On the Legal Rights of Children

The Current Legal Doctrine of Childrens’ Rights

“Young Family Looking Up,” by Vera Kratochvil.

The law currently states that an individual does not fully come into his/her rights until they become a legal adult, which occurs automatically at 18 (or earlier through a legal process of emancipation). In the meantime, childrens’ rights are a complex issue that have to be balanced against parental consent.

I think that this system works relatively well, however, in a perfect world, there are some things I would tweak.

 

Problems With the Current Legal System as it Pertains to Childrens’ Rights

There are two main problems with the current system:

1. Ambiguity surrounding childrens’ rights versus parental consent, which is further muddied by the existence of government bodies such as CPS, which are predatory, tyrannical, and destructive.

2. The idea behind legal minorship is that children have to reach a certain level of life experience and bio-psychological maturity before they are able to make informed decisions in society — which is true, however, this comes at different ages for different people, and some people never achieve this.

 

So my political theory simplifies this substantially. Because:

1. Children live at the largesse of their parents/guardians, and

2. Individual rights entail the corollary of individual responsibility, it follows that:

3. Children do not have individual rights (because they are not able to accept responsibility for themselves).

They are wards of their parents/guardians, who accept responsibility for them. This means that they are not responsible for their actions — their parents are. Likewise, they have no rights (with two caveats to be described in the next section); only such privileges which are specifically granted to them by their parents or guardians.

 

The Transegoist’s View on Childrens’ Rights

In sense, children can be thought of as pieces property belonging to their parents — however, because they have the POTENTIAL of self-responsibility, they do have two classes rights which property does not:

1. A child has the right to his/her life (which includes the right to be legally protected from sexual assault), and if a parent or guardian kills, consents for others to kill, or allows a child to die through negligence, then that parent or guardian is guilty of murder or manslaughter. Likewise, someone who has sex with a minor (regardless of that minor’s age) is guilty of rape, and if a parent consents to a their ward having sex is likewise guilty of conspiracy to rape.

2. A child has the right to announce his/her emancipation. At the moment that he/she choose to do this, the child becomes a legal adult, entitled to his/her individual rights, and accepts responsibility for himself/herself. An individual may return to dependent status only if there is mutual consent between him/her and his/her parent/guardian.

This way, if a child is being subjected to abuse, the child can remove himself/herself from the situation by declaring himself/herself to be emancipated. At that point, anything a now former parent/guardian does to the individual is felony assault, and the individual can press charges.

However, unless the child emancipates himself/herself, and so long as the parents or guardians do not violate the child’s right to his/her life, the parent or guardian may legally take whatever measures they deem necessary to prevent the child from doing harm to himself/herself and others.

This is a necessary condition, because if a legal minor, regardless of their age, commits a crime, then the parent or guardian, and not the legal minor, is legally responsible. In this sense, having a child is, legally, much like owning a pet. The pet is not legally responsible for its actions — the owner is. If a pet bites someone, then the owner is guilty of assault; if a pet kills someone, then the owner is guilty of manslaughter (or, possibly, of murder, if they intentionally “sic-ed” the pet on the victim); etc. — and likewise with children and legal minors; the only difference being that a pet can be put down, whereas a child or legal minor has the right to life — even if they commit a heinous crime.

 

The Corollary: Parents Have Rights, Too

Of course, the parent also has rights. If the child has gotten so far out of hand, or has grown so old, that the parent is no longer willing to accept legal and physical responsibility for them, or if the parent/guardian is simply unable or unwilling to accept responsibility for them anymore, then they can evict the minor. In this process, the parent or guardian must turn the minor over to the care of the state (an orphanage), or a consenting private party, declare the minor evicted, and then they are free of responsibility, and no longer are empowered to make decisions on their behalf. The minor, under the care of the state or private party retains his/her two rights (to life, and to emancipation), and has no rights beyond that until they declare their legal adulthood.

There would be no default age of legal adulthood. And if a minor has become a ward of the state for any reason, and has committed criminal activity, then the state must then (and only then) place the minor in a juvenile correctional facility.

On the Legal Rights of Children