What youth rights means to me

(First published in a Facebook thread earlier this year...)

1. I believe any law that treats people differently because of their age is inherently unjust. Lowering age limits is a step in the right direction, but ultimately laws should be based on individual competence/experience rather than age.

Every age-based law uses age to stand in for some other quality that's harder to measure, like the ability to drive a car safely or cast a meaningful vote. The authors of those laws know they'll needlessly deny rights to some people on the wrong side of the line, but they're fine with that because it's easier, faster, and cheaper than dealing with people on a case-by-case basis.

Instead, we should take the time to define those qualities, explain why they're necessary for whatever rights we want to restrict, and devise tests that can be applied to individuals. If we can't come up with a definition or a test, we should take that as a sign that the quality doesn't really exist, and give the right to anyone who wants it.

2. I think the most fundamental YR beliefs are:

We should judge people by who they are as individuals, not by their ages. Therefore, laws should not discriminate by age, and ageism in business or private life should be treated the same way as sexism or racism.

Unfair discrimination does not become fair or acceptable merely because it only happens for a limited time, or because everyone has been the victim of it at some point, or because it's more convenient than the alternative for those who perpetuate it.

No matter what we might think we know about how someone's interests will change in the future, their interests today are what count. We should not prevent someone from making an informed choice merely because we think they'll regret it later.

Parents, teachers, and other adults who are responsible for the care of young people have their own interests which sometimes conflict with the interests of those they care for. Therefore, granting rights or political power to adult caretakers is not a substitute for granting it to young people.

Young people, especially teenagers, are usually better equipped to make decisions about their own lives than they're given credit for. Ageism has led to millions of young people being denied essential human rights based on false assumptions about their competence. This results in real suffering and loss of human potential that is not widely recognized.

The psychology and physiology of middle-aged adults should not be the standard by which everyone is judged. Younger (or older) people may have different priorities or show different patterns of brain activity, but unless their conclusions are objectively wrong, that is only evidence of a difference, not a flaw.

School uses student laptops to spy on students at home

Disturbing.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

Good news on the strip-search front

The Supreme Court has overturned that 9th Circuit ruling, declaring it unconstitutional to strip search a 13 year old student suspected of distributing ibuprofen (or "Advil" as it's known on the street).

Article in MIT's Technology Review re: voting age

Worth reading. The author starts by citing a recent story about a girl being sentenced to three months for creating a MySpace page that made fun of her school's assistant principal, in what turned out to be a long-running kickback scheme whereby the operators of a private youth detention center paid a judge to send kids there.

The article expresses disapproval about the corruption of the judge and the severity of the sentence, but seems completely unfazed by the idea of an American citizen standing before a judge to answer for a satirical website. And this is actually understandable given the context. While children’s rights law is a notoriously murky area, it seems fair to say that children’s “individual rights” (free speech, due process, etc.) are generally thin to nonexistent, certainly in the US and probably elsewhere too. So for example, if Ms. Transue had been punished by her school rather than a court for setting up her website, it probably wouldn’t even have been news.

The law strikes me as inconsistent in its attitude toward minors: first it denies them individual rights, on the ground that they’re not yet capable of exercising moral judgment. But then it punishes them harshly for all sorts of offenses (in many cases more harshly than adults), thereby presupposing the moral responsibility they’re not yet supposed to have.

[...]

I think our culture’s insistence on treating children as children even after those children are ready to be treated as adults is

1. weird from the standpoint of anthropology and evolutionary psychology,
2. an excellent prescription for turning out adults who still think the way children are supposed to,
3. a useful tool for cracking down on unwanted precocity of all kinds, and
4. a terrific way to make up for the unfortunate encroachments these past few centuries of justice, civilized behavior, and protections for the nerdy and weak, by keeping human beings in such a savage environment for the first years of their lives that by the time they’re let out, the new Enlightenment nonsense has difficulty gaining a foothold.

Again, read the whole thing: he identifies several objections to lowering the voting age, and demolishes them one after another.

This time, an ageist bigot loses it

Come with me once more to the magical land of Slashdot, where user "c6gunner" reveals these startling facts:

• There's no difference between students who are legally required to attend school and employees who voluntarily attend a job.
  
• "Legality" and "laws" refer to school codes of conduct.
  
• The right to vote is unimportant as long as you can still stage protests and sign petitions.
  
• Students are actually free to choose any school they want. All the laws saying otherwise must be figments of my imagination.
  
• Adults who stay at their current job because they don't see any suitable alternatives are in the same situation as minors who attend their current school because they'll face fines, confinement, or other legal penalties if they refuse.
  
• Minors who are required to attend school are "outliers", not part of the "general trend".
  

Austria allowing 16-year-olds to vote

Headline says it all.

Apparently voting at 16 is also allowed in Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Isle of Man. I did not know that.

Time for a maximum voting age?

Via NYRA, this study found that "older voters both seek out and recall less information about candidates" (starting in their mid-to-late 60's) and thus have a harder time voting "correctly", that is, choosing the candidate who share their positions and ideology. "By the time voters turn 90, the scholars’ models predict their correct level of voting will be roughly half of what it was when they were 20."

If the motivation for the minimum voting age is that young people can't be trusted to "understand politics" well enough to vote correctly, then clearly we should look into setting a maximum voting age as well. Senior citizens are well-known as an important voting bloc, though, so of course that won't happen.

One might conclude from the silence on this issue, however, that the motivation for the minimum voting age is not that young people can't be trusted to choose the candidate who best matches their positions and ideology, and thus wouldn't be accurately represented. Rather, the point of denying them the vote is that the older ruling class doesn't want young people to be accurately represented in government.

Someone gets it

You're 16, You're Beautiful, and You're a Voter

Similarly, 16-year-olds who want to start voting should be able to obtain an “early voting permit” from their high schools upon passing a simple civics course similar to the citizenship test. Besides increasing voter registration, this system would reinforce the notion of voting as a privilege and duty as well as a right — without imposing any across-the-board literacy tests for those over 18.

And why stop at voting? Sixteen is a good starting point for phasing in adult rights and responsibilities, from voting to drinking to marriage. In reality, this is already when most people have their first jobs, their first drinks and their sexual initiations. The law ought to empower young people to negotiate these transitions openly, not furtively.

These ideas are nothing new to those of us in the youth rights movement, of course, but it's refreshing to see them expressed on the New York Times editorial page.

(via NYRA)

9th Circuit OKs strip-searching 13 year olds for Advil

(Via NYRA.)

Safford Middle School officials did not violate the civil rights of a 13-year-old Safford girl when they forced her to disrobe and expose her breasts and pubic area four years ago while looking for a drug, according to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.

The justices voted 2-1 in favor of the Safford School District on Sept. 21. The decision upheld a federal district court's summary judgement that Safford Middle School Vice Principal Kerry Wilson, school nurse Peggy Schwallier and administrative assistant Helen Romero did not violate the girl's Fourth Amendment rights on Oct. 8, 2003, when they subjected her to a strip search in an effort to find Ibuprofen, an anti-inflammatory drug sold over the counter and in prescription strengths.

That's right. It's officially OK to force 13-year-old girls to get naked if you suspect they might have OTC headache medicine.

Consider this: if someone had discovered this girl stripping willingly (say, for her boyfriend), there'd be an outrage, she'd be expelled, and it's possible that one or both of them would be branded a sex offender. But apparently it's all right to force her to bare herself in front of school officials, as long as you can get two other students to claim she was handing out ibuprofen. Because apparently alleviating headaches without the school board's permission is such a dangerous threat that it justifies behavior that would normally be considered rape.

Update (6/25/09): This has now been overturned by the Supreme Court.

One more YR snippet

And finally I'll copy this response to two questions, the first about the difference between taking away a toddler's agency to stick his finger in a light socket and taking away a young adult's agency to appear in porn, and the second about age-of-consent laws in general:

I think we can distinguish between a mind so immature that it really can’t make decisions that are rational, explainable through some logic and set of priorities, and one that can. That is, between a mind which is objectively lacking knowledge or reason, and one which has the necessary knowledge and reason but applies them in a way that another might find distasteful.

A toddler who’s about to stick his finger in the socket doesn’t know what he’s doing. He may not know that electricity lives in there, or that live wires are dangerous to touch, or he may not be able to make the logical connection to conclude “it would be dangerous for me to touch these wires”. He’s not making a value judgment or weighing risk against reward.

A sober 20 year old woman who’s about to appear in porn, however, is not missing the knowledge or reasoning capacity needed to make her decision. She knows what porn is, what she’ll be doing, and what she’ll receive for it. She knows that she may regret it later, and she’s weighing that risk against the immediate reward, using her own tolerance for risk. You can argue with her priorities, but that’s a matter of opinion; her decision is still informed and rational.

As for consent laws, it’s hard to take a firm position because of the woeful state of sex education in this country. Fundamentally, I think the key things a person needs to know in order to give informed consent are what sex is, what it can lead to (pregnancy, disease, emotional impact, etc. as well as secondary effects of those), and how to prevent or deal with those consequences. Those are fairly open-ended topics, and many pages have been written about them.

I think the age of consent should at the very least be made an even 16 across the country, but it doesn’t make sense to go much further than that until addressing the fact that a lot of teenagers, who may be quite capable of grasping those elements that put the “informed” in informed consent, still have not learned them. That makes it difficult to set a lower age without causing a lot of false positives. (Ideally, we could test on a case-by-case basis whether informed consent was given, but that isn’t practical.)

However, short of lowering the age, I do think the laws can be improved in other ways. They should include an exception for couples who are close in age, where one is just above the line and the other is just under, and when both parties are below the line, neither should be found guilty. Also, the law should not presume that a younger person’s consent is entirely worthless; a case of actual rape should be treated far more harshly than a de-facto consensual sexual relationship, without having to rely on a judge being sympathetic to the 19-year-old with the 15-year-old girlfriend.

Youth rights snippets

Over at Alas, a blog, they're discussing the idea of raising the legal age to appear in porn from 18 to 21 -- in a misguided attempt to save adults who aren't "really" adults from making a decision they might regret later. My comments there touched on some basic points of my youth rights philosophy that might bear archiving here:

The way we treat minors as immature and incompetent, right up to the moment they do something bad, at which point we want them to take full adult responsibility for their actions, is shockingly hypocritical and it needs to stop.

In any democracy, the government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. The principle at the heart of “no taxation without representation” is that laws can only be legitimately enforced against people who are given a chance to vote, to decide what those laws will be. If minors aren’t allowed to vote, then it’s unjust and offensive to hold them responsible for breaking laws, at least to the same degree as we’d hold an adult - which is why we have a juvenile justice system anyway.

This idea of raising the age of consent for porn to 21 is just stupid. When you turn 18, you can lock yourself into a mortgage, start a pack-a-day habit, or ship off to die in Iraq. How can anyone possibly be mature enough to do that, but still too immature to get paid for a few nude photos?

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The problem is, they won’t mature if we don’t give them an opportunity to. If we raise all the ages from 18 to 21, I think we’ll find that 21 year olds become as “immature” as 18 year olds are today. You can’t lock someone in a box for three years, away from any important decisions, and expect them to come out 3 years more mature at the end of it. Adult judgment doesn’t spring forth from the developing brain in a vacuum; actually practicing judgment and exposing oneself to situations that call for it play an important role.

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As a youth rights advocate, my primary concern is ensuring that young people do not have their agency taken away. Taking away 20-year-old Mary’s right to make decisions about her own life, in order to confer a potential benefit on 40-year-old future Mary who might regret those decisions, might be “feminist” but it’s in direct opposition to youth rights.

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The idea that decisions can’t be made correctly by a brain which will continue to develop is based on the assumption that there’s an ideal, “finished” brain that makes decisions in one particular way, and any other brain’s decisions are necessarily flawed.

But any two individuals will approach the same problem from different angles, applying different logic and priorities, and perhaps come up with different answers. People of any age are capable of reasoning and making informed decisions, even if they come up with different answers at different points in their life. If I choose A and my neighbor chooses B, that doesn’t mean my neighbor is incapable of decision-making; just like if I choose A today and would’ve chosen B ten years ago, that doesn’t mean I was incapable back then… or does it? Those who say young people can’t make decisions seem to think it does.

And I think that’s really what it boils down to. If you ask an 18 year old whether they want to appear in porn, you’ll get an answer, and if you ask why they gave that answer, you’ll get an explanation. No one claims 18 year olds can’t answer the question — they just claim 18 year olds will answer incorrectly. Why? Not because there’s anything wrong with the explanation, but because they might answer or explain differently when they’re older; the answer and explanation given by an older person is presumed to be the right one, which makes any other thought process wrong by default.

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Are you suggesting discrimination is OK because people don’t stay at the same age forever? It seems to me that only makes the discrimination more insidious, by constantly adding newly-oppressed people at one end while depriving the group of motivated activists at the other. Would sexism be OK if every year, a number of women were permanently granted “honorary man” status?

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You, at age 40, might look back and think some decisions you made at age 20 are stupid. But at the same time, you at age 20 might look ahead, consider a decision you might make at age 40, and think that would be stupid, even if you know your opinion might change over time.

Everyone’s opinions change over time, in every aspect of life, but they’re still opinions. As long as 20-year-old-you wasn’t missing the knowledge or reasoning capacity needed to make the decision, the difference can only be due to a different set of priorities. And the only way you can conclude that 40-year-old-you’s priorities are objectively the “right” ones is if you’re simply biased toward older people.