Runaway assumptions
A news story illustrates how injustice towards young people is taken for granted
A few lines in a short Associated Press news item today provide a striking illustration of how unjustly young Americans are treated and how accepted injustice towards them is.
The children told deputies the girl had been upset that their mother had taken away her electronic devices for misbehaving, so the boy was driving her to California. The children were interviewed by detectives, who said there was no indication they had been mistreated by their mother or anyone else in the home.
Notice the juxtaposition of these two sentences. The first tells us that their mother had taken the girl’s electronics; the second, that detectives, after hearing the girl’s story, said they had “no indication” that she and her brother had been “mistreated.” If we were talking about free people, this would be widely seen as absurd: If A took B’s valuable possessions, most people would probably say that was mistreatment. If the person being driven across the country by her slightly younger brother were the 25-year-old wife of the person who had taken her phone, many people would call her spouse’s action domestic abuse. But most people assume that it’s OK for parents to take young people’s possessions, and even to do so for the specific purpose of controlling them through punishment.
The story goes on to say:
The mother declined to press charges and the children were released to her.
Charges? Where is there a basis for charges here? Oh, right: the siblings, the authorities say, took their mother’s valuable property—the same thing the mother did to the girl. But there is no statement here that the daughter declined to press charges. It’s not even stated that she didn’t get the chance. But presumably, she didn’t. The Constitution says states must not deny anyone “the equal protection of the laws,” but it is widely understood that only adults, not minors, get the protection of the law when family members take their property.
And then comes this word: released. Ordinarily, when we talk about releasing somebody, that means setting them free. People who have been released can go where they choose. Here, the people who have been “released” were turned over to the very person they had been trying to get away from. Granted, it’s possible they changed their minds, but we’re not told that. From everything we are told in the story, they were “released” into the captivity they wanted to escape. True, other people are also released into captivity: a state prison may “release” someone to immigration authorities; federal law enforcement may “release” someone to state law enforcement. Still, the word has a connotation of freedom, and its use here may help readers who take parental authority for granted—most of them!—avoid noticing that, for the siblings, if they still wanted to achieve the goal the story shows them pursuing, this was not a happy ending.
Update: ST, the teenager who wanted “to die trying to live” but whom the UK National Health Service fought to put on palliative care, was Sudiksha Thirumalesh. H/T Randy Cassingham at This Is True. The photo below is from her family via the BBC.
I like the idea of equality between adults and children, but I’m not sure that the things children use are necessarily their property. (I’m in my forties, and I don’t necessarily _want_ to own the things I use—especially potentially life-saving things like a phone—, but I know that many people want to own things.) Anyway, if preteens were free and equal to adults, they could walk away from their mother regardless of how she treated them.