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Rhymes With "Brass Seagull"'s avatar

Well-said overall. As a lifelong youth rights activist myself, I agree. And this is what we in the youth rights movement call "adulto-patriarchy", the intersection of adultism and patriarchy.

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Tereza Coraggio's avatar

Hi, Jack. I have some questions for your forum. Who should have authority over the person who takes primary responsibility for a child? My rule of thumb is that authority and responsibility should always go together. But this seems to imply that there's a body of authority that should be over parents, that would take no direct responsibility for the children, but would set the rules for how parents needed to parent. And what would be the punishment to parents who don't obey this authority? Would their children be taken from them? Given to strangers who are paid by you as a taxpayer? Would you send them to parent reform school before they could get them back?

As a related aside, my reader Guy tells me that the term 'rule of thumb' derived from the law that said a man couldn't beat his wife with any lash more narrow than his thumb. That answers the question, I think, of who has been given authority over the person taking primary responsibility for a child. And if the child is an oldest son, he has authority over the mother in primogeniture. Women were allowed to wear veils to show they were 'owned' by a father, brother or husband. Women without a veil could be raped at will, and wearing a veil without a male 'owner' made a woman subject to being stoned to death.

I grew up in the era of spanking and corporal punishment, which was inflicted by fathers in the home and nuns in the school. The trope was "Wait until your father gets home." So 'parentarchy' is really an oxymoron. -archy comes from archons or rulers, who could only be male. The pater familia had complete power over wives, children, servants and slaves.

In looking up which gender commits more child abuse, I first found the counterintuitive stat that it was women. And then I found this site that looks at that statistic: http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/statistics.html. It states: "90% of all children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the actual physical care of a woman (parent, grandparent, teacher, babysitter, day care provider, nurse, etc.), and that 10% are in the care of a man. (This is a conservative estimate.)" It then adjusts the statistics based on that and eliminating instances in the care of a couple, in which the woman would be charged with 'failure to protect.' The result is that a child in the care of a man is astronomically more likely to be the victim of abuse that in the care of a woman, when looking at active violence rather than minor instances of neglect.

If your objective is to reduce the amount of physical pain inflicted on children, the best thing you can do is enable mothers to securely care for their children without the need to depend on a man or, even more importantly, be forced to share custody without being present. Children belong to and with their mothers. Forcibly taking them away, through adoption, custody or mandatory employment inflicts the lifelong trauma of abandonment on an infant. If the child's well-being is your concern, protect the bond with the mother.

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