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Childism

Childism, a term originating in the early 1970’s, is the prejudice or discrimination against children. The term is also used to describe conditions that promote stereotypes of the young. The term was coined (independently) by both Chester Pierce, a clinician and researcher at Harvard, and Jack C. Westman, of the Wisconsin University Department of Psychology. Pierce modeled his understanding of childism on racism. Westman used the term in his book Child Advocacy, explaining it as “juvenile ageism” (following the introduction of the term ageism by Robert N. Butler).

A collection of articles under the title “Do Americans Suddenly Hate Kids?” in Esquire in March, 1974, alluded to the concept of childismin response in part to the veto of the 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act by then President Richard Nixon, who accused the Act of being “family-weakening.”

A third psychiatrist, Michael B. Rothenberg, alluded to it a decade later in a provocatively titled article: “Is There an Unconscious National Conspiracy Against Children in the United States?”

Later, mostly in the 1980s, prejudice against adolescents was given separate names, like “anti-youth racism,” and, particularly in Great Britain, “ephebiphobia.” Fear of youths is sometimes contrasted to “ephebiphilia,” love of youth, which refers to adult sexual preference for pubescent or adolescent boys or girls (rather than younger children, as in “pedophilia”). Some who use “ephebiphobia” (and “paediphobia”) do so implying that the fear is central to a prejudice –as in “homophobia.” But often the term refers to adolescents or children as frightening or frightful.

The first effort to explore childism as a prejudice, operating in ways comparable to but not the same as racism and sexism, the terms on which is was modeled, was made by Dr. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a psychoanalyst, political theorist, and biographer of both Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. Young-Bruehl published an article called “Childism” in Contemporary Psychoanalysis (2009), written about it on her blog, and is publishing a book on the topic with Yale University Press in 2011. Young-Bruehl argues, three basic purposes of childism: to exploit, to eliminate, and to erase. For these purposes, all kinds of acts known later as “child abuse and neglect” can be used. Physical abuse, for example, can serve or accompany each of the three purposes.

In 18th century English there was a word for hatred of children, misopedia (modeled on other words involving ‘mis-“ like misanthrophy, misogyny, misandry). But in the 20th century the usual designation for hostility toward children was “cruelty to children,” and those who harbored this emotion were “cruelists” of the sort to be met with in every Charles Dickens novel. Those who opposed misopedia and worked to help effected children were called “child-savers.” Generally, however, the philanthropic (private, not public) child-savers viewed homeless children –classified as the Destitute, the Delinquent, and the Neglected—as a threat to society and arranged their removal into asylums, Houses of Refuge, or onto “The Children’s Train” for foster home placement in Western states. The “child-savers” felt that these children should be laboring –“idle hands do the Devil’s work.” After 1900, more progressive public children’s advocates worked to establish a juvenile court system, end child labor laws, and provide some support to families (particularly widows) so that their children were not neglected or abused. The Children’s Bureau was established in 1912.

The three strategies of removing or “placing out” Destitute children, putting Neglected children to work (in effect, indenturing them), and erasing Delinquents’ identities or tendencies to rebel in mass establishments like the Houses of Refuge reflect, Young-Bruehl’s arguments.

When Child Abuse and Neglect was founded as a field of study in the 1960s, by a group of pediatricians led by C. Henry Kempe who had identified “battered child syndrome,” the field developed by organizing around types of abusive acts, not forms or purposes of discrimination against children. Four types of acts were identified: physical abuse, neglect (meaning physical neglect), sexual abuses, and (in the late 1980s) psychological or emotional abuse. These classifications still govern the field and determine how child protective services (CPS) personnel identify maltreated children. To protect children, American Congresses passed variations on the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), but did not create anti-discrimination policy.

Anti-discrimination policy began to appear at the time that the United Nations was drafting the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), to which the USA is not signatory.

The term childism creates clarity in the court system and in developing policy. When the word “sexism” was coined in 1965, it helped feminists see all kinds of acts against women—from rape, to harassment on the job, to gender-biased pronouns—as discrimination against women. They could then bring specific suits or write specific legislation or develop specific prevention programs on that basis.

References

C.M Pierce & G. B Allen “Childism,” Psychiatric Annals (1975: 5: 266-270) Child Advocacy (Free Press, 1979, pp. 39, 49) “Age-Ism: Another Form of Bigotry,” The Gerontologist (l969: 9: 243-246). Clinical Pediatrics (l980: 19: 15-24). The Battered Child (first edition 1968, U. of Chicago).

External links

• 'Childism' Elisabeth Young-Bruehl article on 'Who's Afraid of Social Democracy'