struggles not connected to any specific struggle against repression. Perhaps the issue one could take to youth with the least chauvinist potential and the least harm would be marijuana decriminalization, because hey, what could people mess up there, what damage could result in domestic or international politics that isn't manageable. Although, the marijuana topic has long been a recruiting tool of the Democratic Party. Good luck with trying to build a youth movement around marijuana that will somehow turn into a raging anti-war movement.
In the United $tates, there is an ongoing level of youth activity connected to continuous repression of migrants and their neighborhoods. The focus there is not on winning political rights such as the right to vote and the right to run for office, or even First Amendment rights, for the youth themselves or others. So, the one movement in the United $tates that is for certain reasons organically rooted in (Asian and Latin American) youth is not currently seeking civil and political equality with adults. At this time, such a focus -- in the migrant or any other context -- without a burgeoning youth movement would mainly serve assimilation or patriotism, tokenism, or politics confined to the municipal level or lower.
When people in the United $tates were saying four decades ago that youth were people and individuals, that had a more specific meaning than it does today. That youth have personhood could have justified granting youth, or allowing them to exercise, the constitutional and natural rights of individuals. Civil and political rights were a focus, probably not only because they were particularly relevant to activists, but also because other kinds of rights weren't as clearly represented in the U.S. Constitution. Although, the Equal Protection Clause theoretically would have been a basis for giving youth the same rights available to adults under the law. The Constitution grants equal protection to all persons. The definition of "person" is key.
Since the sixties, the notion that youth should be treated as individuals and respected as people with autonomy has been appropriated by the juvenile justice and education systems of the United $tates. In the case of the juvenile justice system, this coincided with the extension of some Constitutional rights to juveniles, but not others. Without a jury's being involved at any point, it is possible for a judge in juvenile court to lock up in a juvenile prison a non-white suspect who allegedly doesn't express "remorse" and place a clean-cut, dressed-up white boy on probation for the same offense -- in supposed due-process hearings. The juvenile justice system with its legal procedures has particularly been a place where various ideas about childhood in relation to rights have been hashed out and have played out. The way juvenile courts function suggest that minors have the capacity to exercise some Constitutional rights, or at least lawyers are able to exercise them on minors' behalf. Yet, minors are granted Constitutional rights individually, not as a bundle. Theoretically, the implication could be that minors fulfill the definition of "person" in some cases, but not others, perhaps that because of uneven development of capacities in the same individual, a minor can exercise some rights, but not others. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in McKeiver v. Pennsylvania (1971), on the other hand, denying juveniles the Constitutional right to trial by jury reasserted the juvenile justice system as a system for the rehabilitation of juveniles, subordinating other considerations to so-called rehabilitation. The Supreme Court decision has been explained as reflecting a desire to hold on to the informality of the juvenile justice system in the adjudication and "disposition" (sentencing) of juveniles -- informality without which the juvenile justice system would supposedly lose its raison d'être. It's not so much that juveniles do not have a right to the benefits of jury trials as that requiring trial by jury would, supposedly, erode the juvenile justice system's ability to consider the individuality of juveniles, an ability supposedly in the interests of children and society. In this context, individuality has nothing to do with the different capacities of individuals of the same chronological age to exercise the same right, but with what is best for rehabilitation.
Rehabilitation is a stated goal in the adult criminal justice context, too, though adults entering the adult system are presumed to have and be able to exercise Constitutional rights. There are shifts toward and away from the rehabilitation ideal (or rehabilitation rhetoric) in both systems, adult and juvenile. Since its inception, though, the juvenile justice system in the United $tates has been connected to a notion of childhood and childhood as requiring special consideration. Within this, the emphasis has not necessarily been on any notion of biological or psychological development. For example, books on juvenile justice in the United $tates published nearly a century ago suggest that much of the early justification for having a distinct juvenile justice practice was essentially economic or settlement-related (in that Euro-Amerika is a settler nation): children are a "valuable asset" of the community, a "natural resource." As such, questions of having or not having reason and morality were extraneous. Delinquents had value as future workers, even if they were otherwise indistinguishable from old people willfuly committing evil deeds. Such economic pragmatism as the motivation for various individualized considerations gave way to more sentimentalism and to scientific justification. Recently, people have been talking about alleged differences between the brains of adolescents and adults in the context of crime: good news for juvenile justice professionals with career interests needing after-the-fact justifications for the juvenile system where "juvenile" has been defined as someone younger than 18.
The topic of juvenile justice in particular should vex those who acknowledge children's oppression and try to handle it within a Liberal framework, but there is a larger question. If children, inside and outside the justice system, are to be protected and have entitlements, why should they have all the same rights as adults. Social-democracy's partial answer to this question is to give everyone a minimum of housing and food, so that all have a right not to be homeless or hungry, not just children. The question remains, what should be the status of children in relation to rights, for example where children are dependent and others are obligated to care for them.
As the youth liberation movement of the United $tates has pointed out since its beginnings, a lack of accountability to youth is a central aspect of their oppression. One way to gain accountability is to gain responsibility. Having responsibility makes children more valuable in the eyes of others, and responsibility, especially responsibility that is not a result of coercion, can bring the ability to make others accountable. What this writer will add is that without responsibility, the tendency will be weaker to give youth the same rights as adults; not only that, but having rights without having responsibility can make those rights useless, or the rights may go unused or not be used to gain responsibility.
If the only things children are valued for are the biological reproduction they represent, and the affection or feelings they give to caretakers, then the progress of children's "rights" in capitalist society may stop at animal rights. There is nothing there in how children are valued that cannot be found in the zoo animal or pet ownership context. For that matter, zoo animals often have names, too, and individual records and fan clubs. Even if children did have the same rights, for example to acquire and dispose of property, that adults did, in actuality their exercise of rights might not be significantly different than animals' -- some animals exercising a right to play, etc. There are highly paid child entertainers and minors with inheritances, but in reality children taken as a group might accumulate little property. If rights were granted in a situation where children were already living with parents, many children may simply choose to continue using MySpace or playing video games instead of working in a job -- a possibility related to the affluence of the First World. The issue here -- of differentials despite rights available to all -- is an issue of Liberal individualism in general, but applies particularly to children, who are born into a situation of dependency without responsibility. (Of course, all people were -- adults, females, workers, oppressed nationalities, etc. -- but children are chronologically centered closer to birth, and the perpetuation of children the social group is based partly on birth.) It is a situation that begins with a biological reality of infanthood, but is prolonged and involves being tied to adults and particular adults. The responsibility of most children in societies where children are barred from economic production, or removed from it because of a lack of knowledge and skill, or family or agricultural need, is either to simply obey adults and love parents, or to do chores like the dishes or do duties such as being the teacher's helper -- in other words, nothing too important (or as valued as what adults do). It matters little that children with "anti-authoritarian" parents may have obtained their small household responsibilities by a practice of "democracy" within the family. So-called democracy in the home or classroom obscures differences in responsibility and power while preparing children for life in society interacting with others according to Liberal culture. It is a bit of a jump to go from symbolic responsibility, or even caring for siblings within the family or mowing a few lawns, to responsibility that is visibly important and necessary to a larger part of a community, and without responsibility in the first place it may be difficult to exercise rights efficaciously.
One thing that this article has not focused on is the topic of neglect, which some count as a form of child abuse. The idea that new-borns have to work before eating would be ridiculous on its face, but it is significant that there is a legal obligation for parents to not be neglectful, while there may be no expectation for children to participate in production or social reproduction other than attending school and studying, providing no immediate benefit to society. (In some classrooms, children help each other in structured or unstructured ways, or a few students who are ahead help the others, but the nature of this is not such that the students in general have valued responsibility on par with the adults'. One of the biggest responsibilities available to elementary school students in some grades and schools in the United $tates is safety patrol/crossing guard. In fewer schools, students in higher grades are allowed to teach and learn with students in lower grades, but in a way that usually reproduces a relation between age difference, and power and responsibility, or where students function as models or reinforcers for other students, yet without responsibility except to participate.) Children are excluded from responsibility in a general way, except as something convenient to parents and teachers or good for children's upbringing and education. The combination of obligatory care without children's responsibility has dynamics that would not be found in a situation where older people and younger people participate together in production and social reproduction, but where children are not owned.
Not just laws, but also existing institutions whose existence may not be contingent on legal age distinctions and existing differences between children and adults in education, power, status, and wealth, perpetuate existing and new children's dependency without responsibility. Even if there were an even initial playing field in theory, children, simply having lived fewer years than adults, might be at a disadvantage in an individualist society. Rather than seek protection or paternalism for children or trying to correct an age-based disadvantage under individualism with additional rights and entitlements before capitalism ends, communists should look for alternative arrangements, outside individualism.
Separately from the responsibility issue, the Liberal ideology on rights presents a problem. Allegedly lacking reason and being uninformed, children are one category of people that Liberal thought has long excluded from the category of autonomous, rational individual able to exercise the rights and freedoms of citizens in a democratic society. Even if it were admitted that a significant number of individual children could reach a state of autonomy and reason earlier than other children, the other children would still be considered as not having attained that status. Theoretically and not speaking with reference to any particular Liberal theory, there could be four categories of children: those without certain rights; children who have those rights, but are unable to exercise them; children who have rights, are able to exercise them, and do; and children who are able to exercise rights, but do not exercise them. To Liberals, it might be desirable for pragmatic reasons to still have an age or ages that one must attain to do certain things, if not eighteen years, then, say, fourteen, the justification being that education should be compulsory below the secondary or upper-secondary level. Even if there were no such distinction of people by age, Liberalism holds that some rights, involving freedom, require certain qualities to be exercised -- qualities that some children may not have. Arguments, clinging in one way or another to the concept of competence, to the effect that more young people should be regarded as competent or should have a presumption of competence are suspect as allowing the exclusion and oppression of young children to continue and reinforcing it; these include the arguments of some post-structuralists supposedly critical of Liberalism. The expansion of liberal-democratic rights to be more inclusive of children may not extend to all children, and if it did, the exercise of rights may lead to the formation or perpetuation of a group that dominates and oppresses another. Granting more rights to children in the first place would itself involve a power struggle.
Struggles for youth's civil and political rights in the 1960s and 1970s regarded the rights both of minors and of "youth" older than the age of majority, for example the ability to organize, agitate and demonstrate on university campuses. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, the "youth" civil and political rights movement may have had limited prospects for creating the momentum for a movement to liberate children in general, not just teenagers. The debate in the 1960s on youth as a "class" (including the John Rowntree and Margaret Rowntree analysis that informed "Toward a revolutionary youth movement" and "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"), either as a new working class or as a group divided culturally and socially from adults, was concerned mainly with old teenagers and people in their twenties -- the age group most relevant to changes related to work, education, and military service. In particular discussions, "youth" was understood as referring mainly to university students. The whole debate on youth as a class had nothing to do with seeing primary school students as part of a distinct class. To the extent that high school students were counted as part of youth in the context of youth's being a class, it was because of an alleged cultural connection to the older "youth." In the sexual context, some leaders preferred orgies over monogamy -- an orientation particularly of older male "youth." Thus, the youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s to some extent were movements for the interests and aspirations of people who were not even below the age of majority. Teenagers were appendages of some of these movements, not central to their organization and politics. If there was a disconnect between even struggles for young people over the age of majority and struggles for young people below the age of majority, there was a basis for the interests and issues of children below high school age to be even more marginal. The media in the 1970s recognized a disjointedness in young people movements, describing children's rights struggles in the 1970s as a "pint-sized version" of the 1960s student movement ("Drive for rights of children," U.S. News & World Report, August 5, 1974, pp. 42-44).
The history of national working class chauvinism, imperialist countries labor aristocracies, colonial elite formation, and more recently the First World female-biology adult gender aristocracy, should serve as a reminder of the danger of movements that objectively seek privilege for a portion of the oppressed. Fourteen years ago ("The Oppression of Children Under Patriarchy"), the idea was raised of an aristocracy of First World children in relation to the whole imperialist-patriarchy. Refining this concept, the present writer suggests that differences among children in the same nation are a basis for the formation of a child aristocracy (more specifically a child-gender aristocracy, as this writer locates children's oppression as a subcategory of gender oppression). If First World teenagers appeared to have privilege relative to younger people, this writer would recognize the possibility of a gender aristocracy consisting of those teenagers. At this time, the freedom of male First World teenagers and female First World teenagers is becoming similar, but hypothetically there could be a gender aristocracy of male teenagers who have differences from adults, but are privileged. Male privilege among children should be considered privilege relative to other children, not just male privilege. This clarifies that ending the oppression of children is a goal, not just ending sexism, and recognizes a continuum in the oppression of children as children.
If there is not going to be a strong distinction between "youth" and "children" with the recognition that children require specific scientific attention, the use of "youth" to refer mainly to people in their teens, or their late teens and twenties, ought to be rejected. It is objectively an attempt to appropriate the word "youth' for a limited portion of young people who may not even be oppressed as young people, while leaving younger youth in a limbo ideologically.
Wimmin and children
In the United $tates, an emphasis on civil and political rights shapes responses to reproduction questions. Constitutionally, a right to privacy or alternatively the Equal Protection Clause is the justification for abortion rights. Some Amerikans who continue invoking the reasoning in Roe v. Wade or make another Constitution-based argument to defend abortion rights may wink when doing so, not thinking too much of the Constitution in particular, but one could base abortion rights on Liberal individualism and civil rights regardless of the U.S. Constitution. If it turned out that the Constitution did not grant a right to privacy, one could argue that it should, for example. Most Amerikans who (as self-identified socialists, etc.) might not agree ostensibly with Liberal individualism in other contexts draw from Liberal individualism lazily, unconsciously or opportunistically in supporting abortion rights. Then people react with indignation or derision when anti-abortionists who may desire to downgrade females' citizenship status argue that a fetus should have Constitutional rights as a "person."
Regarding Liberal individualism, there should be consistency. The point in critiquing Liberal individualism in the reproduction context is not to find a common ground between the religious and the non-religious, the socialistic and the non-socialistic, Democrats and Republicans, or so-called red states and blue states, on "choice." If Liberal individualism is opposed in one context, it should be opposed in other contexts, though of course the accused, prisoners and the repressed cannot be expected to renounce Liberalism in a court room or administrative setting, and there are places where going beyond feudal ideology is on the table. To scientific communists, individual rights are not the highest priority in the reproduction context, and they are not the highest priority in the children's context either. In saying so, it is not that anything good came out of closet-homophobes' derailing the gay marriage struggle in the United $tates that made use of Liberalism.
In parallel, whether in the female-biology adult context or in the child context, one should be on guard against zoological ideas that are zoological because they are ahistorical. Commonly, in the midst of a war or a potential conflict people urge thinking about "wimmin and children" affected. On a more paternalistic or female-identity-centered basis, some bemoan the situation of wimmin and girls alone, as if violence against boy children were tolerable. Whether or not female adults, children, and girls specifically, make up a disproportionate number of casualties or "civilian" casualties in war, or of the victimized, abused or affected, the underlying concern over decades and centuries of time could be fertility, infant mortality, and reproduction more generally, instead of liberating wimmin or children.
Thankfully, most of those talking in a sentimental way about wimmin and children in conflict areas do not identify themselves as feminist. Along the same lines, there is only so much this writer can object to about the U.$.-based organization "Code Pink: Women for Peace" for example, because Code Pink, though it does claim to be a multi-issue social justice organization, does not call itself communist, doesn't claim to oppose various entire systems of oppression including capitalism and patriarchy, and claims it doesn't self-identify as feminist. There is a time and a place for various approaches and rhetoric. What is ridiculous is to see alleged Marxist-Leninist organizations vaguely putting graduate school student struggles in the same category as war-related infant mortality while sometimes representing wimmin as caught in the middle of war.
Today's international infant mortality differences are an index of national oppression, without a doubt, and may be worthy subjects of agitation. However, in the scientific context maternal/female/infant/child mortality issues that are not connected to class, gender or national oppression or ending it should be distinguished as population issues (even if they are such only in the minds or implicitly in the ideas of the people discussing the issues). Maternal mortality may very well imply something about wimmin's status under patriarchy, which is a global system, but if it not discussed in the context of system of oppression, it becomes a demographic or population concern. So even if high maternal mortality is blamed on some rulers, but is not related to a larger oppression in any specific way, the concern may be demographic, or it may be militarist -- warmongering, as in discussions of maternal and infant mortality in Afghanistan that support a continuation of war and war against other nations.
Infant mortality by itself has connotations of mothers and children dying or suffering together. The notion that mother and child should not be killed together has existed since Biblical times and does not represent any kind of feminist discourse on wimmin or children. Something that the Hebrew Bible prophet Hosea (Hosea 10:14) could have said in the eighth century B.C. should not be an ongoing source of distraction from other questions pertaining to children and should itself be disregarded in feminism for theoretical purposes except as an object of critique; it is suggested in the Book of Hosea that mothers' and their children's perishing together is a terrible calamity that God alone is worthy to inflict. Only God may (and can, in the long term) destroy and take away what has been created and given. According to one view, the whole Book of Hosea is an allegory about fertility gods, with Yahweh (himself viewed as embodying sexuality and having fertility significance) competing with other gods for fertility purposes. Now, God is competing with secular entities such as the United Nations.
When Westerners realize what "Oyakodon" (a name for a Japanese dish with chicken meat and egg over rice) means, the response is often visceral -- disgust. The origin of that could be something Moses supposedly said, more than three thousand years ago (Deuteronomy 22:6-7). Destruction or consumption of both parents and their children at the same time signifies disruption of the reproduction process and possibly an affront to God's creation. In secular talk, it could be a form of cruelty to animals, disregard for ecological sustainability, or anthropocentrism.
A final comment here on animal rights: The point is not that children should have "human rights," rather than (or not just) animal rights. Rather, a group of young people, children, are oppressed as a group, and this oppression is to be ended, using methods that go beyond Liberalism. Because English-speaking so-called feminism at the moment is more interested in animal rights (literally) and vegetarianism than children's issues except as related to mothers' status and conditions, much writing of interest is in openly Liberal governance, legal and philosophical contexts and regards children's issues in terms of rights. The contradictions, part of which have been discussed in this article, of Liberal discourse in regard to children reveals its limitations. "Human rights" instead of a focus on class, gender and national oppression makes most sense in stalemate and truce contexts, during or in preparation for a cessation of war before the oppressed have won. In other contexts, "human rights" (including the concept of three generations of human rights) results in confusion. The idea that the elimination of whole populations should be avoided is already available in animal rights and ecology.
Wherever this writer is, she will make an effort for oppressor nation children to be spared any lethal fate that befalls the adults. The content of this, however, will be scientific, not sentimental, probably involving the children's capacity for reform or a goal of minimizing bloodshed in general. The fewer the people who die in the course of revolutionary war, the better, so those spared might as well include people who have more years to live. If the First World doesn't reduce the number and severity of wicked acts it perpetrates on the oppressed, though, some things may be beyond the proletarian vanguard's control, notwithstanding the reality that imperialist oppression and repression are the biggest killers of children on the planet. "Children's rights" as distinct from "human rights" cannot be an excuse for counterrevolution or imperialist intervention. Some of the responsibility for children's deaths in revolutionary war will lie with communists who didn't in their interactions with the masses address issues of children's oppression in a sustained and increasingly advanced way and left children as having a status where they have entitlements -- which may be difficult to provide during war -- but fewer rights than other people. Liberal ideas about equality, when children are valued less than other people and are not accorded similar status as workers and other toilers, may actually contribute to genocide.
Islam and corporal punishment
By way of conclusion, this writer suggests the need for concrete and quantitative writing on child abuse and children's oppression from a communist standpoint. For an obvious reason -- imperialist aggression against Muslim nations and propaganda in support of this aggression -- the topic of Islam and corporal punishment suggests itself. Media stories, and so-called communists building for war on Muslim oppressed nations and calling for the imperialist state to provide protection in imperialist countries with Muslim minorities, allege the corporal punishment of adults, and women and girls in particular, in Islamic settings. This writer suspected that Islam had a worked-out position on corporal punishment of children, and so it would derelict not to address it, Muslims being more than a billion of the world's people. By contrast, it is unclear what New Agers and alleged atheists might do in a society in which people are more isolated and that allows corporal punishment of children, but disrespects and hates children (except quiet, docile babies or their own children) and principally discourages parents from leaving marks on children's faces and necks or doing something that might necessitate a hospital visit.
Even if children's patriarchal oppression could be regarded in some sense as "worse" in the Third World -- and this writer is not convinced of that, as the theory and investigation is lacking to make such a claim -- oppression and repression of the Third World and siding with imperialism would not be justified. Nonetheless, this writer does not mind raising some issues that might be inconvenient for First World propagandists. Comparative international incarceration can be linked to corporal punishment issues and even to children's corporal punishment.
According to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, the United $tates, a First World country with internal colonies, incarcerated at an overall (Blacks, Euro-Amerikans, everyone) rate of 738 people out of every 100,000 people. Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iran, Libya and the United Arab Emirates incarcerated at rates of 87, 91, 132, 168, 206, 207, and 250, respectively.(9) The U.$. incarceration rate for women was "123 per 100,000 of the US female population" -- higher than the overall (females and males combined) incarceration rates for Egypt and Turkey.
Government-sanctioned or customary corporal punishment of adults is alleged to be more common in countries with Muslim majorities. At the same time, supposedly Islam has a preference for corporal punishment over locking people away in prison. The problem for propagandists who often do not provide statistics or make international comparisons is: what would happen to the incarceration rate if there were no corporal punishment of adults, and how would the substitution of incarceration for corporal punishment of adults impact children in terms of corporal punishment. What are the positive and normative implications of eliminating the corporal punishment of adults for the corporal punishment of children.
Corporal punishment for "adultery" is often mentioned in discussions of Islamic corporal punishment of adults. Allegedly, in Islam women can be flogged for fornication; so can men, and men slandering women who are not married to them as fornicators can be flogged.(10) Stories mentioning corporal punishment of adults in Muslim countries rarely provide statistics -- offense-specific, punishment-type-specific or overall, or comparative-sex-specific -- much less provide comparisons with violence in other countries in similar categories or any categories. Similarly, apart from child trafficking, child enlistment and child labor connected to imperialist country borders or clearly connected to differences caused by imperialism (and discussed by the imperialists and the labor aristocracy, with chauvinist goals), stories mentioning corporal punishment of children or child abuse in Muslim countries rarely provide statistics and comparisons, and nor are statistics easy to come by in English.(11) Implicit in some discussions of corporal punishment of adults and girl children is that corporal punishment of boy children is acceptable while corporal punishment of adults and girls is not, because few would openly suggest that there is a reasonable amount or intensity of corporal punishment of adults and girls. In addition to a chauvinist mode of discussion, obscuring reality, of child corporal punishment and abuse in Muslim countries, there is an implication that the corporal punishment of children, at least boys, is acceptable. Those who do oppose the corporal punishment of boys typically do so in such a way (the same way as with girls) as to whip people up for war on Muslim nations.
Change is more likely to come within (or in connection to) Islam in the Third World than within the individualist, pseudo-atheist and New Age cultures of Amerika that many Western communist have tried to tap into lazily or unconsciously, a reality primarily related to the global class structure. As there has been so little attention to non-Western cultures as sites of progress, this writer cannot foreclose the possibility that Islam contains aspects that are relatively good for the struggle against children's oppression, and that failing to handle the issue of corporal punishment of adults correctly would have a perverse effect. If the hadith (not accepted by all self-identified Muslims) is authentic that children who have reached a certain age and refuse to pray are to be chastised, that is relevant to the corporal punishment of adults. In this writer's secular and non-expert opinion, the corporal punishment of children and the corporal punishment of adults are related via Islam such that the corporal punishment of children would have a weaker moral basis if the corporal punishment of adults, or at least the threat thereof, were not present.
In a society where almost everyone practices the pillars of Islam who is obligated to do so, failing to pray (more exactly, failing to perform salah) is one of the worst offenses one could commit. Consequently, a hadith prescribing corporal punishment of one's children for neglecting salah may discourage corporal punishment of children for lesser offenses, because otherwise salah, or corporal punishment for neglecting it, would be cheapened. If children are subject to corporal punishment for anything, though, it stands to reason that adults should be subject to corporal punishment, too, for offenses that either defeat the purpose of salah or make performing salah earnestly impossible; it is difficult for this writer to imagine how one could perform salah truthfully while slandering, for example.
Against MIWS, one could argue that not doing salah is the worse offense, because it is meant to prevent evildoing in general. Obviously, there is a reason why salah is a pillar of Islam. Still, if children are punished for neglecting salah or lesser violations, perhaps adults need to be subject to corporal punishment, too, if not for missing salah, then for something else. Actually, intentionally missing salah while committing evil could be evidence of apostasy, which is often alleged in the West to be punishable capitally in Islamic nations. Leaving aside the controversy in the English language over the actual and appropriate responses to apostasy, this writer suspects that the reason Islamic adult corporal punishment is often associated with things other than missing salah is that salah is often done privately by adults. Neglecting salah is a sin, but may be difficult for others to detect. One can infer from this that attention will be focused on the perceived consequences of not performing salah: specific deeds considered evil. If there is no capital punishment for apostasy, or it is rare, and there is no corporal punishment for salah-related offenses, there may have to be corporal punishment for lesser offenses unless corporal punishment is confined to children.
Removing adult corporal punishment while child corporal punishment remains could have perverse implications. One is that adults are less responsible for the same offenses (whether they would be held responsible by the family or by the community) -- which seems untenable on its face. If some children are not morally culpable and have a presumption of needing to be guided, certainly adults are more culpable. Threats of punishment in the hereafter may not be sufficient. (There is an issue of whether and to what extent children or the prepubescent can commit sin, but it seems that some parents may punish their children for neglecting salah regardless of puberty or sinfulness. In making this statement, I stress that I have only the most superficial understanding of Islam.) Another is to make the corporal punishment of children more private than it may already be -- if the corporal punishment of adults is removed from public observation and community participation. In implementing corporal punishment by discretion and in the privacy of the home, there is a danger of presuming to be in a privileged communion with God or even purporting to be more powerful and worthy than God Himself. God is supposed to come before family and parents, and God will punish sins, or guide believers to the right path, even if they go unpunished during one's lifetime by people. Materialistically speaking, ideas about God may limit child corporal punishment relative to other ideas or in comparison to other patriarchal societies. A third implication is to treat children as property. Another is to naturalize the corporal punishment of children in developmental terms, as if a prescription of corporal punishment for children's neglecting salah exists because corporal punishment is what young people in particular respond to. Restricting corporal punishment to children may widen the corporal punishment of children beyond punishment for neglecting salah. If adult and child corporal punishment is based on the message conveyed by Mohammed, selectively and categorically ending adult corporal punishment and continuing child corporal punishment dislocates child corporal punishment from that message. It opens child coporal punishment up to practices representing ideas about children that are not necessarily based on the Koran or hadith, whereas before the corporal punishment of children for neglecting hadith may have been just a matter of what God wished, divinely revealed -- God's wishes being binding regardless of whether people understood the reasons for them -- with nothing implied about how to discipline children in general.
On an impressionistic level, it does not make sense to this writer that in Islam adolescents, but not adults or young children, would be subject to corporal punishment alone -- the implication of accepting a hadith on punishing children for neglecting salah who are above a certain age, but opposing corporal punishment for adults. (The status of adolescence as a category in Islam separate from childhood and adulthood is itself subject to question.) Why should the threat of corporal punishment stop when children leave the home through marriage etc. Given the possible consequences of an unbalanced approach to adult and child corporal punishment, this writer rather suspects that lashings of adults in front of the community is an advance where the corporal punishment of children already exists or has not been resolved. Objecting to the corporal punishment of adults, but not children, categorically on Liberal philosophical grounds (e.g., that adults are rational) has no basis in scientific materialism attempting to end the oppression of groups by groups. Corporal punishment may be opposed for other reasons, but concretely corporal punishment of adults may accomplish a goal. One might want to end how the ability to perform violence and to undergo violence is tied to age ideologically. Not only should adults be punished publicly so that everyone may see that adults' bodies, too, are subject to punishment; perhaps children should participate in the corporal punishment of adults, even if children do not punish their own parents. (MIWS notes that children have been allowed to recite the Koran according to tajwid in public, among unrelated adults.) On the same note, as long as children are victims of homicide by people older than them, there is only so much scientific feminists could object to executions of adults. It might be a bit too much to expect small children to stone adults to death with stones of the mandated size, but if rifles aren't available for execution by firing squad some children could be trained to use a sword or operate a guillotine. Barring capital punishment, the limbs of repeat child abusers could be amputated on television until structural problems giving rise to abuse can be worked out.
This writer is an unbeliever (however that is defined) and discovering the true meaning of Islam or the true religion is admittedly not my purpose, but I do not wish to dissemble or make a mockery of anything. (When I said "weaker moral basis" above, I was pointing to how child corporal punishment may objectively become separated from religion or acquire a more pernicious or arbitrary character. On the other hand, if Muslims did believe child corporal punishment would be less moral without adult corporal punishment, this might result in less child corporal punishment. This would be determined by investigation. There is an unresolved question about whether some level of child corporal punishment will exist as long as the family and imperialism exist, meaning that I doubt child corporal punishment would disappear if adult corporal punishment were stopped.) Perhaps there is someone else who would be better suited to take up the questions raised related to Islam, because I do not claim to have read the whole Koran in any language. It is nonetheless obvious that most English speakers talking about repression and punishment in Muslim society have not even started studying them scientifically.
Notes
1. New Left Notes, vol. 4, no. 29, 1969 August 29.
2. MCB52, "The Oppression of Children Under Patriarchy," 1995 June, http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mt/mt9child.html
3. Daniel J. Christie and Beverly G. Toomey, "The Stress of Violence: School, Community, and World," in Childhood Stress (pp. 297-324), edited by L. Eugene Arnold (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1990).
4. Emily Driver, "Introduction," in Child Sexual Abuse : Feminist Perspectives (pp. 1-68), edited by Emily Driver and Audrey Droise (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 9.
5. "Table FM-2. All Parent/Child Situations, by Type, Race, and Hispanic Origin of Householder or Reference Person: 1970 to Present," http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam.html
"Hispanic-origin" single-mother families were 1.9 million in 2008, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. MIWS notes this because people who are "Hispanic-origin" can also be "white" in U.S. Census information, so some "white" single-mother families may be non-European-descended families. MIWS focuses on Euro-Amerikan families to suggest that national differences need to be considered. There are differences between Euro-Amerikan single mothers, and Asian, Black, First Nation and Latino single mothers.
The people in a family ("family group" in the Census table) live together in a housing unit. The parents in a two-parent family can be "married" or "unmarried." "Single mother" is MIWS's own term and refers to the parent in a one-parent family where the parent is a "mother." The mothers in mother-maintained one-parent families can have boyfriends/girlfriends living with them or not living with them, not related to the child(ren) by blood or law. Single mothers may be divorced or never-wed.
6. In fact, this is not confined to pop-Freudianism. Michele Elliott quotes a man who alleged this about his therapist: "She told me that I was having fantasies about my mother and that I needed more therapy to deal with it. In reality, my mother had physically and sexually abused me for as long as I could remember." (p. 3)
Michele Elliott, "Female sexual abuse of children: 'the ultimate taboo'," http://www.kidscape.org.uk/assets/downloads/Femalesexualabuseofchildren.pdf
7. From Gina Lombroso-Ferrero's summary of Criminal Man:
"When we realize that there exist beings, born criminal, who are organised for evil, who reproduce the instincts common to the wildest savages and even those of ferocious carnivora, and are destined by nature to injure others, our resentment becomes softened; but not withstanding our sense of pity, we feel justified in demanding their extermination when they prove to be dangerous and absolutely irredeemable." (p. 209)
Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man : According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, with an introduction by Cesare Lombroso, reprinted with a new introduction by Leonard D. Savitz (Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1972).
8. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/2007menu_tables.asp
9. Christopher Hartney, "US Rates of Incarceration: A Global Perspective," 2006 November, http://www.nccd-crc.org/nccd/pubs/2006nov_factsheet_incarceration.pdf
10. Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, "The Penal Law of Islam (2): Theft and Fornication," translated by Shehzad Saleem, http://www.monthly-renaissance.com/issue/content.aspx?id=999
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, "The Penal Law of Islam (3): Qadhf," translated by Shehzad Saleem, http://www.monthly-renaissance.com/issue/content.aspx?id=1003
The present writer does not speak as an expert on Islam in any sense. I refer to Renaissance, but know little about this journal or Al-Mawrid.
11. Although, one English-language Turkish media article reports a figure less than figures claimed for the United $tates.
"Drawing on statistics she gathered working with experts and civil society groups, Aritman says 4 percent of all children in Turkey are subject to sexual abuse, with 70 percent of the victims being younger than 10. "Contrary to popular belief, boys are subject to sexual abuse as frequently as girls. . . . Today, it is impossible to say for certain how many children in Turkey are being subjected to commercial sexual exploitation, but many say official information is off by at least 85 percent."" (emphasis added, ellipses added)
Turkey is known for rejecting Sharia. The present writer makes no claim about whether or not there is a phenomenon of increasing abuse in Turkey connected to Westernization or neo-colonialism. It is not that the 4-percent figure should be chalked up to Islam. Perhaps with more integration with Islam, the figure in Turkey would be lower. I only raise the possible importance of having a comparable statistic.
Ercan Yavuz, "Rise in sexual abuse of minors in Turkey sets alarm bells ringing," 2008 June 7, http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=144149
Bibliography
Female Sexual Abuse of Children, edited by Michele Elliott (New York: Guilford Press, 1994).
Hisham M. Ramadan, "On Islamic Punishment," in Understanding Islamic Law : From Classical to Contemporary (pp. 43-64), edited by Hisham M. Ramadan (Lanham, Maryland, and New York: AltaMira Press, 2006).
Kutaiba S. Chaleby, "Child Abuse and Child Witness" (chapter), in Kutaiba S. Chaleby, Forensic Psychiatry in Islamic Jurisprudence (pp. 77-90) (Herndon, Virginia: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2001).
Mary Gibson, Born to Crime : Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Praeger, 2002).
Sheikh Abdus-Samad Abdul-Kader, "Crime and punishment in Islam," http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_151_200/crime_and_punishment_in_islam.htm
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