Children aren’t considered to be ordinary human beings (with privileges and rights) until they are adults. Not only do they not have the same rights or privileges, but they are often judged and subjected to laws based solely on adult fears. This magic age when someone becomes an adult is always shifting based on the adult culture’s preference or perception. For example, I’ve read that some children (oppressed human beings) don’t become “real” adults until they are over 26 years of age. The arbitrariness of this magic age makes the oppression more profound since there is no agreement as to when you will be emancipated from it. Apparently all of us experience this oppression because all of us experience childhood.

It’s the responsibility of each adult when they become an adult to not treat other young people in the same oppressed way that they were treated. I encourage everyone to seek out youth rights resources, especially if you have been hurt by oppression/abuse in your youth. It’s empowering to learn about different ways of interacting with people in order to help prevent the spread of abusive behavior. It’s worthwhile to research the subject and try to think of ways to help or change so that more young people don’t grow up thinking that this is the way the world should work.

I think a lot of adults abuse children because they are feeling and acting on this adult privilege. I think it’s important to learn better ways of interacting with people of all ages so that no one has to feel like they are less than human. Unfortunately prevalent culture likes to enforce the hate. I still experience youth oppression everywhere in the USA, and most people consider it normal. Many adults fear prejudice from youth. My experience is that the prejudice definitely goes both ways, but tends to originate from the adults and their desire to uphold their positions of privilege.

Reminds me of a friend of mine who was adopted who had no interest in meeting her biological parents. She didn’t have any ‘you abandoned me, I hate you’ issues, she just saw her adoptive parents *as* her parents and her biological parents as strangers that she had no interest in meeting. Made perfect sense to me, but apparantly she had gotten a lot of crap over the years for not having this deep curiosity about her biological parents, like that made her disloyal or something.

The first thing I thought of was that, well, maybe he was abusive and she has every right to let him rot in poverty. (And knowing what we do now, she certainly wouldn’t be the first woman from an abusive home to get involved with abusive men as an adult.) Hell, maybe she IS just an ungrateful brat. We don’t know – but the ‘ungaretful brat’ scenario seems to be the default logic, not just with Rhiannah, but EVERYONE when it come sto their parents.

I think what she’s saying is that admitting that child abuse is bad would be the same as admitting their own parents were cruel to them, and most people can’t go there. Some of us, of course, have nothing to lose.

I’m not familiar with Alice Miller, but someone was telling me recently about an author who says most Americans have what he calls an authoritarian personality – meaning, they want an authority figure to boss them around their entire lives. That’s why they like politicians who want to legislate what we can do in our personal lives and so on. I speculate that the only reason an adult could crave this is because they’re terrified of being responsible for their own choices – they want Daddy Government or Daddy Religion or any faux daddy they can find to make all their decisions and take all the blame.

For people who can’t stand responsibility, giving up freedom to the point of losing autonomy is a small price to pay.

Alice Miller talks about how people seem afraid to challenge parental authority. It would undermine everything they believe in.