Title: Are kids oppressed? Child liberation beyond equal rights

Abstract: Thinking about childhood often has a paradoxical quality. Children and young people are at once idealised and demonised. Childhood is romanticised in memory and imagination at the same time as it is the receptacle for our deepest traumas. The idea of children as an oppressed group is subject to a similar tension. On the face of it, the social situation of childhood (in most or all historical and present societies) satisfies most or all of the criteria normally treated as indicative of oppression: children are involuntarily members of a group which is subject to pervasive formal and informal discrimination, segregation, confinement and also, disproportionately, to all forms of violence (physical, sexual, economic). At the same time, the idea that children qua children constitute an oppressed group is almost universally regarded as laughable (when it is contemplated at all). The subordination and control of children, it is argued, really is ‘for their own good’ (whereas the same claim, where it has been made in the case of e.g. women and colonised peoples, has been false). Children, it is argued, are different from adults in ways that justify this subordination and control – being, for example, irrational, emotional, and naturally dependent on others to identify and secure their best interests. I will not contest the obvious truth that there are significant differences between adults and children (and that these differences themselves differ from the differences that obtain between other groups such as men and women). I will argue, however, that the claim that children are oppressed does not rely on the denial of this truth. The claim of oppression is a claim about what a given power structure does to those who are subject to it, namely that it restricts them in ways that are to their detriment and, in some sense, to the benefit of a dominant group. I will suggest that this claim, applied to the social structures that regulate childhood (the actual ones, at least, rather than some hypothetical ones) is highly plausible. If this is correct, then it follows that children stand in need of liberation from that oppression. Child liberationists, whose influence peaked in the 1970s, have typically framed the demand for the liberation in terms of ‘equal rights’. As a former child-child-liberationist with enduring sympathies in that direction, I will argue that the apparatus of (equal) ‘rights’ is not the most promising vehicle for a liberationist project, and that if we are interested in understanding and countering the oppression of children, we would do well to look beyond it.