"The Omen, AS, Teachers/School and Child Lib"!

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A new idea changing the emphasis of this thread, though in no way invalidating the first 5 pages of impassioned debate ; the idea "Being Age-Queer", is near the bottom of page 6 ! !

Another new idea to add to the debate: Major new insight into role of schools in Aspergers/HFAS halfway down page 7 !

Re: poll ;I do not mean that this repression of under-18s is a recent phenomenon, but one that has become aggravated, clearer, since both women and people of colour got the vote, etc. Under-18s are now the only group of humans without these rights ( apart from convicted criminals).

I watched the film "The Omen" (1975) this evening, for the first time in years, and was struck by how the "child", Damian, presented as so sinister and hateful, is a pretty good portrait of someone with some kind of autistic spectrum disorder, riding his tricycle round and round on the same spot for hours, screaming and struggling and hitting out for no apparent reason, repeating the same sound over and over again, not lively chatty and demonstrative as children are "supposed" to be. But at the same time i realised that if took away the "spawn of satan interpretation" there is actually NOTHING wrong with his behaviour at all; it's just not the notion we have of a child; he has too much presence, too much power, disturbs his mother ( rather than being a comfort to her), etc.

I was reminded of the films "The Exorcist", and "Rosemarys Baby", also from the 70s, and their scary children. Perhaps expressing an awareness in society of a growing restlessness amongst under-18 year olds at the small role assigned to them ( "child"). Unease on the part of the "adults". I wondered where that fear and unease might have moved to.

So I was wondering whether it is possible that the massive increase in numbers of diagnosis of sensory and cognitive disorders on the autism spectrum in recent years may be a stage of crisis in "adultism", the social construct which suggests that the adult is superior to the child and should reasonably have greater political rights and power than the child, and which underpins the current arrangement in which people under 18 have almost no more rights than a domestic animal?

Am reminded of the "epidemic" of bizarre and mysterious illnesses supposedly suffered by women in the era leading up to womens emancipation with the vote. The proliferation of psychiatric disorders and vague but debilitating physical problems diagnosed with increasing frequency in women 150 years ago; The horribly invasive "treatments", hysterectomies, clitoridectomies etc, the masses of laudanum and other opiates/tranquilisers prescribed for women, as the system tried to keep a lid on womens dissatisfaction. Society tried to retain the status quo. Repressive measures, labelling many women mentally ill, shutting them up in institutions etc, went on in an attempt to neutralise them.
But they weren't really ill, just "difficult", for patriarchy to handle. They weren't mad or disordered; they were just causing disorder in the vested interests of men!!

To keep the status quo, and adult privilege, children like that, infant "troublemakers", must be labelled ill/disordered/disabled/invalid/abnormal, gagged, shut up, doped into inactivity, and the other children will be frightened into behaving like "normal" children. This might be political repression.

People use the same arguments against childrens liberation as were used to dismiss women.

NB: Since beginning the thread i have developed my idea in a very significant way, involving a change to the thread title, which was previously " Autism, "The Omen" and Child Rights". The new idea occurs to me on page 6. ! !

I do appreciate my diagnosis--it can be helpful, because it gives me some insight into myself and has also allowed me to find others who understand.
But I can completely see what you're saying. My diagnosis was prompted by my teachers, who were terrified of me for my quirks. When I was five I finished The Hobbit and for some reason they thought it was an indication something was wrong with me (gee, suppose I was just a little advanced intellectually? What a terrifying prospect).
Adults have always been really uncomfortable with my behavior, I say whatever I want to and tell people the truth. Teachers, friend's parents, the local priest didn't like the things I said and they all decided it was a cognitive 'disability' instead of my simply being different. They did the same thing to my husband, except they labeled him schizoid for his behavior. Fortunately my Mom is also AS and she knows I'm not 'cognitively impaired' or whatever they're saying.

Remove the clitoris to reduce dissatisfaction?!? WOW! Anyone suggesting that would probably be hung in the us! One would think a happier wife would make the whole marriage happier, for the husband and kids as well as the wife. BTW I can tell you that if I had a wife, I would want to keep her happy.

Frankly though, running a family and house is a full time job. Most societies see the womans role as taking care of the kids and house, and the men as taking care of most other things. If a woman wants to abandon that role, or doesn't play a part in it, it seems unfair and stupid. Otherwise, it only seems right.

Today, it seems that women will often send the kids away, get a maid, shift kids with carpools/sleepovers, babysitters, etc... Heck, I was a latchkeykid!

Frankly, I LIKE the idea of leave it to beaver.

No, because...

There is no evidence of an "Autism Epidemic".

An adult has a great deal of knowledge of a child's abilities. After all, they were one.

I don't give children matches. (Actually, I don't give adults matches, either.)

An argument can be made that teens need more rights (I'm all for reducing the voting age to 16, for example), after all, in most traditional societies one is considered an adult around the age of 14 IIRC. IIRC the reason 18 became the standard age of majority in the West was outrage over child labor and a desire to encourage parents to keep young women in high school instead of marrying them off in their teens.

Comparing adult women to children is just stupid, though. a 10-year old needs the authoritative guidance of a parent.

The "evil children" movies of the 60s and 70s was simply an expression of Korean War Generation (folks born from the mid 1920s to the mid 1940s) married couples coming to resent thier kids as restrictions on thier freedom.

If I recall correctly.

I wish when I was a kid I had more say in what was going on. Would have saved my parents countless dollars and me the horror of being a test subject for medicine. Perhaps a right to children when the methods used to control or deduce what is going on has failed.

100-150 years ago, women were turning up in droves at doctors, either on own volition or brought by their family, for fainting, fits, "hysteria", shouting and screaming, retreat to their room, stammering/stuttering, resistance to sex, "excessive" enjoyment of sex, desire to go out on own, stopping talking, feeling pains in parts of body with no known cause, nervous fits, panic about the slightest ordinary things, inability to deal with servants, and other inappropriate and "troubling" behaviours,etc etc.

They were prescribed tranquilisers, laudanum and other opiates, were advised "quiet", ( to stay at home and not see friends etc cos would over-excite them) or were given occupational therapy, weaving and embroidery for instance; and/or were operated on to remove the womb, believed to be responsible for these maladies, or had their clitoris removed because it was thought that a women was sensitive and that perhaps sexual desire was sometimes too much for her, or that she had too much sex drive, it was causing her to seek out inappropriate experiences or to behave like a man ( this was a treatment particularly in vogue in the USA with women of coloured race). If none of this worked, and the family could afford it, they were shut up in institutions, where all kinds of "treatments" were administered, including removal of parts of the brain. ( Working women went on working.)
When Freud came along he suggested it was because they had wanted to have sex with their fathers and had not yet dealt with the disappointment.

Some women, with or without supportive husbands, fathers, etc, campaigned for the right to vote. They said that the role allowed to women was limiting and restrictive to the point of inducing illness. That womens mysterious ailments/disorders were often the womans only way to express her oppression. Given no voice in society, not allowed to speak except of "feminine things",( of her children and housework, watercolour painting and piano music etc), refused a listening ear, they developed, completely unconsciously the most amazing range of puzzling and disturbing symptoms. Which many doctors and researchers spent many decades trying to find explanations for. Very real disabling disorders which did not respond to usual medical approaches.

I am suggesting that the recent rapid increase in AS diagnoses may be partly fuelled by something similar.
It would be surprising if the people known as children were NOT suffering from the "universal franchise"; the right to vote of every human being whatever their colour, race, sex, sexuality, level of income, and level of intelligence; of every human being apart from those between the ages of 1 day and 18 years old.

This is an inacceptable injustice, to which many of the most intelligent and sensitive children might reasonably be reacting with increasing distress. The ones who behave as if they had the same rights as adults, refusing discrimination, are being labelled ADHD, or whatever, and the ones who cannot articulate their pain, because there are almost not the words, and certainly not the space in the normal "childs"life to use them, are developing the most impressively bewildering array of disabling symptoms and disorders.

At what age is a reasonably intelligent and sensitive person capable of understanding that they do not have full human rights, that instead have similar rights to the family pet? My Brother Dog. I think it could be from the earliest age. It's amazing what people pick up about the world around them.

There's an element of revenge in it to make doctors hunt this hard for the cause, but i expect that the people referrred to as children would much rather have the right to vote from whatever age they wish, to work if they can and choose to, to own property and choose their place of abode within the means at their disposal, to drive if road traffic laws were changed so that not death trap, and to have sex ( with perhaps limitations to partners within 5 years of their age until 16) once puberty achieved.

One of John Holts books is called "Escape from Childhood".
Because of the absence of real human rights for people under 18 years old the dynamic of childhood is one of being a hostage. For which would automatically get "post-hostage" psychotherapy if had been in the hands of anyone that the state did not recognise as legal "guard ians".
Many children come out as sheep. Others have set their heart on the moment when will be liberated, and are shocked afterwards by how unequipped they are to handle life outside a hostage situation.

Is it possible that brought up in a framework of rights, which significantly structure human relations, ( otherwise women and black people would not have fought for them), a sensitive person in first years of their life absorbs the information that whereas every person over 18 has full human rights, they themselves have welfare rights on a par with the household pet. Does a sensitive person then feel kinship with animals ? Even behave like one?

I just looked at the International Declaration of Childs Rights, arrived at unanimously by the United Nations in 1959, and find that it is in almost all respects the same as the welfare rights of domestic animals.
Even the right to a name and nationality is just a rewording of the obligation on pet owners to register their animal to have a license.

The other rights, to :
the means to develop healthily and normally,
to a healthy diet, lodging and medical treatment,
care in case of disability,
love, understanding, and protection,
recreational activities, and
protection against negligence, cruelty, and exploitation,
are just verbose and waffly elaborations on the animal protection laws, which require that any animal, which is not going to be killed and eaten anyway, is treated in a non-abusive way, and includes all the above.

The right to an education, which is the only other item in the declaration, is about as much of a "right" as is the requirement to train a dog not to soil, not to attack, etc, and that of any working animal to receive the training necessary to do its job well.
The declaration is an insult to the entire population under 18 years old.

It is now 100 years since women received the right to vote. I don't know how long it is since people of colour in the USA received right to vote. Was it different depending on the state? Whereas 100 years ago children had women and blacks with them in their state of disenfranchisement , women often perceived as being like children, and blacks as like animals and children, now children only have animals for company in this position. And it is becoming intolerable.
Just as women managed to unconsciously create some of the most medically challenging disorders and syndromes, for which doctors came up with many names, 100-150 years ago, the people referred to as children may well be doing now. Out of pain and powerlessness.

According to the 2 books I mentioned above both the 1970s and the 1890s were what the authors call "Awakening" periods. I wouldn't be surprised if the female "hysteria" nonsense of the time period was the sociological equivalent of the original "mid-life crisis" phenomenon suffered by middle-aged people of the Korean War Generation in the 1970s and 1980s.

Oh, and I really would give kids the right to vote, most will just vote for who their parents vote for, or will be manipulated by their parents to vote for who their parents want ("vote for X and I'll take you to McDonalds"). I'd say 14 is around the youngest age that most individuals start "thinking for themselves" more since it is in one's early teens that very abstract thinking starts to develop.