ILF DIGEST Conference

September, 2003

Youth and Human Rights Discussion
Host Mike Males

U.S. Policy Toward Adolescents: Human Rights Violation?	Social Construction of the Concept of Youth	Raising Youth: Parental and Societal Roles
Racial and Ethnic Diversity and Treatment of Youth	Repression of Youth Through Traditional Power Structures	Views of and Treatment of Youth (America vs. Other Nations)
Advocating Human Rights and Liberties for Youth	Current Media Issues	Youth and Sexuality
The Case for Lowering the Voting Age		Closing

Mike Males
Walter-- thanks for the note, and I wish I had a definitive answer. The normal

explanations--the US is an aging, wealthy society in which children are costly to raise and the economically unproductive, traditional families are in transition, adolescents and adults experience generational conflicts, etc.--do not explain why Americans are so hostile to youths in ways similarly situated European adults are not. One possible underlying reason is that the US is the only nation that is both wealthy and racially diverse. Compared to other affluent nations’ citizenries--e.g., UK (3% non-European), Sweden (2%), Germany (2%), Japan (1% non-Japanese), Australia (8%), Canada (13%)--the USA (31% nonwhite) is diverse and becoming more so, particularly at young ages. (In this respect, the USA more resembles poorer Latin American neighbors.) The USA’s diversity has led to a situation in which older whites do not identify with, and often actively fear, poorer, younger groups. This explanation seems insufficient to fully explain the extraordinary anti-youth fear and anger among American adults, however, especially in view of the growing hostility against white youths. I admit that I am stumped by the vehemence of rationality-defying fears and punishing policies that are automatically accepted here as vital to dealing with children and teens. Currently, the USA accounts for 90% of the world’s Ritalin prescriptions, 90% of the world’s juvenile executions, and virtually 100% of the juvenile curfew arrests, drug tests, and a host of other negatives--and we are moving further from accepted world standards by the month. I hope this forum will generate some thinking about our appallingly bad-and-getting-worse record.

Participant
Mike: I, as a very senior WBSI (the forebearer of ILF) member, welcome you.

I suspect that much of our conversation here will show generational differences. My college class was ‘38 and the demography of our nation was (as you have pointed out) very different. It was a "white" population and its norms were WASP –even in my family which was non-religious Jewish—and my marriage of 67 years, and still counting with enthusiasm, was to a non-religious Christian Scientist. Our ethical norms were WASPish and our very successful child rearing practices were with a mixture of love and expected discipline. While divorce was in our vocabulary, it was not in our list of options and much of this has been passed along to our 3 children (no divorces and a traditional work ethic).

Our grands are not yet married, but I expect that some of the above ethics will have rubbed off on them. But I also am sure that the details of their future child-rearing will need to be quite different.

I write the long introduction because I believe that much of our discussion here will be related to the rapid changes in our demography and cultural composition of a nation which is in many respects "foreign" to me and not yet absorbed by most of our citizens of all cultural mixes.

Two final "prejudices":

1. We must learn to be tolerant of differences without throwing away many of the virtues that were embedded in my early years.

2. I recognize the importance of the emphasis that Dick and others place in treating children more like adults -- but hope that in doing so we will also recognize that a person of 15 is quite different from one of 25.

Participant
Thank you, Richard, for inviting me to this; I'm sure I'll have some interesting insight to add to the discussion.

First of all I'm not sure the lack of rights and respect for youth is primarily an American problem. Assuredly it is worse here than in Europe and other places, but I think when we focus on the cultural differences we miss the root causes for the lack of youth rights, and I believe these are universal.

As for why the United States happens to have a worse form of ageism, I'm not sure. I think however it is not unusual for our history. I believe Europe also struggled with, and still does struggle with racism and sexism and discrimination against homosexuals, but in all cases (I'm shooting from the hip on this assertion) the United States had a worse form of the particular discrimination.

Racism and sexism and the like however were not unique to the United States, and a critique of these forms of discrimination must be a universal, cross-cultural critique. Likewise, with ageism, and the lack of youth rights. It is a universal problem so there must be universal answers.