Month: December 2006

Children Are Not Citizens

Legal2 Comments

Other than enemy combatants, there is one other group of people who have absolutely little if any rights under US Law: namely children. Every year it seems there is a new group of adults that are championing to protect children, much in the same way Kyle’s mom on South Park spends all her time trying to protect Kyle from everything she feels is wrong. It is these initiatives that have brought us child seat belt laws, drunk driving laws, and of course the ever popular sex laws that are meant to prosecute child sex offenders. Except that no one ever thinks about how these laws can backfire and hurt the very children that they are aimed to protect. A good example is the 13 year old Utah girl who under the law is both victim and violator.

The Ogden, Utah, girl was put in this odd position because she was found guilty of violating a state law that prohibits sex with someone under age 14. She also was the victim in the case against her boyfriend, who was found guilty of the same violation by engaging in sexual activity with her.

In this case the law is intended to protect children regardless of whether the child agrees to press charges. While the Utah girl does not see herself as a victim, she has no say in the matter, because to the law her opinions or intentions do not matter, all that matters are the interests of the State. The child in fact belongs to the state, and so the state decides for her. Ultimately she has no recognized rights in the matter.

Here in Iowa, a law that forced known sex offenders from living within close proximity of schools and daycares was suppose to make it safer for children, but instead it ended up making it easier for sex offenders to disappear. Police and other authorities are now having a hard time trying to find them. In worse cases, as the offenders went off the grid, they ended up finding secluded residences that made it that much easier for them to commit the very crimes the law is meant to prevent against!

The main point of child laws though is to help children, but until we actually give children some actual rights under the law, we will end up making laws that harm the very children we aim to protect. Consider the irony that people who commit crimes against children and who are prosecuted, still end up having more rights than their victims.

Gender Education

Editorials3 Comments

Fixing America’s education system has become a fashionable thing to do of late; ever since No Child Left Behind was enacted (with the promise of fixing education once and for all) there seems to be no end to the wacky ideas that some people have come up with. In case you have any doubts that public education is broken, look no further than Kozal’s Savage Inequalities. It is an (entertainingly) dim view on the failure of public education. I should know, cause even my school, Bowen James High School, is included. There is nothing more inspiring than picking up a book in college and finding out just how bad adults failed you when you needed them most. But I digress, we were talking about those wacky ideas that people have about public education, and no idea is as simple as separating the boys from the girls.

We seem to think that by removing the bad influence of boys, we can create a challenging and comfortable environment for girls to prosper. At the same time we can remove the influences of sex and make everything nice. Who would argue against this, after seeing girls excel in math and get improved test scores? Probably the same people who have to work with men and women, that’s who! Separating children based on their sex is just a bad idea. While it may be that some girls do perform better in math or whatever subject you wish to test them on, the undeniable fact is that society is made up of both sexes. You risk creating dysfunctional adults. Women who find themselves fascinated by the opposite sex, but who are uncomfortable around men. The same scenario applies to men. If not think about what you are saying to children: that girls cannot compete with boys, so you are in fact lowering their standards, and for boys, that perhaps they cannot comport themselves around girls, so they have to be separated from them?

The problem is gender, but after so many years, we still have not addressed it properly. We still expect girls to be nice and pretty, and boys to be rough and athletic. We perceive sexual drive in boys as natural, and in girls, well it is just plain naughty. Ultimately, the sexes are not equal, because we are still perceiving their success on different standards. If we were to apply the same standards to both sexes, like we were suppose to do twenty years ago, we would not be having this conversation at all. Today we talk about how boys are being left behind, how they cannot compete against the girls, how we expect boys to be quiet like girls, or how girls are not as successful in engineering, or how women still earn less than men… we still have not solved gender discrimination, we just talk like we did.