Children Deserve Better
by jj skolnik
Survivors of child abuse have been having a rough time recently, with the late child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes in the news nearly every day. Even though nearly all are united in denouncing his crimes, too many of those who claim to castigate abuse do so from a condescending, paternalistic, and harmful position.
That last point is perhaps the hardest to wrestle with, because it can feel validating on the surface to see people righteously angry at the kinds of things you went through. But the familiar argument—that children should be protected because they are innocent and naive—has more in common with pedophilic attraction than it does with a meaningful recognition of children’s pain. Children are routinely diminished into a category of not-quite-people, not-people-yet. A blank surface to be despoiled, rather than full, complete humans who deserve boundaries, safety, respect, and care.
I don’t want to get too deeply into my own childhood experience here; it’s not the point. But I did always have a keen sense that adults, even those who wanted to protect me, often misunderstood what I needed. Someone to ask me what I wanted. Someone to offer me the space and the resources to heal. I wanted my autonomy and personhood recognized. I wanted to be heard, not pitied or coddled. This is no different, at the core, from what adult rape survivors go through.
This idea of childhood as a space of innocence—and children as blank slates primed to receive the imprint of the adult world without any agency of their own—goes back to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the walling-off of the commons and the invention of private property, as Madeline Lane-McKinley argues in her recently-published book, Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy. During early capitalism, she writes, the nuclear family unit became tied specifically to financial survival, putting the focus on the bonds between parent and child in a new way, and defining the child as parental property.
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