Will Somebody Please Think of the Children? Conservative America Won’t.
Conservatives love to use children as a cudgel to attack LGBTQ+ people, but policies prove they don’t really care about children.
Originally published at Prism & Pen
“Think about the children!”
That is a phrase conservatives love to invoke to stigmatize LGBTQ+ people, to justify excluding LGBTQ+ people from equal rights. Conservatives love to use children as political props to whip up moral panic. However, when it comes to policies aimed to actually improve the lives and wellbeing of children, conservative America consistently proves to be antagonistic.
A new Human Rights Watch scorecard recently came out, grading all 50 states on their laws related to protecting children. The international organization gave 20 states a failing “F” grade, and 26 a “D,” including Florida.
Not a single state received a “B” or an “A.”
New Jersey, Ohio, Iowa and Minnesota were the only states to receive a “C” grade.
States at the very bottom of the scorecard include Mississippi, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Georgia and Washington.
The metrics used to assess each individual state were based on standards set from The Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty designed to protect the well-being of children. Adopted by the United Nations in 1989, The Convention on the Rights of the Child addresses a host of issues germane to children’s rights, such as:
children’s rights to education
health
an adequate standard of living
freedom of expression
protection from violence and exploitation
a broad array of other rights
Fun Fact: The United States is the only country that has failed to ratify the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, the primary international treaty on the rights of children. 196 countries have ratified the treaty, and the United States is the only U.N. nation that has not.
In the United States, many of the issues addressed by the Convention are left to the jurisdiction of individual states, not the federal government, and there is wide variation from state to state.
Human Rights Watch graded every state on four individual factors related to The Convention on the Rights of the Child—child marriage, child labor, juvenile justice and corporal punishment.
Here are some highlights from their report:
Forty-three states still allow child marriage, with over a quarter million children, some as young as 10, married in the US between 2018 and 2020.
The seven U.S. states that have banned child marriage are Minnesota, New York, Delaware, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
No U.S. state prohibits violence to discipline children. Approximately 160,000 children are subjected to corporal punishment in schools each year, despite extensive research finding that paddling children is ineffective in correcting their behavior and increases child aggression.
Weak child labor laws allow children as young as 12 to work 50 or 60 hours a week in agriculture, the most dangerous industry for US child workers. The minimum age in Florida is 14.
Half of US states, including Florida, allow children under 18 to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and more than 50,000 children are tried in adult courts every year, often resulting in extreme and punitive prison sentences and higher recidivism rates.
The Human Rights Watch cites statistics on all four factors and how inaction on protecting children’s rights is actively harming children currently.
This is what the Human Rights Watch says on Corporal punishment:
No US state has prohibited all corporal punishment of children, and 23 states allow it in both public and private schools.
Only two states, New Jersey and Iowa, prohibit corporal punishment in both public and private schools.
Approximately 160,000 children are subjected to corporal punishment in schools each year, according to data from the US Department of Education.
Black children and children with disabilities are significantly more likely to experience corporal punishment in schools.
Corporal punishment in child penal institutions remains legal in 16 states.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child calls for protection of children “from all forms of physical and mental violence,” and U.N. experts state that the Convention “does not leave room for any level of legalized violence against children.”
Corporal punishment has been found to be both ineffective in correcting children’s behavior and harmful to child development.
I mentioned in a previous post that homeschooling groups run by Christian nationalist organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom have been running sabotage on corporal punishment bans, all in the name of parental rights and religious freedom.
The fact that no state bans corporal punishment and only seven ban child marriage (found to be found to be associated with increased risks of domestic violence and poverty, according to Unchained at Last) is enough to show that America really does not care about children—most especially conservatives.
Conservatives love to say trans people and drag shows are a danger to children, even though they are as harmless as can be.
All the while, they love to bully trans kids, subject kids to school shootings due to not regulating gun purchases, send kids to prison for life as a human rights violation, send kids to conversion therapy if they are LGBTQ+, allow for child marriages that lead to abuse, and do corporal punishment that is nothing more than abuse.