The Protective Circle

(Please note, the following essay is constantly in a state of improvement and so will be expected to change as I work on it. Consider it a work in progress. I welcome comments and criticism.)

The Protective Circle

For children, there is no objective good. Often when people talk about protecting the innocence of children they assume there is one measurable standard of care that necessarily benefits them. This is in terms of popular consciousness, because any professional will attest to the fact that for children there are possibly endless forms of adult intervention that serve to benefit the individual child. Popular consciousness tends to deride certain interventions with children as necessarily harmful or helpful regardless of their observable effects. Acts that are considered helpful and those that are considered harmful are only schematic categories. The only undeniable proof of their categorical representation ought to be externally visible on real life children—not phantoms.

“Children” is nothing but a representation. If I were to say that children are harmed by sex, for instance, there is no specification of what children I am referring to, what type of harm is inflicted, to what degree the harm is inflicted, to what degree the harm can be reversed, and what type of sexual advance was administered. If these questions can not be answered, then what we are dealing with is a phantom child, a non-living spirit, a representation with no presence anywhere outside the mind, and an activity that also could be considered representational. What popular consciousness does is it replaces the real living and breathing child with a phantom representation, and asserts that some acts are necessarily harmful to it and that others are not. How can harm be inflicted on a phantom child? When we consider such statements as necessary truths, we show a great care for phantom children that we are depriving real living breathing children.

The insertion of “perhaps” or “can” into our objective statements defang the beasts, but they still remain just as ravenous. The statement that children can be harmed by sex allows us to assert that some unjustifiable act, still of unknown specificity, has the potential to cause harm, still of unknown quantity, on phantom children. That is all well and good, but since real children are nowhere included in the statement at the preference for phantoms, we are still forced to regard the objectivity of the statement as pertaining to phantoms rather than real children. Real children exist in the world of the living, not in the world of the imagination, or in the popular consciousness. One can not talk about what harms and what doesn’t harm, what threatens or doesn’t threaten children, until one addresses specific examples of real children—the ones with names and faces. Otherwise, one is simply referring to phantoms.

To remove the maws and claws from this beast and truly render it limp, we have to strip away our preconceptions further. In other words, to keep statements from being harmful to children (seeing as that has become the justification for all human behavior these days) we have to back track to the foundation upon which it stands and rip the rug out from beneath it—to get it lying on its back. Simply adding in the precautionary clause “some,” as in some children can be harmed by sex, does nothing to slay the implication of the statement. We’re still forced to consider that only some phantom children can be harmed by sex rather than the whole lot of them. This is all well and good to know, but it should be real children we are concerned with, considering it’d be hard to prove a phantom child exists at all, never mind that such a spirit can be “harmed” by something we mortals do.

To fully lay limp this beast, we have to kill the statement. After we do so, we realize that statements can do no harm to phantom children any more than the acts that they imply, but to fully set our public consciousness toward assisting real children, rather than fooling around with these universal platitudes directed more toward spirits—it becomes necessary to kill the statement completely. To kill a statement, you simply propose to who specifically you are referring to. If you are making a statement in regards to a living entity, it ought to have a specific name and a specific face. If the object of the statement does not have either, then we are forced to concede that we have unwittingly created another beast.

Now the statement, for children there is no objective good, might be considered another beast, but it implies that very same source of confusion around marrying our constructions of reality to terms that is the focus of this discourse. It is true that our schematic representation of objective good is also a castle built upon a spider’s web just as much as the phantom children it focuses on, but it is not a beast because it doesn’t reference any supposed objective harm to those phantom children. What we are considering are statements that imply some objective harm to some general conception of children. Simply because it proposes the idea that whatever is in “children’s” best interests is subjective doesn’t imply that there’s any harm done in that. The statement that statements are harmful to children is an example of a beast.

The History of Fences

The reason such statements can be considered “beasts” is an example of a human fallibility in preconception. In early human history, it became important to protect our specific offspring from creatures—real beasts, which could do real or objective harm to them. The savanna was a dangerous environment for the young of our species, as is nature—we didn’t need to have to state it to make it so. When the leopards were out prowling, it was understood what danger was actually there, it didn’t need to be conceptualized. Even if no harm resulted from a close encounter, it wasn’t a metaphorical representation of harm. It was a leopard. And when the young were placed in the center of the circle of armed guards, they were real live children, not a popular conception of children. Somewhere in our history the popular values concerning “threats” to our children grew to become, on the whole, phantom beasts on the prowl for phantom children. One can easily picture a circle of armed humans in the modern world, protecting a pillar that is the universal representation of “children” (something faceless and formless—in the realm of ideas) from giant “pillars of evil” standing all around, also as formless and motionless.

While we armed the battalions to defend a formless entity from a formless evil (which has become the standard model of reasoning in this world of terror), one question I think crucial remains—where were the actual children and the actual evils? Over time in our history, as our civilization grew so did our awareness of harms to children, some which aren’t even physical. We started to fear what might happen to children more than we feared what actually happens to them. As all manner of nightmare brewed in the dreamland of the adult popular consciousness, we failed to wake up and see objectively the harm that we posed to children in our trance. We invented institutions in society such as Protectionism that created beasts out of simple statements and then set out to save all children from the supposed evil they suggested was necessarily out on the prowl, lurking in the dark, hiding, waiting to pounce at any minute!

We felt powerless before the growing threat and were desperate to do anything to protect ourselves from having to fear any longer. Institutions were set in place to take care of that for us. Now we leash our children, drug them, lock them in, supervise their every move, restrict them from certain areas, set curfews to keep them in, build up fences around the play grounds three stories tall, and all manner of desperate acts to keep us from having to worry. The subtly here is that we know none of these actions truly keep them safe, and so we continually retreat back to our nightmares to dream up new ways to confine, control, suppress, and keep our young hidden from the light of day and subjected only to our darkness under the covers.

When children disobeyed us, retaliated, hit back with a vengeance, we turned them into a threat. Now it was possible that our children were not even safe from themselves, and only one wrong move could set one off on a shooting spree, cutting themselves and developing all manner of adult psychopathology in the process. We leveled blame for the threat at the audacity of our freedoms and set out to further criminalize, suppress, marginalize, censor, and dehumanize—not only against society but against our own children—to protect them from themselves. When they fought back, we fed them behavior altering medication, sent them to reeducation camps, arrested and incarcerated them in the adult justice system, censored their artwork and writings, enforced stricter codes on apparel and expression, developed technologies to track their movements, lowered curfews, latch-keyed, and gave them less useful playthings to distract themselves with until even those were considered a threat to children. Then we fought among ourselves about whether our own institutions originally set up for their protection were harmful to them, and used them as political weapons to advance adult agendas. When they fought back, we feared our children were threats to our children.

Making the matters worse, those so-called leopards were still out on the prowl, and were often able to utilize these institutions set up to keep them out, as well as utilize the children who formed their small resistance against it. Whenever you hear of how a child agreed to meet up with an online predator, as the media trumps up the incident to spread concerns of such a “growing threat,” rarely is the question asked why the child would agree to do such a thing that does not concern pinning the blame to yet another so-called social ill. It seems that as we build our fences three stories tall to keep the so-called evil from coming in, there’s nothing stopping a child from squeezing out the bend in the bottom. Thus, the institution of childhood remains intact just as the individual children within it remain free for the picking.

The reality is that fences built around children exist to keep the sanity of paranoid adults more than they do for the benefit of children. If we built a fence around a child, we can calm our trembling hearts that the child is safe from all external hazards, and then effectively divest our responsibility for the child to the devices. These fences replaced the human “protective circles” that used to shield the children in the midst of a threat out prowling. As paranoia increased the possibility that a threat could happen at any time, we entrusted the fences with providing that protection at all times for us, thereby killing our need to worry whether the children are safe so long as they are contained within it. From within the artificial circle, children are actually no safer, and perhaps even more jeopardized in the lack of caretaker regard. They are preyed on by whatever can manipulate the circumstances within the protective circle for its own ends, often producing economic gains for itself and still remain public approved—it is a “fence” after all.

The truth about our artificial fences is that they are merely an illusion. There are none that can be built high enough to protect all children from all harms all the time. It is about time the western world wakes up from the nightmare scenario and retreats back to that age of reason when we only concerned ourselves with actual harms on actual individual children, rather than assumed harms on phantoms. It’s about time we cease building these metaphorical fences as surrogate “protective circles” to stand in place for us. Human beings are capable of doing what a three-story fence can not—exercise responsibility for individual children and empower them to protect and feel responsible for themselves. It’s about time we wake up and accept the fact that children get hurt, people get hurt, and focus our efforts on working with those individual youth rather than on building our three-story fences, child protection industries, and medical industrial complexes. Whether or not we can wake up and reverse our irrational behavior will be determined by how economically, politically, and personally convenient it will be to stop using fear tactics as a means to inspire movements in popular consciousness. Whether or not that will happen is a question of whether human nature can be persuaded.

Save the Life of My Child!

We tell children not to fear the dark because the world is really no different in the dark than it is in the light, and that the difference there is only in the imagination. Whether or not this keeps children from seeing predators in the dark where they aren’t, the rationalization helps them set aside the illusions from reality and deal with each as it is necessary. Similarly, whether telling Protectionists that the world is no different where there’s illusions or realities actually keeps them from seeing threats where they aren’t, this rationalizing ought to affect how they deal with the perceived threats to children. If a threat to children is imaginary, deal with it as an imaginary threat, and if it is an actual concern, deal with it as an actual concern. The world is not made of light and shadow though, so it often is difficult to tell where realities end and illusions begin.

The question starts at the border between what is real and what is an illusion. An adult can expend great deal of time building an artificial fence and come away thinking that by doing so they are personally involved in looking out for the child’s best interests, regardless of how much of their personal responsibility is being divested to a device. Likewise, an adult can stand there administering a child’s behavioral medications thinking that by doing so they are taking an active role in educating that child about how to control their impulses; hold the leash and think they are instructing the child to not wander far; program the television’s parental settings and think they are educating their children about the nature of the so-called objectionable content; serve food products with health labels plastered all over them and nothing organic in them and think they are fostering their children’s health; tag their children with GPS technology like cattle and think they are keeping their children out of harm’s way with an eye on them at all times; create a block to their children’s ability to obtain information online by limiting their time and what sites they can access and think they are keeping them safe from the unlikely threat of predators. Indeed, adults can actively do many things, purchase many goods and services under the illusion that in doing so they are being good parents, but in reality only end up buying peace of mind for themselves and subjugation for the children. That is line between illusion and reality, it costs only the money the parent can afford to spend but its effects include a fearful society and sure financial gain for those who can manipulate the world inside the fence.

Likewise, a society can perpetuate the mechanisms of fear that make it profitable for these institutions to capitalize on that fear to begin with. A society can actively close down a public gathering space like an outdoor community skating rink and think by doing such it has saved any children who would hope to play there from potential kidnapping; can arrest and hold an eight year old carrying a nail file into school and think they were preventing a tragedy from happening; create the six o’clock curfew in the afternoon for all those under the age of eighteen so as it becomes even criminal for a youth to be seen outdoors and think they are keeping children safe from a potential threat regardless of where children are indoors, regardless of the position of the sun in the sky; intentionally work to bias state examinations thinking they are manufacturing equality; eliminate school grading and think they are keeping any student from feeling disenfranchised; rigorously restrict registered sex offender boundaries and think they are actually keeping sex offenders away from children; award vigilantes when they take duty and responsibility away from the jurisdiction’s own police force by going after those who they see fit as potential hazards to children; label children themselves as sex offenders when they commit a so-called sexual offense during their naturally explorative years and think they are preventing the child from going through life a deviant. Indeed, society can actively do many things, enact many ordinances, laws and enforce many standards under the illusion that in doing so they are being a responsible group of politicians, advocates, and public representatives, but in reality only wend up buying a constituency’s peace of mind, votes for themselves, saving community funding that otherwise would be wasted on so-called ineffectual public programs, and spreading fear and subjugating youth in the process. That is line between illusion and reality, it costs only the campaign donation money the constituency can afford to spend but its effects include a fearful society and sure political futures from those who can manipulate the world inside the fence.

Popular consciousness creates beasts out of statements by associating an assumed source of potential harm with a precluded and magnified effect. The thinking becomes something to the effect of, because I see a man propped up on the television who has been accused of groping a child, that means my child is in danger. Although the shrewdest judges of the witches and even the witches themselves were convinced of the threat they posed to society, this threat nevertheless did not exist. This applies to all threats. An individual is not capable of threatening society, only particular individuals within it. The only individuals poised to threaten society in general are terrorists who may engage in chemical warfare whereby radioactivity or some other contaminate is released and is capable of spreading out a great distance either through the air or in the water. More commonly, the individual child molesters and other agents who harm children are not capable of posing such a wide-spread threat to society that justify the amount of attention they receive--much less the amount of social paranoia they generate. In this case, the man on the television accused of groping a child, if any objective threat actually happened, could only be considered a threat to that individual child at that specific time. He is by no means capable of multiply that one threat to every child in society, and his actions should not warrant such attention that every child in society pay the price for his momentary lack of discretion.

Refutation of Protectionism

Protectionism holds that protecting a child from experiencing a potential hazard is always in the child's best interests. Protection could be said to mean the actions undertaken to remove a child from all hazards for the purpose of preserving a child’s best interests. A child’s best interests are traditionally defined as the motivations to decrease a child’s vulnerability to hazards (that which is in a child’s best interests is that which decreases their vulnerability to hazards). Thus protection is said to necessarily decrease the degree to which a child is harmed by a certain hazard in the world and therefore be a necessary course of action. However, if we understand a hazard to be any action, object, or idea for which a child is vulnerable (to the extent that they are likely to be harmed by that action, object, or idea), then anything which serves to put a child in harm's way increases the degree to which the child is made vulnerable to the action, object, or idea. If protectionism were true—that it is in the child's best interests to always remove them from harm's way (if such was possible), then it should also be true that a child is best off if he or she never experiences a hazard to begin with.

The rationale for this could be illustrated as follows. We assume that a child with a value of +10 in this formulation means said child is not subject to any harm brought about by hazard A, and therefore, is a child whose best interests are being best served in relation to hazard A, as per the definition in the formulation of Protectionism. Suppose we assign child A, who has not been protected from hazard A, as defined above, a value of -10 (the child not being protected has subjected them to the total amount of harm, and therefore is assigned a full negative score), and we assign child B who has inadvertently been exposed to and then protected from this same hazard a value of -5 (the child being exposed to the hazard subjected them to some harm in and of itself, though not the total amount of harm due to their being protected from it). It would appear that according to these two examples, the protected child has a higher value than the non-protected child, and therefore is having their best interests served by the action of protection. However, if child C has never been exposed to this hazard to begin with, according to this formulation we have no choice but to assign child C a value of +10 in regards to hazard A (the child’s lack of exposure to this hazard has not subjected them to any harm). Thus child C is best off by having not experienced a hazard from which they’d need to be protected.

This argument from Protectionism, that children are best off if they never experience any hazard relative to those children who have, is not sound. The rationale being that psychologically we understand that exposure to a reasonable degree of hazard actually decreases a child's vulnerability. The act of making a child vulnerable normally isn’t considered to be in a child’s best interests, especially by the very principles of Protectionism. This is similar to how a lack of stimuli for young child often increases their degree of sensory deprivation. Allowing a reasonable degree of hazard in a child's life should also be necessary to decrease a child's vulnerability to hazards, and therefore be in a child's "best interests," as we've defined already. A reasonable degree of hazard could best be defined as a program of implementing controlled exposure to hazards for the purpose of decreasing a child’s vulnerability to the hazard while not subjecting them to imminent physical danger. Such a program would be against Protectionism’s ultimate goal, which is to protect a child from experiencing all potential hazards.

Thus, Protectionism's ultimate goal, if attainable, does not serve a child's best interests because it increases the child's degree of vulnerability to those hazards. Protectionism’s ultimate goal increases the degree to which the child is made vulnerable to the action, object, or idea, they are being protected from, meeting the definition of a hazard. So therefore, the ultimate goal of protectionism is actually contrary to its own objectives. Furthermore, if one then chooses to define a child’s best interests as something else, we may further see how Protectionism as a cause for action is a very loose nail upon which to hold up the supposedly universally objective protective structure it ties around children.

The rationale for this could be illustrated as follows. We assume that a child with a value of -10 in this formulation means said child is not vulnerable to any harm brought about by any hazards as a result of the action carried out to protect them from hazards, and therefore, is a child whose best interests are being best served. We assign child A’s vulnerability to hazards, who is exposed to all hazards (not protected from any hazards), a value of +10 (the child not being protected increases child A’s degree of vulnerability to any hazard to the total amount). We then assign child B who is exposed to a program of a reasonable degree of hazard as defined above, a value of -5 (the child being exposed to a reasonable degree of hazards as defined decreases child B’s degree of vulnerability to any hazard but not to the full amount, as the child is still being subject to hazards, and therefore is assigned a negative number less than -10). Now we also assign child C’s vulnerability to hazards, who we speculate is protected from all hazards (and therefore has not experienced any hazards), a value of +10 (the child being protected from all hazards increases child C’s degree of vulnerability to any hazard to the total amount, and therefore is assigned a total positive amount).

It would appear that child B in this formulation has a higher value than child A and child C, and therefore is having their best interests best served by the action carried out with him or her. If Protectionism were true, that it is always in a child’s best interests to protect them from all hazards, then the action carried out on child C would not decrease child C’s vulnerability to hazards, and thus not constitute a hazard in and of itself. It would appear the action that best serves a child’s best interests, as defined above, as far as this scenario is concerned, is the program of subjecting a child to a reasonable degree of hazard for the purpose of decreasing their vulnerability to hazards.

(To Be Continued)