Childism: A Prejudice You Grew Up With

Unlike Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March, Child Abuse Prevention Month in April carries no message about prejudice: that child abuse manifests prejudice against children. Or that prejudice against children is comparable to sexism against women and racism against people of color.

Thanks to half a century of work by feminist intellectuals, sexism can be understood as an ideology and a prejudice. All kinds of discrimination and violence against women are united in our minds by the concept. But when we read in the newspaper that a child in New Jersey has died from neglect, or that a child in Florida’s protective services has disappeared without a trace; when we learn that children seeking political asylum in our country have been held in solitary confinement, or that molestation of children has been covered up in yet another diocese of the Catholic Church, we do not say “there is prejudice against children at work in each of these instances.”

In 1989, the United Nations issued a Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by more governments than any other UN Convention.  The Convention does bring together in one document descriptions of many of the forms of child maltreatment we read about daily in the newspaper, but it does not make us think of children—all the world’s children—as a group. It is about “the Child,” an abstraction.

And there is no indication in the Convention that there is a form of prejudice against a group—children—at work in all the forms of maltreatment.  We might call it “childism,” on analogy with “sexism,” which was coined in 1965 on analogy with “racism.”

Childism is a hard form of prejudice to recognize and conceptualize because children are the one group that, many assume, is naturally subordinate.  Until they reach a stipulated age, children are the responsibility chiefly of their parents or guardians—those who have custody.  But what does custody permit?  What distinguishes it from ownership?  One of the essential ingredients of childism is a claim by offending adults to the effect that “these children are ours to do with exactly as we see fit,” or “children are here to serve, to honor, and obey adults.”  These claims make a subordination doctrine out of natural dependency, out of the fact that children are born relatively helpless and need to be taken care of until they can take care of themselves.  It seems normal to insist, “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother” without any reciprocal “Honor Thy Children.”

As the opposite of growth promoting altruism, childism takes many forms.  In the half a century old field called “Child Abuse and Neglect” (CAN) four main types of child maltreatment have been identified and described: physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse.  These categories are now used for all statistics gathering in the field, but they do not strike me as very illuminating. They do not reflect how frequently the four types are combined in a given case, for example. And they do not prompt inquiry about the subordination purposes served by maltreating—as a classification of wars by the types of weapons used would not prompt inquiry into the purposes served by war.

Listening to my adult patients in psychoanalysis who were maltreated as children, I have heard basically three stories: they tell me that they were not wanted, that they were controlled and manipulated, or that they were not allowed to be who they felt they were. So I have come to think in terms of childism that intends  (1) to eliminate or destroy children;  (2) to make them play roles no child should play; or (3) to dominate them totally, narcissistically erasing their identities.  These three broad categories capture the forms of childism from the child’s and the adult survivor’s point of view. Survivors make it very clear that the worst part of their experience—the most difficult to heal from, the least forgivable—was that no one protected them from it. They often make it clear, as well, that they have internalized the prejudice and direct it toward themselves.

Maltreaters in our society who aim (consciously or unconsciously) to eliminate children most frequently neglect them; more active infanticides (against female newborns, for example) are relatively rare. Of the CAN types, neglect, which accounts for about 60% of cases, is the one that most frequently leads to death.  By contrast, those who manipulate children, believing that they should serve adults, playing adult-like roles, most frequently practice physical and sexual abuse, keeping their victims alive and continually available, like slaves.

Many who beat and molest children are even driven by a fantasy that children should be taking care of them: they should give love (and never cry, never misbehave); they should be little wives or little (easily subdued and free) prostitutes; they should be pawns in an adult relational game.

CAN researchers have noted that emotional abuse, which takes a huge variety of forms, is usually woven into all maltreatment, but it essentially consists, I think, of assault upon a child’s sense of self, inducing lack of self-esteem. It is the means for total dominion over the child’s identity.  Children who have been terrorized on a daily basis with “I am going to kill you!” are hard to distinguish clinically from children who have grown up in a war zone (except that the war zone children have a better chance of healing in the case when their parents have tried to protect them).  A parent can produce a child who cannot learn by calling him  “Idiot!” or  “Stupid!” all his life, or by depriving him of an education; a society can do the same by refusing adequate funding to support public schools or operating with a testing regime that measures children’s failures.

Unlike those who suffer from racism or sexism, children are not yet political thinkers or political actors; they depend upon adults for the articulation and protection of their rights as they depend on adults for survival and for loving care. Every adult citizen is, in this sense, a political representative for children; every voter should be voting “in the best interests of children” for those who cannot yet vote.  Fortunately, we now have a relatively enlightened science of Child Development, but comprehending and acting upon its basic principles must become a social and political responsibility for all adults—and it is childist to shirk that responsibility. When a parent is not able to say to his or her children  “I am responsible for you, having brought you into the world, and your welfare weighs heavier with me than my own," that is childism.

Why don’t we reframe Child Abuse Prevention Month into Children’s History Month? We could celebrate the capabilities and accomplishments of our children—all children—and teach ourselves and them the forms of prejudice they—and we—have endured. We could inaugurate it singing “We Shall Overcome Someday!”

Author note: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a psychoanalyst, biographer of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, is the author of The Anatomy of Prejudices and the forthcoming Childism. She is also co-founder of Caversham Productions, a Toronto-based company that creates educational media on psychoanalysis.