For the Sake of children
by
Matt Giwer (c) 1994 <3/12>

      There is a trend that is more than a little disturbing afoot these days. The invocation of "for the children" is becoming accepted as a stopper in political discussions of Constitutionally protected human rights and civil rights. It is tempting to point to the loss of ninety lives, including children, in Waco as having been the result of an action being taken "for the sake of the children."
      However the examples we have are much more widely spread and more insidious than that. Johnny can't read but there is certainly time to indoctrinate him against smoking. Adults have the right to own guns but that must be curtailed for the children being harmed by them. We have the right to a free press but we must ban kiddy porn for the sake of the children.
      The time is long passed when we needed to but did not examine the basic assumption of this argument. At the moment it appears that if children can be connected to an issue in some manner then that connection can not be challenged. Whatever side of the issue it must be considered in favor of that side.
      Legal childhood continues to age eighteen all else being equal. Legal adulthood continues for approximately another sixty years. Childhood is a fleeting and transient thing. In our society what we put children through is an education, formal, informal, and social to prepare them for no longer being children. No matter the emotional attachment to the innocence of childhood, a childlike nature is not something we truly want to see in an adult.
      Another aspect of this is that at least half of our population identifies with children and with what happens to them. And in our society where women are voters and active in social matters that brings a weight of concern for children that is something new in terms of social change, given such changes are measured in decades.
      It is of interest to note that one hundred years ago there were no child labor laws and young children worked in factories. Today this is considered reprehensible and a shame. That is only a point of view and not a particularly reasonable one. Had their families not moved to the cities those children would have been working the same hours on the family farm. And for other than mandatory education children on farms continue to do so today.
      The farm work analogy is very important in that not only is farm work of all kinds, not just on the family farm, exempt from child labor laws there are other major exemptions. Such labor is exempt from all safety laws and farm work is the most dangerous in the country. It is also exempt from the forty hour work week, workman's compensation. You name the law that protects an adult worker on the job in this country and you will find an exemption for farm labor. And that includes farm labor for children.
      This is not a call for regulating such labor rather to point out people raised on farms do not appear particularly damaged by the experience. Yet we would hold any non-farmer guilty of sixteen law violations were his children treated the same. The culture of the city is to enshrine in law an image of childhood that exists only in social custom and has nothing to do with children as people but with the common image of childhood.
      It is this image that women bring into play when dealing with political issues. Yet we have not examined why it should be given any particular standing in our society. For any parent and child neither chose the other as a person; one can only choose one's friends.
      Thus a child born to less than socially acceptable acceptable parents was not the choosing of the child much less the choosing of society at large. It follows the primary responsibility for the child is held by the parents. Society at large has (by stretching matters) a responsibility to enforce the behavior of the parents toward the child.
      Thus gratuitously beating the child is right out. However, in matters that can be considered discipline be it physical or not the parent must be granted the widest possible latitude. Unfortunately that is not the case these days.
      For example the magic term, child abuse. This is an incantation that by merely saying it condemns the accused without evidence. The extent of what is considered child abuse these days has no comparison to what would have been considered abuse a century ago. But the words have not lost their power to invoke imaginings of wild sex orgies with children when the action was sending them to bed without supper.
      That ignominy was often suffered by the Beaver yet today there are people wanting to classify that as child abuse. That is a benchmark of change in only forty years. The question has to be asked, did the Beaver grow up any worse for it? Rather conjure up your most grevious understanding of the way children were raised in the past and ask how Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln or your favorite historical character managed to survive.
      Now lets go back to the eighteen years of legal childhood and the sixty years of legal adulthood. When it comes to restricting the parents for the sake of the children a rather obvious point is being ignored. Those children become parents. Those children become the restricted. Thus over a life time the benefits and harms to the children must be compared to the benefits and harms to the adults. Due to the difference in time spent in each category the considerations for the adults is three times greater.
      It is not clear that everything done for the sake of the children is unquestionably to their benefit merely because it appears to be so. Obviously we have the question of Waco before us. It is difficult to see how they benefited from dying.
      This a matter of responsibility for unintended consequences. Certainly the actions taken were not intended to lead to their deaths however that does not absolve the person taking the action from those consequences. When such consequences are immediate there is usually legal responsibility. However there are long term consequences for which there is equal responsibility.
      The longer the term of the consequences the more difficult they are to evaluate; in fact it is nearly impossible. There are too many uncontrolled variables. For example almost every change in our society in the last 50 years has been blamed for falling academic test scores at one time or another.
      Certainly in substantiated cases of actions that would be considered criminal outside of the family situation there is no question. The problem is that many things within the family situation would be criminal (restricting actions) or the non-family response (if you don't like it, leave) are also criminal. Thus the family merits unique treatment before the law.
      Benefits and harms are difficult to assess as we are not omniscient either individually nor as a group nor as a public figure. That is one of the reasons the original intent of the establishment of government in this country was to strictly limit that government. It is the unanimous experience with governments that any power the government holds will eventually be abused.
      Therefore to judge the justification in granting the government a particular power we have to assess the magnitude of the abuse in which the government will engage. Even the most noble cause can not rely upon the character of the people in government to prevent abuse. People in government are fleeting and they are no more screened for character than for any other job.
      Thus the direct harm we have to consider is to the adults in any action. This is not out of line with tradition. Looking back that traditional one hundred years we find the husband was the sole spokesman for the family. In the interim that spokesmanship has come to be shared by husband and wife and some would say it has shifted to the wife having the most say, certainly in the control of the children in a separation or divorce the wife has the greater say. I hold this symptomatic of the larger issue of acting for the sake of the children with women as the spokescritters for that position.
      In further considering this matter the parents are ultimately responsible for the children regardless of the intrusion of a government employee. Eventually that person will go away and the parents are left with dealing with the aftermath of the intrusion and the degree of harm it has done to the children regardless of the benefits.
      There is no way out of considering the adults primary in any actions taken for the sake of the children. And in these intrusions the actions the harm to the adults is clearly measured in the deprivation of their Constitutionally protected human rights and in their civil rights created by law.
      We can start with the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

4th Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

      I do not see it necessary to suggest this would include the members of the family in the original context or in the modern context. Yet we an invasion of this privacy can occur based upon a single anonymous phone call. Anyone from a best friend to a worst enemy can make that phone call.
      Many states have enacted special laws regarding injury to children from firearms. Firearm injuries are portrayed as something adult, as something children should not have to suffer. It is an argument with emotional appeal but is divorced from reality.
      Deaths and injuries of children by poisons from all of those things kept under the kitchen sink, in the laundry room and in the garage outweighs guns by tens to hundreds of times. And this only deals with the legal children category. It does not address the real children.
      It is common to read the number of child deaths from guns as the caption for a picture of an infant. More truthfully the picture should be of a teenage drug dealer dying in a shoot out he started. That person may be a legal child but there is no excuse to count a gun carrying "child" in those same statistics.
      Although we hold the freedom of speech does not cover commercial speech, meaning there is no freedom to lie in advertising, we find a cartoon character, Joe Camel, under heavy attack for appealing to children. The only study supporting this position is comparing the recognition to Mickey Mouse. It is hardly necessary to point out Mickey Mouse has a lot more competition these days than in the days the people designing the test were growing up. Mickey Mouse would lose to Barney the Dinosaur these days.
      If we will accept the battle of the cartoon characters is not is ridiculous then we have to ask a more important question. Even though Johnny can't read he has been thoroughly indoctrinated against smoking to a degree that would make a brain washing expert envious. The question is, why has all this educational time and money been wasted if one ad campaign can wipe out everything? That is like saying one ad campaign can wipe out years of education in arithmetic.
      Rather perhaps it is a recognition the anti-smoking efforts in school are equally propaganda and their results disperse as quickly as cigarette smoke in the windy day of reality. In any event for the sake of the children does not appear a reasonable justification but it is the only justification we have. Whether it works or not, if it is "for the children" then we have to do it.
      Like it or not, starting in the late 1940s this country has been systematically dismantling its pornography laws. However the censors found the "for the sake of the children" issue and have passed kiddy porn laws without opposition and they have not been overturned.
      The reasons these laws should not exist are the same reason every other pornography law should not exist. The basis for these laws is the old "only a pervert would be interested" justification. Remember here that written, drawn, or photographed material is equally banned unless, as in the Maplethorpe exhibit, it is declared art.
      Avoiding the observation that only those who can appreciate art can appreciate kiddy porn I go on to the next step. Only photographic kiddy porn has the slightest possibility of being harmful to children. Written and illustrated material can not save if we subscribe to the pornography as a cause rather than an effect.
      How are people harmed by this? To my mind it would be pornography with people who appear to be children rather than adults. Right now there are cases where people are being charged with selling photographic material where one of the characters was only recently discovered to have been under age when the videos were made. That is enough to trigger the prosecution even though she looked quite adult at the time.
      Now we have a woman who was a legal child at the time and a dealer is has to pay the cost of a legal defense and who knows what all else because this woman lied about her age before she was a legal adult.
      And here we get to the question of who is harmed. The actress still has her career. The publicity from the case will help her. Perhaps she was harmed in some manner but she shows no particular signs of it. She will not be charged with anything but the adult in this case will suffer financial loss at a minimum. Who suffers from this non-protection of non-children?
      There is no defense in this culture of the physical use of children in sexual situations. Even permitting children to view sexually explicit material is considered abuse in this society. Yet in all of these prohibitions there is not the slightest evidence that any of it harms children. Our social mores will not permit us to seriously question the premise that it does cause harm.
      The best that can be done is to presume it is only the observation of the sex acts of others that would cause harm. It is clear about half and perhaps a majority of the world's population is living in a one room shelter that might be called a home and it was much higher in the past. Given the greater number of children in the past it is obvious seeing one's parents performing the sex act was in no way harmful.
      It is clear we have permitted a matter of what are only contemporary social mores with which we are judging and we are not judging on the basis of harm to children. We are in fact doing no different than some parents do, inventing a harm from an action -- if you keep making that face it will freeze that way. There is no harm with the face; there is no penalty for doing it. But we believe in a harm without question.
      In so believing much beneficial cultural change is being subverted by using the for the sake of the children argument. It is the presumed harm to the children we have not examined and are in fact violently opposed to examining. And this opposition comes from women.
      Militant feminism does not come alone and while the feminists make fools of themselves when speaking for themselves they have a hook on the cultural milieu of children. It is a new venue for attack upon rights we have held safe for decades if not centuries. Yet upon examination we find there is no basis for the presumed benefit to children much less a benefit that could outweigh the harm to the adult.
      Waco should be the stopper on this form of argument. We have seen it is powerful enough to be the primary excuse for the deaths of the children. Literally we are to the point of holding abuse is worse than death. Of course that was the old description of rape and again women promoted that. Whether they died by that decision is highly questionable. But in 1993 the powerless children died by it.
      It is time we challenge this argument every time we see it and not be put off by the "everyone knows" response. We can not be put off by pretensions of social approbrium. It is time to challenge this argument every place it appears.
      Children are a justification for anything and everything that can be connected with them. The harm always accrues to their parents through the parents to them if not directly to them. There is no such thing as a change without a negative side and all have to be examined in detail.