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Youth Liberation - Blog Posts
RECOUNT 2024: PROOF THAT HE CHEATED (spread this)
for them. for your siblings. for yourself. we have to fight. I believe in you, we're all in this together.
you don't "hate kids," you hate being forced into a caretaking role.
you don't "hate kids," you hate censorship passed off as family values.
you don't "hate kids," you hate the constrictiveness of the nuclear family.
you don't "hate kids," you're just not used to occupying fully age diverse spaces so you're not used to the noise or the many different kinds of needs.
you don't "hate kids," most public spaces just aren't built for kids, and so the few kids you see are always uncomfortable and distressed.
you don't "hate kids," you hate the intense social rules assigned to kids and anyone who interacts with kids.
You don't "hate kids," you hate how society reproduces its most restrictive elements and how kids are powerless to resist it.
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
Could you recommend kid friendly critical/independent thinking/youth liberation/etc material and so on that we can get print outs of?
"like to do whatever, reblog to explode someone bad" yes absolutely we should do that but you know what else we should do
go to this website
find one in your area or search "little library [your city]"
go to goodwill every once in a while and buy whatever you can afford worth of kids books and go stuff every single one of these things full of them.
have a printer? print out kid friendly critical thinking and environmental pamphlets and other appropriate educational materials and shove them in there. who knows what you're indirectly teaching someone that could change their life?
being a radical is doing things that challenge the norms, standards and institutions that are currently established. whatever we do on tumblr matters, it's a form of praxis, but if you wanna get real wild with it, go out into the world and start forcing it to be the way that you want to see it rather than waiting for everyone's cooperation.
suicide rates are going up in educational institutions. an increasing number of kids are using drugs. and the problems seem to be "rebellious teenagers", "weak minded students", "unable to engage in healthy competition", "spoilt", "no cultural values"; when ACTUALLY these are reactions to a pervasive problem much larger than this: capitalist culture. students can't cope with competitiveness because it's no longer competitiveness - it's threat, it's fear. why can kids relatively handle losses in sports and art/writing competitions? why is the issue largely with academic competition? ever thought that it's not the kids who're problematic, but the academic system? we live in a culture which is misleadingly called "survival of the fittest". which is nonsensical because in the so-called "real world"? people do help. in workplaces, in higher education institutions. but students are isolated and made to view people as opponents instead of a support system. instead of encouraging cooperation and support in classrooms. suicide is not solely a mental health issue, it's a systemic+social issue; and making it an individual issue would mean giving institutions a free pass.
kids are turning to drugs because society is putting pressure on them, the demands and expectations made of them exceed coping capacity. because society doesn't forgive people who fail; the system works to keep people who're low down on the bottom instead of helping them get back up. in an experiment called the 'rat park', researchers found that rats who were placed in a cage all alone (no company/pleasurable activities etcetc) with two bottles - one full of water and the other heroine/cocaine, would drink from the bottle laced with the drug; but when they placed the rat in a "rat park'", with other rats whom it could play/mate/socialize with, they opted for the bottle of water.
with COVID came a variety of issues - unemployment, relationship issues (all sorts of relationships), loneliness, and so on. along with this are identity issues, academic pressure, social issues that certain kids face (poverty, casteism, misogyny, queerphobia), and lack of proper support/inclusiveness for neurodivergent kids, and also students who've undergone trauma.
we need to change the way we look at kids who use drugs. we need to stop criminalizing kids who use drugs. we need to change the way we look at suicide. we need to stop with absolute bullshit "spring fan" and removing the ceiling fan altogether alternatives, and instead acknowledge the ACTUAL PROBLEM.
Unpopular opinion:
The whole "adults can't be friends with kids, it's just grooming lite™" is a product of adult supremacy. By saying that adults can't have healthy relationships with kids unless they're family/students, and adults can only be mentors not friends insinuate that children aren't individuals who have intellect, autonomy, agency, thoughts, and feelings of their own. It insinuates that adults always have to impart something, that kids never be equal, that kids can just *be* around adults.
When I was a 12th grader, i was friends with kids from kindergarten, 3rd grade, and 7th grade. How was i friends with them? I treated them as equals. I respected their opinions and views. I didn't advice them, didn't make things about me, didn't treat them like mindless dolls. I had discussions with them about religion and feminism that they initiated. I talked about their friends and my friends and the things we like. I never spoke down to them, never demanded that they speak to me in a certain way, never felt offended when they talked to me as an equal. Told them not to refer to me using age-based terms. I asked them doubts when I didn't know the meaning of certain words they used or what they were referring to. I respect boundaries - spoken and unspoken. Never told them certain things "aren't meant for children, you wouldn't understand", instead I told them that I didn't know how to explain certain things in a particular to help them understand. I changed the onus.
The first step to dismantling adult supremacy is realising that children have things to contribute, that they have a whole ass personality of their own. It's realising that all concepts such as boundaries, consent, peer pressure and so on that apply to adults apply to kids as well.
Remember: equal doesn't mean the same. I wouldn't talk about sex in front of my friend who's uncomfortable with sex related topics. I wouldn't talk about gorey R rated films with friends who get squicked out by them. So why would it be hard to not mention such topics around children?
Unless kids have examples of healthy relationships with adults, how can they identify unhealthy relationships? If what they see and learn is that relationships with adults mean listening to advice and preaching, always being treated as unequal, then how are they supposed to be empowered? How are they to believe that they are their own person and do have a voice and a place in this world?
what I genuinely CANNOT comprehend is how adults find it remotely acceptable to use the "I'm the earning member" / "I pay the rent" / "this is my house" argument towards children and actively encourage it but when used towards a non earning spouse it's acknowledged as being abusive? So you admit that you don't see your children as autonomous individuals with basic human rights?
"you can't wear that in my house. you can become an earning member and buy a house and do whatever you want there" directed towards a child is okay but directed towards, for example, a homemaker wife, is abuse? make it make sense how the former ISN'T?
Why tf does someone need to be over 18 to have basic body autonomy? Why tf does a person need to be an earning member to be considered as a person having inherent worth/dignity/for their word to be taken into consideration (at the very least)?
I have witnessed leftists who believe in prisoners rights justifying spanking and I don't understand. If you can understand that people in power hitting incarcerated people to "correct" them is a violation of human rights and an abuse of authority, how do you not understand the same logic when it comes to parents and children?
People who complain about power and abuse of power rarely acknowledge one of the most primary forms of abuse of power - against children. And that's just hypocrisy at its finest.
Ppl seem to forget that like minors have sex, and do indeed get horny, its not just something that happens as soon as you turn 18