All violence children experience is adult violence.
By "adult violence", what is usually meant is violence perpetrated by adults, particularly against children in the context of child abuse and neglect. But almost every form of violence is adult violence. Adults aren't only the vast majority of perpetrators of all interpersonal violence (despite the moral panics they craft to justify hurting and restricting children even more), they're the only perpetrators of structural violence. Adults control the world, a world that children didn't contribute in creating and aren't permitted to contribute in changing. A world in which their voices don't count. Therefore children who experience the violence of capitalism, white supremacy and the carceral state are all victims of adult violence. Children who were historically victims of genocide were experiencing adult violence. Children who are victims of genocide now are experiencing adult violence. The transgender boy who tried to kill himself after Greg Abbott ordered that supportive families of transgender "minors" should be investigated and who, when the hospital learned he was transgender, was referred to a psychiatric facility and his family turned in is a victim of genocide and adult violence. Children who are jailed in psychiatric facilities are victims of adult violence. The violence of psychiatry is adult violence. Parents who are prosecuted by the state for not being abusive enough are also victims of adult violence. Children who will experience environmental devastation will be victims of adult violence. Adults call their claim of ownership over the world, their uncontested domination over children and less powerful adults, "taking responsibility" for youth. When that actually is preventing any threat to the established order by relegating children to the status of apprentice human beings, rather than actual ones. Preventing them from exercising any form of agency to defend themselves from their oppression. Adults are destroying this earth piece by piece as if it belonged only to them because of their greed, starving billions of people, incarcerating millions, perpetuating the supremacy of privileged groups, genociding the outsiders and then turning around, pointing their fingers at the people they arbitrarily exclude from being political actors, and calling them "problems". Look at how they dress, they spend too much time on their phone, they talk back to their parents, they can't sit still at school. Fuck you.
Ps. Before you bring up bullying, who do you think is forcing children into the prison-like environment of school and socializing them into hierarchies?
"Youth adapt to the ever-present threat of being watched by internalizing adults’
standards regarding appropriate development. Once youth have internalized the adult gaze, they begin to police one another in its absence, forming networks of observation and control within their peer groups and exercising normalizing judgment to maintain the order of those networks and the norms that drive their operations (Conner et al. 2016, 22–26; Foucault, 177–84). Young people integrate adult expectations into their identities and monitor their peers for deviations worthy of punishment, which often takes the form of bullying (Lesko 2001, 125–26). This process is frequently structured by multiple factors, including age, race, and gender, the effects of which may be internalized by youth. Lesko explained adolescents’ tendencies to assimilate to the language of adults in a manner that closely resembles Fanon’s description of the effects of colonization on the psyche: “the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets—i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being” ([1952] 2008, 2). Thus, the adult gaze of acknowledgment and approval can feel falsely liberating to youth as it seems to affirm their humanity (Fanon, 89)".
-"Panoptical Time, Cissexism, and
Heterosexism: How Discourses of
Adultism Discipline Queer and Trans
Youth", Seventy F. Hall.
