Since the home is ground zero for the fight for justice, as so many children experience abuse and neglect from the adults in their lives, we must begin our struggle towards justice with the family unit. The feminist philosopher Susan Moller Okin expresses this well: ‘If families are not themselves governed by principles of justice, how can they morally educate citizens fit to sustain a just society?’ We must think about how we use relationships of marginalization and oppression within the family to justify such relationships outside the family — for example, how we infantilize Black people and other people of color in order to justify our horrendous treatment of them. This happens because the adult-child relationship forms the foundation of how we think about all other relationships involving power differentials. As the Stinney Distro project states, ‘Every hierarchy, every abuse, every act of domination that seeks to justify or excuse itself appeals through analogy to the rule of adults over children.’ So if how we think about the adult-child relationship is off, if we entertain or allow any form of abuse or neglect to exist in that relationship, it will have far-spreading ramifications for all other relationships in our world.
R.L. Stollar, Love Does Not Abuse: The Parenting Philosophy of bell hooks, https://rlstollar.com/2020/12/06/love-does-not-abuse-the-parenting-philosophy-of-bell-hooks/
