The children's liberation movement emerged in the 1970s, drawing inspiration from the feminist movement and other social changes of the period. Two of its most influential manifestos were Escape From Childhood by John Holt and Birthrights by Richard Farson. David Archard summarised the movement's core propositions:
The basic claims of the children’s liberationists are that the modern separation of the child’s and adult’s worlds is an unwarranted and oppressive discrimination; that this segregation is accompanied and reinforced by a false ideology of ‘childishness’; and that children are entitled to all the rights and privileges possessed by adults.
My aim in this article is to point out the dark side of the children's liberation movement. Before doing so, I acknowledge that the movement also had some good ideas. In particular, I have learned a great deal from John Holt. His book Escape from Childhood contains many entirely valid critiques of the abuse of power over their children by parents. His book Instead of Education is an excellent critique of schooling with useful suggestions for alternative ideas for education.
Justifying Sexual Abuse of Children
The children's liberation movement was highly skeptical of parental authority. The core idea that came out of the movement is the view that parents have no right to act paternalistically towards children and that paternalism is itself a kind of abuse of parental power. As a corollary of this view, parents (and other adults) should treat children in the same way that they would treat a rights-bearing adult.
There are numerous problems with this theory but I want to focus on the most significant implication of this view: the idea that children can consent.
People are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions. Since children have not yet reached a level of rationality that enables them to foresee the consequences of their actions, they are not able to meaningfully consent to contracts, medical decisions, sexual activity, or other agreements.
The child liberationist movement denied this. Since restrictions on children were seen as illegitimate, child liberationists argued that children are able to consent to contracts and, most significantly, to sex. Richard Farson clearly states this in Birthrights:
What it does advocate is the freedom for children to conduct their own sexual lives with no more restrictions than adults. Further, that all sex activity be decriminalized so that sexual experimentation and sexual acts between consenting people can be enjoyed without fear of punishment. If all this sounds too open and free, we must recognize that in this society—when it comes to matters of sexuality—we are not likely to err in the direction of too much freedom.
If "all sex activity" is decriminalized, this means that adults would be able to have sex with children. This is justifying, defending, and excusing such evils as pedophilia, incest, and the sexual abuse of children. This is the dark side of the children's liberation movement and it can be seen in all the writings of the period.
The theorists of the movement do not deny that their views logically entail that adults should be able to have sex with children. Instead, they make a range of excuses and minimisations.
The argument child liberationists used to defend their views on child sex was as follows:
- The child liberationists claimed that society has an unrealistic view of children as asexual or innocent.
- They cited evidence to show that children have sexual feelings.
- They argued that since children are sexual beings (and not innocent), therefore sex with children should be allowed.
Whether or not society has an unrealistic view of children's sexuality is irrelevant to the moral question of whether a child can consent. Whether a child has sexual feelings is beside the point: children cannot meaningfully consent. The presence or absence of sexual feelings in the child has no bearing on whether they can consent. The declared consent of a child has no bearing on whether an adult who has sex with the child has committed a crime because a child's consent is not meaningful.
Grooming
What the children's liberation advocates argue is that there is no such thing as grooming. This follows logically from their argument that children can consent. According to this idea, all that a pedophile would need to do is persuade a child that sexual activity is beneficial to the child, and then the pedophile would not be committing a crime, since the child "consented".
John Holt dismisses the risk of grooming by asserting that children are capable of sexual desire and therefore are not victims. In Escape from Childhood he writes:
Some people have voiced to me the fear that if it were legal for an adult to have sex with a consenting child, many young people would be exploited by unscrupulous older ones. The image here is of the innocent young girl and the dirty old man; few worry about the young boy having sex with an older woman. Here, too, we are caught with the remains of old myths–in this case, that only men were sexual, that women were pure and above it–from which it follows that any young girl having sex with an older man must necessarily be his victim.
Pedophiles seek out children who are vulnerable precisely because such children will be much easier to persuade and so the pedophile can commit their crime with much less resistance from the child. Vulnerable children are highly suggestible because they are not being cared for and protected by their parents. This vulnerability is exploited by pedophiles. This evil exploitation of children who have already been neglected and harmed is what grooming is. Yet child liberationists deny the existence of grooming.
Incest
How can children's liberation advocates seriously defend an evil such as incest? The main defence is to minimise the gravity of this crime by claiming that it is not a big deal and kids turn out fine. Here is how Richard Farson argues it:
Incest and sexual activity within the family, whether it be father-daughter, mother-son, brother-sister or any homosexual combination of those partners, is far more common and far less traumatic than we have always been led to believe.
In a disgusting passage, Farson agrees with someone he cites who argues that fathers should be able to have sex with daughters in order to preserve the family if the mother is unable to have sex:
Sometimes incest occurs because it become functional to the preservation of the family, for example, if the wife is an invalid. When a family member, as Bagley puts it, "is socialized in the norms of incest, whether it is seen by the family to be functional for the survival of the family or because it is desired for some other reason by some dominant family members, the evidence from case histories shows that incest can be accepted by the younger partner with equanimity." This is literally arguing that parents may use their children as sex objects and that the children will be fine.
Farson uses a long quote from Karl Menninger's 1942 book "Love Against Hate" to argue that incest has positive benefits:
The assumption is, of course, that children are irreparably ruined by such experiences. Without intending in the least to justify or excuse such criminal behavior I may nevertheless point out that in the cold light of scientific investigation no such devastating effects usually follow (a fact which I hope will be of some comfort to certain anguished parents). Two psychiatrists (Lauretta Bender and Abram Blau) recently made a careful follow-up study of such cases and concluded that children exposed to premature sexual experiences with adults frequently turn out to be "distinguished and unusually charming and attractive in their outward personalities." The conclusion to be drawn from such observations need not be shocking; they simply bear out our contention that sexuality is not the evil and horrible thing it is generally conceived to be. Such experiences are traumatic to the child only when connected with deep hostilities; the furtive and desperate nature of such attacks, combined with the attitude of society toward them, tends entirely in the direction of unbearably stimulating the child's hostilities so that he conceives of sex as brutality. But when the experience actually stimulates the child erotically, it would appear from the observations of the authors cited just above that it may favor rather than inhibit the development of social capabilities and mental health in the so-called victims.
Menninger asserts that he doesn't intent do justify or excuse incest, but immediately goes on to do both. The implicit assumption in this despicable quote is that the child has consented to sex. Again, children cannot meaningfully consent.
Menninger assumes that children who have been abused are fine because they are "unusually charming and attractive". His skill as a psychologist doesn't seem to be enough to make the obvious connection that children in such circumstances may appear charming because they have had to adapt their personalties to please adults as a matter of survival.
The contemptible nature of his arguments can be seen by replacing incest with rape and making the same argument: e.g. rape is not such a big deal because the victims have better "social capabilities" afterwards etc.
Citing Child Sexual Abuse of Babies As Evidence
As part of the argument that children should be viewed as sexually active, Farson cites the crank Alfred Kinsey's 1953 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female :
Full display of physiologic changes which are typical of the response of an adult have been observed in both female and male infants as young as four months of age. This citation is itself evidence of sexual molestation of babies that was undertaken by Kinsey in his research. Kinsey did experiments on children to see how many orgasms they could have within 24 hours. He documented this in a table in his book.
Pedophilia
Farson has another argument to justify pedophilia: the claim that children enjoy sex with adults and that it is really hurting the child to treat pedophilia as wrong. He quotes Germaine Greer, who minimised incest and claimed positive benefits:
One woman I know enjoyed sex with an uncle all through her childhood, and never realized that anything unusual was toward until she went away to school. What disturbed her then was not what her uncle had done but the attitude of her teachers and the school psychiatrist. They assumed that she must have been traumatized and disgusted and therefore in need of very special help. In order to capitulate to their expectations, she began to fake symptoms that she did not feel, until at length she began to feel truly guilty about not having been guilty. She ended up judging herself very harshly for this innate lechery.
Note that Greer simply assumes that the child could legitimately consent to sex and so it doesn't even occur to her to address whether the adult had done anything wrong.
Increased Child Sexualisation
Another bizarre argument by child liberationists is that if there were increased sexualisation of children, this would protect children from sexual abuse. The argument is essentially that society is too repressed about sex and that if everyone just lightened up then children would be able to resist sexual advances because sex would not be such a big deal. John Holt argues this in Escape from Childhood:
A mother of three daughters told me once that because she, speaking for society, was able to tell one of her daughters that she could not sleep with a young man who wanted to sleep with her and was using various kinds of blackmail in order to get her to do it; the daughter was protected. She did not have to say no for herself. She could even say things like, "I'd like to but my mother would kill me." But this is all in the context of a society in which men exploit women as sex objects. In a society such as I propose, the dangers (to the daughter) of sex would be less. At the same time the pressure on the young man to make a conquest would also be much less. If sex were not seen as dangerous, romantic, and ecstatic, and at the same time dirty and disgusting, there would be less need to protect people from it, and they would be more able to protect themselves. Women who did not feel that their worth depended on their being sexually attractive to men would not be swayed by the kind of blackmail boys use on girls today--indeed, they would be turned away by it. A young man who tried it would soon be out of luck.
Did Holt seriously think that children can defend themselves from manipulative sexual aggression simply by being more familiar with sex?
The Wider Movement for Legitimising Child Sexual Abuse
It was not only Farson and Holt who made arguments to legitimise pedophilia. Many other thinkers of the postwar period also argued for this.
Shulamith Firestone's influential radical feminist tract The Dialectic of Sex had a chapter on child liberation in which she called for "The sexual freedom of all women and children" so that "now they can do whatever they wish to do sexually". She explicitly defends incest, stating:
Thus, without the incest taboo, adults might return within a few generations to a more natural polymorphous sexuality, the concentration on genital sex and orgasmic pleasure giving way to total physical/emotional relationships that included that. Relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of – probably considerably more than we now believe
In 1977, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, and other intellectuals signed a petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalization of all "consensual" sexual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen, the age of consent in France at the time.
Conclusion
The children's liberation movement was at its best when criticising the abuse of power by parents and by the State. It went seriously wrong when suggesting alternative norms for relationships between adults and children.
The core philosophical problem with the children's liberation movement is that the authors had no real theory of what the parental role is. In particular, they did not have a coherent theory of parental obligations or parental authority.
Do parents have enforceable obligations to their children? If so, what should those obligations be? Both Holt and Farson were vague on this question.
Do parents have any basis for parental authority? Holt and Farson were skeptical but never fully repudiated parental authority. They were not advocates of abolishing the family like Shulamith Firestone. Yet they never clarified what parents should have authority to do. Holt accepted that parents have authority to make rules about what goes on in their own home as homeowners, but he left it at that.
Since they lacked a theory of the parental role, the children's liberation advocates viewed parents as if they were merely some benevolent friends of the children and children as if they were just small adults.
Neither Holt nor Farson thought about the causal responsibility parents have for the state of peril that children are in. Nor did they consider the implication of this principle: that parents have an enforceable obligation to remove their children from a state of peril by raising them to the safety and self sufficiency of adulthood.
If they had thought about the parental role in light of this principle, they would have argued that parents have a clear obligation to protect their children from sexual predators, as part of their more general obligation to get their kids out of peril. And they would have argued that in order to fulfil that obligation, parents have authority to act as guardians of their children, including protecting their children from predators, dangers, and consequences that their children do not yet fully comprehend.