Perhaps our oldest and most significant blindness has been towards those of our species classed as children.  Man is generally slow to take notice of his accustomed brutalities to the helpless – whether animals, slaves, women, or the poor – and children are least of all an exception. Some dramatic examples illustrate this. Over the years young people have been legally and regularly suffocated, starved, exposed on dung heaps, beaten to death, imprisoned, sold as slaves, abandoned, terrorized, bound and gagged, neglected to disease, relentlessly insulted, and, simply, treated like the chattel they have by law always been. Yet most of this has escaped popular and reflective awareness altogether. Child-abuse is not as recent published glimpses of it might lead us to believe, a contemporary aberration. It is, rather, a long accepted way of life.

Childhood, the category that holds, defines, and governs children, is a social construct that is contingent upon time and place. There is some universality in the vulnerability and dependency of young children, but the length, contours, and extent of that dependency, as well as the assignment of children to dependency, vary greatly across time, nation, and geography. The present construction of children in the United States as dependent – and dependency as private, familial, and developmental – naturalizes childhood and the roles children perform as a class, within racial, ethnic, national, age, gender, and economic groups. This construction limits interrogation of what the public might owe these dependent persons and what public roles children play.

For most people, human rights have increased—but for children they have shrunk.
We’ve made progress in many realms of civil rights over the past decades in the U.S. The rights of African Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and handicapped people have expanded, thanks in part to deliberate civil rights movements, in which significant numbers of people demanded rights for these groups. But the rights of children have shrunk.

Throughout history women have been considered inferior to men and hence subject to their domination. People of colour have been considered inferior to white people and hence subject to their domination. Gay people have been considered ‘perverted’ and ‘unnatural’ and hence subject to punishment. As a result there have arisen the women’s liberation movement, the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. These are all positive developments. They have achieved some success and I hope they will achieve much more.
But where is the children’s liberation movement?

Even within the vegan and animal liberation communities, principles surrounding family and fertility are not held consistently across species. To remain ideologically and, more importantly, ethically consistent, those who promote total liberation for all animals should not bear children. This can be accomplished either by remaining child free or by choosing to foster or adopt already-born children. The key arguments for childbearing as a valued step in the process of childrearing replicates several ethical and ideological imperatives against which animal liberation advocates argue. It supports biological arguments of superiority, creates unjustified boundaries to delineate hierarchies, values humans over other animals and the Earth, values humans with capital resources over humans in poverty, and neglects the needs of those children who are without families.

Why Violence?  This document offers a comprehensive explanation of why human beings are violent.

• It took me 41 years to learn the central insight that generated this document, now in its 9^th edition.
• It is the primary outcome of 14 years of deep psychological investigation undertaken, while living in seclusion, by my soulmate and research colleague, Anita McKone, and myself from 1996 until 2010.

• Anita’s website, which includes her explanation of our process during this period – ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology’ – and her songs of nonviolence, can be viewed here: AM.

Does a child have a right to privacy and freedom from parental conditioning?

• It is one of the most fundamental problems facing humanity today.
• The future depends on how we solve it. It has never been encountered before.
• Only recently … have we become aware that the greatest slavery is that of the child.

It was never thought of before;
It is not mentioned in any scripture of the world. — Osho

Human rights are moral principles that set out certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law. They are “commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being.” Human rights are thus conceived as universal (applicable everywhere) and egalitarian (the same for everyone). – Wikipedia

The greatest slavery is that of the child.

Does a child not have as much right to privacy and freedom from parental conditioning as the parents expect for themselves? It is one of the most fundamental problems facing humanity today. The future depends on how we solve it. It has never been encountered before. For the first time man has come of age, a certain maturity has happened - and as you become mature you have to face new problems.