The lunacy of Child Liberation My feral delinquents don't deserve rights

But, but, but (you may think) aren’t some of those restrictions intended to reduce their chance of being subjected to violence? Aren’t things like, say, requiring children to go to school intended to reduce their chance of poverty? Apparently that’s not how the author sees it.

Dr Finlayson complains that nobody takes the idea of child lib seriously. “I think we have a bit of a collective mental block about childhood […] even within politically radical circles. If the idea of child liberation comes up at all, it’s reduced to caricature and summarily dismissed.”

Well there’s a tempting invitation if even I heard one: reducing the idea to caricature and summarily dismissing it is exactly what seems appropriate, not least because the book’s ahead-of-publication hype machine is reducing it to caricature already.

We can recognise that our ideas about what constitutes the span of childhood are culturally contingent and historically determined. We can recognise that there’s no natural or immutable law that tells us how we should police and protect children, or that tells us at what age they should be allowed to smoke, drink, take international flights and make whoopee. But to argue categorically — as the puffery for this book unequivocally seems to — that we should “break the consensus that children’s lives are not their own” is eye-catching but bananas.

I don’t know if Dr Finlayson has any children, or has even met any children, but if she has, they are clearly out of the usual line. Children, in my experience as the parent of a 14-year-old, a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old, are not to be trusted with implements any sharper than a butter knife — let alone a vote, bodily autonomy or the decision as to whether they should go to school.

“Basic freedoms of movement and speech”? Any radical progressive in favour of giving children more freedom of speech than they already have will get a nasty surprise if they check out what teenagers say to each-other on their class WhatsApp groups. The last time I gave my 12-year-old freedom of movement, he left his guitar lesson, climbed on the W3 bus instead of the 144 and my co-oppressor, his mum, had to miss her Thursday football game to go and rescue him from the far side of Alexandra Palace.

Children are maniacs. Left in charge of their own lives, they will subsist entirely on Lotus Biscoff Spread eaten from the jar with a dessert spoon. They are excellently good at losing things, breaking things, and setting things on fire. Given a free choice as to how to spend their days, they would play Rocket League on the PS5 or browse early Nineties indie songs on Spotify until their eyeballs fell out. Were we to take seriously the notion that children should be put in charge of their own destinies, I feel confident we could reverse the goods of western civilisation, patiently accumulated over millennia, in a generation or two.

An “oppressed group”? Sure, my 14-year-old will regularly make clear that she feels oppressed by the way that the boss-class, ie me, occasionally asks her to do her homework, stop looking at her phone, go to bed on time, leave for school before midday, empty the dishwasher or wave even a cursory hello to members of her extended family when they come to visit. By the orthodoxies of identity politics — in which her “lived experience” is sovereign and it is your task to listen humbly and “educate yourself” — you could construct the case that she is indeed oppressed. But it is not oppression as the medieval Russian serf, the plantation slave or the employee in a Chinese iPhone factory will tend to recognise the term.

Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that the feral delinquency of my own children and all the children I have ever met may be a symptom of living under the normative yoke of late capitalism. Let us suppose that, were they only freed from the crypto-fascist structure of the nuclear family, the little brutes would at once become public-spirited, communistic, outward-looking, self-directed and responsible: pint-sized versions of the “organic intellectuals” mid-century Marxists dreamed of springing up in the proletariat like mushrooms after rain.

Nevertheless, it bears noting that the state of childhood autonomy for which Dr Finlayson appears to campaign — a state in which age discrimination is cast off, and children enjoy the freedoms and responsibilities of adults — isn’t a glorious and untried future. It’s an inglorious and well-tried past.

Childhood itself — at least as we conceive it now, of a period between toddlerhood and early adolescence associated with play and education and (thank you, the Romantics) “innocence” — is an invention of the early modern period. Until relatively recently, in historical terms, children were to all intents and purposes treated as tallness-challenged apprentice grown-ups. The strong version of this case — the historian Philippe Aries’s flamboyant declaration in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” — has been largely discredited. But the weak version is unarguable.

Daniel Defoe, touring the UK in the early 18th century, reported approvingly from Norfolk that “the very children after four or five years of age, could every one earn their own bread”.  It was only after decades of campaigning through that century and right up towards the end of the 19th century in this country that laws were passed to protect — sorry, oppress — such children.

Writing in 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took aim at the “free labour” of children (the term given to those child workers who still lived with their parents rather than being formally apprenticed), pointing out sourly that “If the labour were indeed free, the contract would approach, on the one side, too near to suicide, on the other to manslaughter.” Coleridge’s view, gradually, won out. Children were oppressed first by an 1819 Act which prevented children under the age of nine from being employed in cotton mills, and limited working hours for those over nine. They were oppressed again by the 1908 Children Act, which removed their right to the death penalty, their right to visit brothels, their right to buy tobacco and — unkindest cut of all — raised the legal drinking age to five. There’s a whole two-century long, hard-fought history of campaigning to remove rights from children, and personally I’m all for it.

And to state what will perhaps be obvious: no matter how high-minded the philosophical case for Child Liberation, we should be uneasy that there are people who will cheer such a case to the echo for non-philosophical reasons — specifically, those who will find distinctly appealing the idea that a liberated child will be capable of consenting to sex with adults. Nambla (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) and the UK’s now-happily-defunct Paedophile Information Exchange — both of which surfed the wave of contemporaneous late-20th-century liberation movements — were very keen on respecting the rights of children to express their sexuality freely.

I don’t for a second suggest that this is the agenda that Dr Finlayson is pushing, but it should give us — and in my view should have given her publishers — serious pause. Not all radicalism is a good idea just because it’s radical, and it’s possible to construct a theoretical position that’s very clever but doesn’t have a lick of sense. Perhaps the book itself will prove more sensible and more subtle than its hype, but from this far off it sounds just a tiny bit s-word.

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Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator. His forthcoming book, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, is out in September.

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