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aronarchy · 1 year

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Why we don’t like it when children hit us back

To all the children who have ever been told to “respect” someone that hated them.

March 21, 2023

Even those of us that are disturbed by the thought of how widespread corporal punishment still is in all ranks of society are uncomfortable at the idea of a child defending themself using violence against their oppressors and abusers. A child who hits back proves that the adults “were right all along,” that their violence was justified. Even as they would cheer an adult victim for defending themself fiercely.

Even those “child rights advocates” imagine the right child victim as one who takes it without ever stopping to love “its” owners. Tear-stained and afraid, the child is too innocent to be hit in a guilt-free manner. No one likes to imagine the Brat as Victim—the child who does, according to adultist logic, deserve being hit, because they follow their desires, because they walk the world with their head high, because they talk back, because they are loud, because they are unapologetically here, and resistant to being cast in the role of guest of a world that is just not made for them.

If we are against corporal punishment, the brat is our gotcha, the proof that it is actually not that much of an injustice. The brat unsettles us, so much that the “bad seed” is a stock character in horror, a genre that is much permeated by the adult gaze (defined as “the way children are viewed, represented and portrayed by adults; and finally society’s conception of children and the way this is perpetuated within institutions, and inherent in all interactions with children”), where the adult fear for the subversion of the structures that keep children under control is very much represented.

It might be very well true that the Brat has something unnatural and sinister about them in this world, as they are at constant war with everything that has ever been created, since everything that has been created has been built with the purpose of subjugating them. This is why it feels unnatural to watch a child hitting back instead of cowering. We feel like it’s not right. We feel like history is staring back at us, and all the horror we felt at any rebel and wayward child who has ever lived, we are feeling right now for that reject of the construct of “childhood innocence.” The child who hits back is at such clash with our construction of childhood because we defined violence in all of its forms as the province of the adult, especially the adult in authority.

The adult has an explicit sanction by the state to do violence to the child, while the child has both a social and legal prohibition to even think of defending themself with their fists. Legislation such as “parent-child tort immunity” makes this clear. The adult’s designed place is as the one who hits, and has a right and even an encouragement to do so, the one who acts, as the person. The child’s designed place is as the one who gets hit, and has an obligation to accept that, as the one who suffers acts, as the object. When a child forcibly breaks out of their place, they are reversing the supposed “natural order” in a radical way.

This is why, for the youth liberationist, there should be nothing more beautiful to witness that the child who snaps. We have an unique horror for parricide, and a terrible indifference at the 450 children murdered every year by their parents in just the USA, without even mentioning all the indirect suicides caused by parental abuse. As a Psychology Today article about so-called “parricide” puts it:

Unlike adults who kill their parents, teenagers become parricide offenders when conditions in the home are intolerable but their alternatives are limited. Unlike adults, kids cannot simply leave. The law has made it a crime for young people to run away. Juveniles who commit parricide usually do consider running away, but many do not know any place where they can seek refuge. Those who do run are generally picked up and returned home, or go back on their own: Surviving on the streets is hardly a realistic alternative for youths with meager financial resources, limited education, and few skills.

By far, the severely abused child is the most frequently encountered type of offender. According to Paul Mones, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in defending adolescent parricide offenders, more than 90 percent have been abused by their parents. In-depth portraits of such youths have frequently shown that they killed because they could no longer tolerate conditions at home. These children were psychologically abused by one or both parents and often suffered physical, sexual, and verbal abuse as well—and witnessed it given to others in the household. They did not typically have histories of severe mental illness or of serious and extensive delinquent behavior. They were not criminally sophisticated. For them, the killings represented an act of desperation—the only way out of a family situation they could no longer endure.

- Heide, Why Kids Kill Parents, 1992.

Despite these being the most frequent conditions of “parricide,” it still brings unique disgust to think about it for most people. The sympathy extended to murdering parents is never extended even to the most desperate child, who chose to kill to not be killed. They chose to stop enduring silently, and that was their greatest crime; that is the crime of the child who hits back. Hell, children aren’t even supposed to talk back. They are not supposed to be anything but grateful for the miserable pieces of space that adults carve out in a world hostile to children for them to live following adult rules. It isn’t rare for children to notice the adult monopoly on violence and force when they interact with figures like teachers, and the way they use words like “respect.” In fact, this social dynamic has been noticed quite often:

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority” and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person” and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

(https://soycrates.tumblr.com/post/115633137923/stimmyabby-sometimes-people-use-respect-to-mean)

But it has received almost no condemnation in the public eye. No voices have raised to contrast the adult monopoly on violence towards child bodies and child minds. No voices have raised to praise the child who hits back. Because they do deserve praise. Because the child who sets their foot down and says this belongs to me, even when it’s something like their own body that they are claiming, is committing one of the most serious crimes against adult society, who wants them dispossessed.

Sources:

“The Adult Gaze: a tool of control and oppression,” https://livingwithoutschool.com/2021/07/29/the-adult-gaze-a-tool-of-control-and-oppression

“Filicide,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filicide

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sage-writes-n-coins-mogai · 3 months

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What radicalised me into the youth liberation were my parents.

They smacked me, took away my possessions, threatened to destroy said possessions, emotionally neglected and abused me, ignored my declining mental health, ignored my autism and ADHD symptoms, had my thoughts, feelings and opinions dismissed because “I’m just a kid”, called me lazy and selfish because I just wanted to rest because I’ve been on my feet for the past four hours looking after my baby sibling, told that my pain doesn’t matter because “it could be worse”, taught that my emotions don’t matter, taught that I can only rely on myself even when I clearly need help, taught that what’s between my legs is much more important to them than what’s between my ears etc. etc.

Because of all this, I’m both terrified and resentful of my parents especially my step father, who’s an ignorant Gen X cishet white man who has admitted that he believes he’s better than everyone when in reality he’s just surrounded by mentally ill/disabled people and literal children who are still learning how to be people.

I’m not joking when I say that I that I’m glad I’m moving out, but I’m really worried that I’m going to “mess up” somehow and my parents will chose keep me home longer. They hold so much power over me, even more than they know, they’re capable of absolutely destroying my life and I would be incapable of stopping them because we live in the middle of bush and it’s a three hour walk out.

And I bet you my bottom dollar if my parents knew how I really felt about them they would punish me in someway because hating the people who traumatised you is crime apparently :/

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glittertimes · 7 months

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“Another example is with the “child-free” movement. Child-free living is often framed as a feminist reclamation of our bodies or an ethical choice not to bring more children into the world. Whilst everyone should have reproductive autonomy, there is no such thing as child free living because children exist everywhere in all our communities, within which adults in particular have a responsibility of care. Parenting is community care, and community care is parenting. They are one in the same and therefore everybody -regardless of age- should be working on their parenting skills. The linguistic framing of “child-free” is also problematic: young people are not some harmful or oppressive force to be liberated from. Children need to be free from the adults, not the other way around! And most people discussing or practicing I have outlined do nothing like most people, to support youth. Any so-called liberatory framework that affirms adult power and agency without simultaneously identifying the oppression of young people and fighting for our power too, is just ageist.

- Innocence and Corruption: An Abolitionist Understanding of Youth Oppression by Aiyana Goodfellow

This is something that’s always bothered me about people who advocate for being child free but I didn’t know how to put it into words!

I totally understand the frustration with the pressure to get married and start a family! No one should be forced to have children if it’s something they don’t want, and I get wanting to divest from discussions about children altogether bc of those pressures.

But the child free movement focuses so much on adult freedom and fulfillment when there’s so much being left out about how children suffer from patriarchy and capitalist expectations as well!

Your life can be fulfilling without children or raising a family, but we can’t blame all of adults’ problems or lack of fulfillment on children when the real thing we should blame is patriarchy and capitalism. Which again, children do not benefit from, they’re just as oppressed (if not more so!) as adults under these systems!

#personal #abolition #youth oppression #ageism

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sigynsilica · 6 months

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Minors can't buy medicine.

That's not a joke.

That's not a dystopian novel prompt.

That's not an exaggeration.

In the modern day in which we live, certain kinds of medicine are illegal for minors to buy because the government views children as inherently irresponsible to the point that they are forbidden from buying cold and flu medicine.

#youth liberation #youth rights #youthlib #children are an oppressed class #human rights #social justice #leftism

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xxlovelynovaxx · 4 months

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Uh-huh. You realize, coming from a 26 year old, that this is just ageism, right? "I'll only take you seriously because of your age"... and you think you're in the right?

Yeah, "14 years olds act more 14 about it" because typically a group with absolutely zero societal power that is literally treated as the subhuman property of their parents and irrational mindless inconveniences that are only here to annoy "real people" will get upset when you continue to treat them as such while reminding them of the absolute privilege and societal power you hold over them.

I was 14 too. I remember the frustration at no one taking me seriously. I remember the fury that when I turned 18, 20, 25, suddenly everyone believed me about the things I'd been saying for 4, 6, 10+ years. I remember the disillusionment that happened when I realized the only thing that had changed was not some arbitrary debunked number at which the brain "develops fully", not some threshold of "maturity", but simply that I was no longer the age at which the state had a chokehold around my personhood, or in some cases the age which people think my human rights should have been delayed to.

Because it's not like adults EVER have bad opinions about something you say online, right? It's not like they don't FREQUENTLY respond to you trying to talk to them about it with stubborn and willful ignorance. It's not like the OP of this or a similar post didn't once respond to my detailed and logical essay about ageism with "lol I'm not reading all that". It's not like unreasonableness and angry nastiness at a post is utterly unlinked to the age of the person perpetrating it, and people of all ages do this in equal numbers.

Oh wait, it's exactly like that, it's just that society supports and even rewards the exact same misbehaviors in privileged people that they condemn in marginalized people.

It's just that when an adult does this, it's either that they're arbitrarily right based on their age/other privileged identity and often the marginalized status of the person arguing against them (see: OP, every argument on antisemitism where goyim are seen as the rational and reasonable and therefore right ones), the person arguing is being "immature" and "might be lying about being an adult' or "is acting like a child" (transmascs being silenced about their oppression using infantilization, the concern trolling of people who are happily 'crazy', the infantilization of disabled people and especially those who are intellectually, cognitively, or developmentally disabled), or both.

They're right. Their age has nothing to do with what they're saying. However, it has everything to do with how you're mistreating them. If they had no age in their bio, you might have taken them seriously, at least enough to believe they might listen to your viewpoint and to treat them like an equal human being.

If they had had an age above (usually 20-25), your last grasp at defense would have been to discredit them by comparing them to a 14 year old or accusing them of lying about their age, precisely because even adjacency to that identity allows you to shut down any argument they make.

Unfortunately, when you're in your 20s and 30s, everything is influenced by how fucking 20-40 you are. You forget exactly how cruel and oppressive society is to children. You forget how people magically started treating you like a person instead of a thing that existed only to "irrationally" be angry at the world around you. You forget how you were right to be angry at how they treated you.

You forget that you were legally allowed to have someone else dictate what and when you ate, how you dressed, whether you received necessary medical care, whether unnecessary medical procedures such as intersex "correctional" surgeries and treatment were forced on you at any age, when and for how long you were allowed to leave the house, and if they hit you in a well-known erogenous zone it would have been considered "discipline" as long as they called it "spanking" and not "physical and sexual abuse. You forget this and any number of other things considered abusive if a partner or roommate were to do it to even someone who had just turned 18 two seconds ago.

You forget that while it was technically illegal for your parents to starve you, to beat you, to emotionally abuse you by gaslighting or daily verbal abuse or manipulation, to torture you, to sexually abuse you, to hurt you to the point of you developing PTSD and or dissociative disorders, that there is very little recourse for actually enforcing it. You forget that you just have to hope that a different adult believes you, and in order for them to do that you usually have to fit a stereotype of a good victim and that your parents usually already have to be not in good standing with your community.

You forget how many cases of actual textbook abuse CPS does nothing about for "lack of proof" despite a supposed societal narrative of "believe victims".* You forget that they prioritize reunification even in cases of actual physical abuse, often with the abuser themself. You forget that you were a member of the only class that can have the police called on them like dogcatchers to drag them back kicking and screaming to their abusers, with no recourse or means of escape provided, because the state depends on and serves the institution of the "nuclear family". You forget that historically police served to return escaped property to their owners, and still do so today.

(*Believe victims if they have any measure of societal power that causes consequences for not believing them. Believe victims as long as you will be judged by most people for not believing them. Believe victims only if you can be held accountable for not doing so.)

As a disabled person and therefore a vulnerable adult, I had the unique position of being treated as a child until I escaped at age 23. It was all the same arguments - that it was "for my own good", that I was "incapable of making those decisions for myself" (or apparently, finding someone I did trust to make them for me, because I was "unreliable enough" I couldn't even do that), and so on.

This only made me realize that, despite the fact that none of that was true, it wouldn't be okay even if it was. It's not okay for disabled adults who DO need significantly more help caring for themselves than I do and who are profoundly cognitively or intellectually disabled to have their autonomy infringed on and their consent violated.

So why, then, is it okay to do to a child, regardless of their actual ability to take care of themselves or "make rational decisions"? Why is it okay to treat a child this way? Why is it okay to regard someone as fundamentally subhuman until an arbitrary cutoff?

Why is it okay to assume complete and total irrationality and unreasonableness on the part of an entire class of people just because as a subjugated and oppressed class they are still on rare occasion irrational or unreasonable? Isn't that bog-standard bigotry?

Why is it okay to justify their oppression by them being sometimes unable to fully stand on their own two feet, without help or community, under the weight of the oppressive system itself that serves to reinforce that? Why claim the purposeful elimination of tools and obscuration of helpful skills and knowledge under the guise of "protecting them" shows that they are incapable of surviving without those violences in a system that you claim is not, in fact, openly hostile to them?

And yes, this does all matter in the context of petty online discourse, because it is these systems that serve to reinforce and be reinforced by this casual ageism.

It is reaffirming the ideas which uphold these systems - that children are incapable of being rational people with reasonable emotional responses to mistreatment, who have to be told at every point what is in fact fair and how they must react to not face active bigotry for their immutable identity. It is conditioning children to beg for scraps of respect so that they learn assimilation early and go on to perpetuate childism when they themselves become adults.

It's petty and cruel, and it's destroying my faith in humanity to see marginalized people I otherwise respect sharing this. Y'all of all people should know better. Y'all of all people should be able to see how it maps to multiple of the various types of oppression and even intersectional oppression and then goes further.

Y'all of all people should be able to remember how being a child was your primary identity and primary form of marginalization, because you could legally be allowed to be abused for your other marginalized identities and most people in fact supported your family doing so, or at least felt that even if it was wrong it was still "their right" to do so.

Maybe you were privileged enough to have a supportive family, but I know for a FACT most of you weren't.

Kids are considered uniquely incapable of having any identity that is not immediately apparent - of knowing they are chronically ill or queer or plural or neurodivergent. They are considered incapable of having valuable and complex thoughts about politics or religion. They are not listened to or considered experts on the specific intersectional discrimination they face for immediately apparent identities, such as being children of color or visibly disabled. Adults within those groups are considered the experts on forms of discrimination they'll even admit they no longer experience, but that children continue to.

This is not just queerphobia or ableism or racism or any other number of forms of bigotry. This is specifically childism intersecting those forms of bigotry. It is not just not okay because of their queer or disabled or racial or other identity. It is not okay because children are fucking people, and yeah, deserve to be treated as equals and not be condescended to even in the actual rare cases where their reasoning is not completely rationally sound - just as is the case for disabled people, I might add.

If you can see how one is ableism but not how the other is bigoted childism, if you can't see the parallels between two cases where

-most individuals in a class are fully rational and intellectually capable people purposely being mislabeled as not so in order to justify their subjugation

-which is fundamentally reliant on the societal acceptance of mistreatment of those who may not be fully rational or intellectually capable (which is deeply ableist/childist, oppressive, and wrong),

-and where those who actually aren't fully rational or are intellectually incapable face no reprieve both in being weaponized against members of their own class with relative privilege AND in fighting their own mistreatment, which unlike in the case of those who might be able to convince others of their capability is considered always justified on the basis of their incapability, while not actually being okay on ANY basis,

then I can't help you.

To be clear, the reason it is ableist and/or childist to label someone as intellectually incapable when they are not is not at all because actually being so would be in any way bad. It's because it relies on the deep, insidious ableism/childism against those who are considered intellectually capable to function. It is essentially a separate facet of that same ableism/childism, and one specifically functions because of the other facet of ableism/childism that says that all members of said class are incapable and therefore need to be mistreated in the same way as those who actually are.

"No one deserves to be treated this way," is fundamentally how this oppression should be addressed, period. Understanding how it functions differently for different people, and how easily the most vulnerable members of an oppressed class could have their liberation tossed aside in order to pursue assimilation for the less vulnerable is still important, though. Understanding that your own oppression relies on the total subjugation of part of your community on the basis of an ontological trait that they have and you do not is actually paramount in recognizing both your own relative privilege and how to effectively fight the oppression you all face.

Or to put it simply, it's important to recognize that if you're being oppressed because someone is claiming you're something you're not, that that oppression isn't okay toward the people who are that thing.

Anyway, adults who talk about childism, adultism (I apologize that I struggle to remember the difference between the two, much like I struggle with the difference between ableism and disableism), and youth liberation also hold privilege. As I mentioned above, the most that someone can use to discredit me here is to say that I'm immature or they think I'm secretly a child.

Even the people who really don't want to examine their own privilege and complicity in their hierarchical relationship with children are more likely to listen to me, and if they don't they'll make fools of themselves with such lines as "I refuse to read anything longer than a twitter post to educate myself on complex systems of oppression".

I'll keep trying to stand up for children anyway. Not just because I actually remember what it's like to be 14, but because I have a responsibility to do so as an adult. I'll uplift the voices of the children who quite honestly are way better at explaining this and have a far better understanding of both the direct experience and the sociological theory behind it than I ever will be.

Also note: I didn't anywhere in this post point out how people who are 17 and some months are functionally indistinguishable from those who have just turned 18, or how variations in "development" might cause some who are 15 or 16 to be very similar to others who are 18, or so on.

Quite frankly, I don't think that matters. I do think 14 year olds deserve to be treated with respect just as much as 17.99 year olds, and I also think often 17.99 year olds face much of the exact same mistreatment and oppression (especially systemically) as 14 year olds. The exceptions where legal emancipation can help those over 16 are both rare enough and require trading being controlled for being unsupported. Therefore I think that while a more nuanced conversation about this could take place within the communities actually affected by this, I think it's neither appropriate nor helpful here.

I'd also like to remind people that predators are often successful at grooming children because they pretend to treat them with respect and take them seriously. The answer to this should not be "oh, anyone who respects children is a groomer", but rather, "hey, maybe if everyone treated children with respect and took them seriously, actual predators would have one less avenue through which to target and harm children".

As a CSA victim myself, I will NEVER stop doing anything and everything I can to prevent more children from becoming victims. I only care about what's effective, not what feels good in pseudo-proxy revenge fantasies against imagined perpetrators while very real ones continue to go unnoticed and unchallenged by society.

I take children seriously because it's the right thing to do, but also specifically to fight CSA. I also remind anyone who needs it that they do NOT know they can trust me or anyone else on that sole basis. While I want to be a safe adult, doing so in a society where children have no recourse against mistreatment fundamentally requires them protecting themselves by not trusting me just because I recognize the power I have over them and the ways in which they are abused.

(This is another example of how the fearmongering mindset over generational friendships, particularly between minors and adults, is just as harmful as the pushback against comprehensive sex education and coming from the same puritan and christofascist roots. Knowing that something is sexual abuse just allows victims to voice what they're experiencing. Having safe adults who respect them allows children to recognize the manipulative behaviors and other red flags of unsafe adults.)

Anyway, all the original post is saying is "I don't like when members of an oppressed class stubbornly refuse to compromise on being treated as equal people with valuable thoughts and rational responses to mistreatment, and in fact insist on being listened to when I say things that are cruel, unfair, and untrue."

(When did use of "unfair" become a synonym for "whiny snowflakes children who just can't see that life is inherently unfair" in leftist spaces that purportedly fight against systemic injustice, anyway? When did it become something "immature" in the fight against identity-based violence that is inherently not fair?)

So I guess, act more 14 about it. I'll continue acting more disabled and queer about ableism and queermisia, so I fail to see what's bad about that. But imagine thinking that interacting with someone on the basis of their age is useless and thinking you're in the right for it. Truly showing their entire ass.

#childism #adultism #youth liberation #cw csa mention #csa mention #it's sometimes shocking to me that people are so much more ignorant about child liberation than even like. mad liberation and stuff #but it makes sense bc children are fundamentally THE most oppressed class on the planet #also yes I'm using USamerican ages here bc that is what I have perspective on #I welcome people from countries where personhood is granted at different ages to weigh in #also I use children here but I'm not sure if I should say 'minors' or something else instead esp when primarily discussing teens so like #lmk if I need to change that #undescribed #needs ID

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sillymcrandom · 7 months

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guys if you’re gonna address kids for being uneducated about a certain topic maybe dont be overly hostile to them and being like “oh you dumb fucking minors stupid kids” and overall just being super ageist/childist/whatever word you wanna use instead of kindly educating them thanksss

#like for example earlier i saw a stitch on tiktok of someone responding to a video someone made shitting on murrsuiting and the person #that stitched them was just saying some super ageist shit to them like maybe dont do that do your taxes bro instead of shitting on an #already oppressed group bc someone is uneducated about something #jesus #youth liberation #youth lib #ageism #sex ment tw #childism

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chaotic-being · 2 months

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Transphobia kills

This is the first time I'm going serious, but I feel like I need to do this.

In a world where acceptance should reign supreme, the stories of Nex Benedict, Brianna Ghey, and Jacob Williamson are a powerful reminder of the grim reality faced by many who dare to live as their true selves. Their lives, though cut short, carry a deep message that speaks to the fundamental right of every individual to be recognized, respected, and loved for who they are.

Nex Benedict, Brianna Ghey, and Jacob Williamson, like countless others, bravely embraced their true selves despite the societal pressures and prejudices that sought to constrain them. They stood tall in the face of adversity and defiantly challenged the narrow-mindedness and bigotry that infects our communities. Tragically, their journeys were cut short by transphobia - a force that continues to claim lives and shatter dreams.

Their stories are a powerful reminder that the fight for equality and acceptance is far from over. Transphobia, in all its forms, is a plague that not only threatens the lives of transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people, but also undermines the very foundation of our society. It fuels fear, division and injustice, creating barriers to understanding and compassion where empathy and solidarity should flourish.

We live in a world where celebrating authenticity in theory is often condemned in practice - a world where the mere act of being oneself can be met with hostility and violence. It's a sobering reality that demands our collective attention and action. We cannot afford to remain passive bystanders in the face of such injustice. The deaths of Nex Benedict, Brianna Ghey, and Jacob Williamson serve as a call to action - a call to dismantle the systemic inequalities and prejudices that continue to plague our society. It is up to each of us to challenge the status quo, to confront discrimination and hate wherever it manifests, and to create a world in which every individual can live freely and fully without fear of oppression or persecution.

Most importantly, we must never forget the lives and legacies of those lost to transphobia. We must honor their memory by continuing the work they started - by standing up for justice, equality and human rights for all. Nex Benedict, Brianna Ghey, and Jacob Williamson may no longer be with us, but their spirit lives on in the struggle for a more just and equitable world.

Transphobia kills, and that's not okay. But together, through our collective action and unwavering solidarity, we can strive to create a world where love prevails over hate, and where all people are free to live authentically, without fear or prejudice. This is the legacy we must honor. This is the future we must build.

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