so many people in the notes of my post about how it's outright dangerous to advocate for increased parental control over kids' internet usage saying 'well obviously the Good parents should have control over their kids' internet usage and the Bad ones shouldn't' and it just absolutely baffles me how people can think like this without their heads exploding scanners style. like 'abolish the family' is an ambitious political goal i'll give you that but at least it's a goal that could be executed in the real world
banking my political positions on the invention of the excalibur style child surveillance software that activates only for the righteous and pure of heart
Parents’ right to control nearly every aspect of a child’s life is held not only against the state and other adults, but also against their own children. In every American jurisdiction, parents have a privilege to commit assault and battery against their children under the parental discipline exception that would otherwise be prosecutable as domestic violence, and their children lack the protection from law enforcement that adults enjoy when attacked. Although defenders of “corporal punishment” may conceive of it as a means for parents to instill necessary discipline in children, statutes are written in such a way that parents are free to mete out ad hoc “punishment” without due process, limited only by the high threshold of child abuse. Any inquiry or review into whether such battery actually served a disciplinary purpose is unlikely, absent disagreement by a child’s other parent, due in part to there being virtually no serious legal standards defining when and whether “discipline” is reasonable. Parents may legally hit their children for violating ad hoc rules—or no rules at all—so long as they plausibly believe this to be necessary to control, train or educate their child. Parents can also confine their children and commit what would otherwise be kidnapping against them.
These parental powers over children effectively enable parents to use the threat of violence or confinement to force their children to do whatever the parent desires, so long as it falls outside of narrowly-defined abuse statutes. Likewise, children can be forced by their parents to abstain from anything they are not legally required to do, such as attend school, no matter how unhelpful this is for them. Children can be coerced in this way into participating in nearly all varieties of illiberal indoctrination, from ex-gay movement conversion camps to reactionary political or religious programs, to more seemingly innocuous activities like sports, music lessons, or compelled social bonding with relatives that would nonetheless be degrading to an unwilling participant. That people commonly express toleration for even those parenting choices they profoundly disagree with under the belief that it is not right to tell someone how to raise their “own” children reflects how pervasively accepted parental powers are.
Depriving children of the equal protection of the laws by privileging parents to commit what would otherwise be battery, domestic violence, kidnapping, and false arrest under the parental discipline exception is far from the only way the state grants parents rights against their children. The state also directly imposes legal duties on children to obey parental authority. The most dramatic examples of these legal duties are found in the ungovernable, unruly, or incorrigible minor laws, where children who disobey their parents may be charged with a juvenile status offense. Defying parents under these status offense laws can trigger direct state coercion against children in the form of court-mandated probation or even imprisonment in a juvenile detention facility. A significant number of states continue to maintain runaway laws that allow conviction of a child away from home without parental permission for a juvenile status offense. Most states that do not define this as a formal offense will nonetheless have procedures for police to detain children who are away from home without parental permission. Children who repeatedly run away are often regarded as children in need of services and may be forcibly confined to the same detention facilities where juvenile offenders are incarcerated. It is a crime in most places in the United States to aid a runaway, contribute to the delinquency of a minor, or both."
Samantha Godwin, Against Parental Rights
