a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Remarks for October 18, 2008 conference on Prejudice, William Alanson White/Sullivan Society, New York; adapted for Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine scientific session, November 2, 2010 and Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, November 22, 2010 ; published in a fuller version in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, vol. 45 (2009).

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

In The Anatomy of Prejudices, published in 1996, I argued that the way in which prejudices were studied in America after the Second World War created among social scientists everywhere in the world a blindness to the motivations or purposes of prejudices and to their characteristic forms. The field of prejudice studies, it seemed to me, needed a conceptual overhaul, a new foundation.

Horrified by the consequences of anti-Semitism –by the Holocaust—students of anti-Semitism in the 1950’s had made it the paradigmatic instance of prejudice, which was defined generically at the time as “ethnocentrism.” All prejudice was conceptualized as hatred of an in-group “we” for a minority out-group “them” (or even all minority out-groups). Then, during the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950’s, this overgeneral approach to anti-Semitism and to all other prejudices, summarized in the title of Gordon Allport’s classic The Nature of Prejudice (1954), was carried into the study of racism, described (mostly by white social scientists) as white group-hatred of a black minority. Women, not being an out-group to men of their own groups and also not a minority group, were not eligible to be considered victims of ethnocentrism according to (mostly male) social scientists. But feminist theorists in the 1960’s took one aspect of racism for their reference and defined sexism as a kind of racist enslavement of a sex-group, women.  In the 1970s, sexism became the key to understanding homophobia as, essentially, a variant of sexism in which men are fearful of the feminine –the homosexual—in themselves.

From an initial overgeneralization about all prejudices being alike and operating as ethnocentrism, a cascade of overgeneralizations flowed, sweeping away differences among types and sub-types of prejudices and blocking efforts to see the prejudices in their relations. Shelves of books focused separately on anti-Semitism, on racism, on sexism, on homophobia, each taking the distorting history of prejudice study for granted. When the victims of these prejudices began to study their own histories in comparison to others’ histories, signs of unease did appear among social scientists, but there was not enough momentum to question the conceptual foundations of the field of prejudice studies. The victims found their voices, but they never came together to invent comparative prejudice studies or to reflect historiographically on the history of prejudice studies.

Trying to urge the study of prejudices toward a new conceptual foundation, I suggested that the modern prejudices which are present in all societies (that is, prejudices other than ethnic ones with specific histories confined to specific societies and regions) serve three basic purposes, both for individuals and for the societies in which they become normative. So there are three basic forms of prejudice.  First, prejudices that serve to ghettoize and then eliminate or eradicate an unwanted and feared group or groups, which are perceived as thieves or resource mongers who have infiltrated and taken over by covert, conspiratorial means (so that they seem to resemble the international Jewish conspiracy or now the international Islamic terrorist network). Second, there are prejudices that mark a group off as eligible for sexual exploitation or attack because the members are the eroticized objects of incestuous desire. The incestuous objects live close by or even in-house as servants or slaves to their masters, so they are sexually available but their physical differences –chiefly their color or class mannerisms– demarcate them as not “blood relatives” and thus safe from taboo. (Recent global migrations have increased enormously the numbers of people available for prejudices operating as racism does.)  Or, third, prejudices can justify attack upon people who are perceived as threats to the identity and specialness or prerogatives of a group self-appointed as “superior,” which is riven with both chauvinistic disdain for and envy of  “inferiors” (who are necessary to the identity they threaten, as women who reproduce are to men asserting patriarchal privilege).  Using a version of Freud’s characterological theory, I described eradicating people and societies as obsessional; sexually exploiting people and societies as hysterical (although differing from many individual hysterics by branding their conflicted desires on the bodies of others rather than suffering their symptoms on their own bodies); and identity-protecting or identity-inflating people and societies as narcissistic.

In this scheme, anti-Semitism, then, became one instance of obsessional prejudice. Other instances that I studied were prejudice among whites and blacks against the “Jews of East Africa,” who happened to be Indian “middleman merchants,” and prejudice  among many kinds of Americans against Japanese entrepreneurs who seemed to be taking over corporate America  in the 1980s. Racism became one form of hysterical prejudice; classism is another (not necessarily involving color demarcation), particularly in situations where the lower classes supply the upper classes with servants and prostitutes. Sexism is the most widely and diversely practiced form of narcissistic prejudice, and it depends on denigrating women’s brains and their sexuality while both are also envied as “feminine wiles” and ability to bear children.  Homophobia comes in all three characterological forms –obsessional, hysterical and narcissistic– depending on whether the primary motivation or purpose served is to eliminate, to sexually exploit, or to bolster narcissism by saying “we are not homosexual.”

I also noted that groups other than homosexuals can be victims of all three of the basic prejudice forms, and I cited two age groups: older people (who are understood now as potentially victims of “ageism”) and adolescents. Age groups have to be thought of as groups before they can be targeted as groups, and this only happened to adolescents at the turn of the 19th century, and then more consistently after Stanley Hall published The Psychology of Adolescence in 1904.  Adolescents could then be obsessionally unwanted and feared as infiltrating and draining the resources of adult society; hysterically feared as sexually anarchic and dangerous wild ones (“juvenile delinquents”); and narcissistically criticized as bent on supplanting adults and asserting power as the up-coming generation (like “Generation X”). Older people became a group with the rise of the socioeconomic category “retirees” in societies valuing youth and productivity and intellectual novelty (rather than age old wisdom belonging to the aged). They could be judged burdensome and draining on limited resources, embarrassing for their sexuality, and threatening to hopes for the future with their ties to past standards and their nostalgia.

A few years after I published The Anatomy of Prejudices, while I was training to be a psychoanalyst and rereading with new interest the child psychoanalytic literature that I had first read in the 1980’s while writing Anna Freud: A Biography, I had something like a crisis of conscience, a prolonged intellectual anxiety attack, over my remarks about prejudices against age groups.  How could I have described the complexity of prejudices directed at adolescents, and not observed that prejudices of comparable complexity fall on prepubescent children, even though they are only incompletely thought of as a group (and only to specialists do preoedipal or zero to three children seem to be a sub-group).  As a theoretician, I had no trouble responding to my bad conscience by entertaining the hypothesis that there are prejudices against children and considering how they might be operating in justifications for eliminating by physical abuse or neglect or infanticide; or in rationalizations for sexually abusing young children or making them play inappropriate sexual roles ; or in adult claims that children are owned and can be indoctrinated or mutilated or trafficked just as adults wish. Unlike prejudices against adolescents, prejudices against younger children would be clued to their relative helplessness (or dependency) and immaturity, and I thought this was apparent in, for example, debates within pedophile societies about the age at which it is (supposedly) not wrong for an adult to use a child sexually. There is no word for prejudice against adolescents comparable to “ageism”; and no concept, much less a word, for prejudice against children. But it seemed to me that the lack of words was part of the problem.

Because I was in a training analysis at the time, where my own childhood was before my eyes four days a week and where the extent to which my intellectual preoccupations and theories have been –like anyone’s– shaped by my childhood experience was brought home to me over and over again, starting to fill in the blank in my book did not make me any less bothered that I had been blind to the prejudice against children that I now call “childism.” One of the strengths of The Anatomy of Prejudices, I thought, was that the Freudian characterological theory at its center fitted with my experience, both as a student of character –that is what a biographer is—and as a person who was writing about character and prejudice from the perspective of having been the target of prejudice, not a “dead heterosexist white male” like the majority of social scientists. I had built up the theoretical structure of that book by paying attention to what victims of all kinds of prejudice had written about their experiences. But children, of course, do not write about their experiences of prejudice, so I had not found their voices in the bookstores. Like every other person on the planet, however, I had once been a child (as I had been an adolescent): why didn’t I hear my own experience?  And what was I hearing from my patients?

When I began to question myself in this way, I began to listen differently to the patients I was psychoanalyzing –both to those whose stories were of “child abuse and neglect” and to those who, like me, and like most children, just had some non-abusive but decisive, character-shaping experience with obsessional, hysterical or narcissistic prejudice against children. I made the assumption that children (even pre-verbal ones) know the purposes and intentions of their abusers, and that they –or they when they are adults—can be helped to articulate that knowledge and develop it, deepen it, by therapeutic work.  The method I was using to explore childism –not a traditional social scientific method at all—was to collect my patient’s stories and shift out of them the knowledge they contained about the forms of childism, the motivations of prejudice against  children.  I worked for years before I turned to the literature that exists on “child abuse and neglect,” which is the literature that comes closest to being about childism, or manifestations of childism.

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I’d like to share a bit of this work with you today to show you what can come from working with a hypothesis that there are three forms of prejudice against children, and that those forms  are similar to the narcissistic, obsessional and hysterical forms that can be seen playing out in prejudices against adults in other target groups –women, Jews and other “middelman minority” groups embedded in others’ economies, people of color and of “lower class.”

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Let me start with a few historical remarks:

In the late 19^th century, people began to be aware that child labor was a monstrosity, but it was seen as a class-based phenomenon of poverty, a problem  grasped chiefly by socialists who viewed it in the context of their critique of capitalism and of the prejudice that would  come to be called “classism” in the late 20^th century. Particularly in England, which had a child protection society as early as 1857, twenty years before there was one in America,  scientists began to wonder, as Charles Darwin did upon considering infanticide, whether there was something perverse in human nature that allowed, or encouraged, adults to exploit and harm their own children:  “Our early semi-human progenitors would not have practiced infanticide… For the instincts of the lower animals are never so perverted as to lead them regularly to destroy their own off-spring.”  (Bakan, xi)   Darwin was reflecting on his knowledge that  filial infanticide is unknown among the primates, although it is known among some mammals, like pigs and rabbits, and many mammals let unfit newborns die, effectively euthanizing them. Later evolutionists have noted that filial rape or child rape (and rape in general) are rare among mammals, and parental homicidal physical attack an aberration. Only among humans has filial infanticide been, at certain times and in certain societies, a normal practice; only among humans is parental rape common; only among humans is homicide the most frequent cause of death among infants (as it is right at this historical moment, right in this country).

Darwin could recognize one form of “child abuse and neglect,” infanticide, as a specifically human action, although he was at a loss to understand this “perversion”–as he called it– of our nature.   But neither this kind of questioning nor the word available in Darwin’s time for the prejudice humans can have against their children — “misopedia” (‘hatred of children”), which was developed to echo the more common words misogyny,  misandry, and misanthropy—helped late 19^th century  people to discover the huge range of types, much less the forms of motivations, of child abuse and neglect.  “Misopedia” fell out of usage, and nothing –no “childism’– replaced it.

Further, unlike women, and unlike people of color, children were not considered by political theorists in Darwin’s time as a group left out of evolving new,  more inclusive forms of social and political organization, the legacy of the 18^th century revolutions with their bills of rights. A Declaration of the Rights of the Child was framed at the United Nations in 1959, but had little effect (and no enforcement even after a Convention was written in 1989).  Among the rights declared by this Declaration was the child’s right to a name and a nationality, but children did not, in the 20^th century become known as left out of protection by a nation-states –as stateless–due to a prejudice like racism or sexism. They were promised nationality, but they were not citizens, voters.  Because the behaviors comprised by “child abuse and neglect” are not, even now, thought of as manifestations of prejudice,  little in the whole vast history of social scientific study of prejudices was brought to bear on these  behaviors.

The lack of a link between studies in the field of “child abuse and neglect” (CAN) and political theory or studies in prejudice is not just an academic matter of how research is organized in universities or fields organized in the domain of natural science or social science or social services.  The isolation of child abuse and neglect as a field from other types of prejudice studies (and connected areas, like study of human violence) has had profound effects on public policy for the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect, as it has had profound effects on prejudice studies themselves, which (as I noted) have a great silence where the suffering of children should be.  The lack of a link between CAN and studies of prejudice has meant that the basic and basically disturbing questions about child abuse and neglect: why would a person –especially a parent– beat a child?  rape a child?  starve a child to death?  how can others let this happen?  The questions of motivations and purposes and meaning  can hardly get posed.

Prejudice studies themselves were blocked from much progress after the Second World War by a definition of prejudice that could not include sexism, much less childism.  As I indicated,  in books about prejudice like the most famous one, Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice  (1954), it was assumed that all prejudices are fundamentally the same: they were defined as  prejudgments  and oppressive behaviors directed by an in-group against a (usually minority) out-group. They were all were variants of “ethnocentrism,” a way of opposing “us” to “them.” In the 1950’s, neither women nor children, because they are in every familial or tribal or community or national group and thus not out-groups, were qualified to be victims of prejudice.  Girls and boys are not other than us (men and women); they are us, they are ours, we were them.  One form of prejudice against children is that we own them.

The discovery of sexism did finally call into question the idea that prejudice is always against a (usually minority) out-group,  as women are not an out-group in the required sense.  But this rethinking did not extend on to children, only to older people.  However,  when the phrase “child abuse and neglect” (sometimes “child maltreatment”) came  into currency in the 1960’s it did, practically, if not in theory, designate the behavioral manifestation of prejudice against children. It was eventually used to cover not just violence against children (physical abuse) and neglect, but sexual abuse and emotional abuse, that is, some of the range (certainly not all!) of types of words and deeds that are comparable to the expressive, oppressive means or the symptoms of the other prejudices.  But, nonetheless, the understanding that child abusers are people who are prejudiced against children has never been part of the household-word understanding of “child abuse and neglect.’ The phrase concentrates attention on some of the types or the symptoms of a problem, not on the prejudice fueling abuse and justifying or sanctioning or excusing maltreaters.

The social scientific studies of prejudices that accumulated across the 20^th century, despite their methodological and theoretical diversity, did come to a consensus over one psychoanalytically inspired insight about prejudiced people. They agreed that all prejudices involve  projection onto the individual or group target of an unwanted, rejected part (or parts) of the prejudiced person’s experience, which had become a part of his or her self or personality. The ‘bad’ is extruded onto them and they become bad, hateful.  A kind of deidealizing is involved. The rejected and projected part was made up of feelings that were native to the interior, so to speak, or feelings that were once stimulated by others or directed at others –in love, in hate, in desire, in anger.  When a child (representing children as a group) is made a target of a projection, that child is, in turn, expected to be or do something positive or negative for the projector: give help, give sexual favors, give money, give love, be a receptacle for hate, be the one ruled, be bad, be punishing, be hating.  What is projected outward grows up on its target as an expected behavior.  Depending on the content of the projection received, the victim of prejudice is, in one way or another, the subordinate. The servant who does not live up to the expectation vested in him or her is punished.

Different individuals and groups become targets for different projections, and different kinds of actions, including violence, follow, particularly when the projector’s expectations from the target are not met. “Child abuse and neglect” should be a map of all the kinds of maltreatment of children, each of which could be read or interpreted as projections and consequent actions that fall upon children and adolescents. And I think it is reasonable to hypothesize that if such a map or list were made, analysis of it –psychoanalysis of it  –would lead to the conclusion that childhood miserable feelings about one’s self and childhood miserable feelings about others lie at the roots of all the projections.  Children are the targets for childhood feelings still strong in an adult; that is, fixated in an adult and never outgrown. Or, to put the matter another way, the adults who maltreat children are miserable children psychologically. They are immature, if we define immaturity as being able to understand and contain (not project) one’s own difficulties and miserable feelings. So it is not surprising that research into the psychology of child abusers of all sorts has shown that they have in common that they expect the children they abuse to be in some way parental or at least adult toward them –they want from children what they wanted as children, and that is usually love, but it may also be, even more sadly, hatred and punishment. Any social and political conditions that do not foster, or perhaps do not even allow,  adults to achieve maturity psychologically are conditions conducive to childism. When a society, for whatever reasons, cannot promote maturity, it becomes childist.  If the society never achieves the ability to promote maturity or descends into chaotic insecurity, or descends into hyper-rigidity and totalitarianism, all kinds of prejudices will be activated,  but especially childism; and in that society the young will be abused and neglected, even if their abuse and neglect are rationalized as morally or politically correct.

Childism is expressed in many kinds of child abuse and neglect behaviors, and it is very important to recognize and study these differences, viewing them as projective,  but I believe that all people who maltreat children, despite their differences, do have in common that they are projecting  prejudice against children out of their own immaturity. By this claim I mean that they hold in their minds an image of children (or of childhood) that is rigid, impervious to facts about children or experience of children, and that is deeply defensive. Ultimately, I believe, the image defends or armors the maltreater against feelings from his or her own childhood of being unloved or unwanted; against actual memories of having been abused or neglected; or against the interpretation that there was no love or only inconsistent and hurtful love. An adult harming a child was once a child, and to some extent a child who felt judged and treated prejudicially as such, and often accepted the judgment.  But not all adults who felt themselves to be what childist prejudice said they were become active  maltreaters,  so it is crucial to ask what allows those who do not to refrain (or to grow into maturity) as well as what prompts those who do to act harmfully (not having grown into maturity).

I want to be clear that I do not offer this analysis as exculpation: a maltreater harming a child is harming a child –and should be held to account for that therapeutically, morally and, when appropriate, legally. But the strong unwillingness of most (not all, not the most extreme) maltreaters to recognize harm inflicted upon children as abuse is connected to the way in which a harming adult is also preserving himself or herself in a state of self-ignorance and emotional  closure, isolation, unrelatedness –all terms that are synonymous with immaturity.  A self-ignorant person can also, crucially, easily interlace his or her image of childhood with all of the other kinds of prejudices that the surrounding society may promote.  A man who is a sexist will suffuse his image of childhood with sexism, for example, and if he maltreats girls (or boys) he will do so in a sexist manner.

Prejudicial images (made up of projections) about children –childist images—can be studied  from many angles, but I want to make here a quick image map, which I think can be useful cross-culturally and transhistorically. There are many, many images, but I have found that they do map onto the three fundamental prejudicial images –narcissistic, obsessional, hysterical, and narcissistic — each of which can prompt and guide any of the behaviors categorized as physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, or emotional abuse (or any combination of these). (So, obviously, classifying by these types of acts will never get an inquirer to the maltreater’s underlying, guiding image or purpose.)

The first image, found particularly among obsessional people, is of children as bad, by nature evil, or full of some kind of wickedness that needs to be beaten or in some other forced out of them, for which they need to be punished.  They are “bad seeds,” they carry a curse, or what Christians call an “original sin.” Sometimes children are imagined as pollutants –like a pestilence or a disease; epidemics or environmental disasters like droughts or floods are attributed to them.  Thus the plague that overtook Athens was said to be caused by Oedipus, and in order to rid the city of its miasma his father King Laius put him out on a hillside to die of exposure—an infanticide.  Mid-19^th century American philanthropic child welfare organizers imagined children as the carriers of the disease Poverty, which would infect the republic in the form of bad citizens. Children were imagined as using up resources or scarce supplies, operating like a wasting disease eating up a family or a society. Eliminating or eradicating the child is the best way –and the only definitive way–to disinfect, but incarcerating or ghettoizing him, beating him down, castrating him, reduces his power to infect and reproduce infection. Defenses against children conceived as bad seeds or pollutants  take predominantly obsessional forms.

In a second childist image, found particulary among narcissists, children are represented as the future overthrowers of their parents, as rebels and rejectors of tradition, rather than as  replications of their parents or the extension of their parents’ lives into the future or into immortality.  Their rebellions have to be put down and their aggressive rebelliousness has to be beaten or terrorized out of them.  The cry of their abusers is “Obey me!” and the assumption is “I own you! You are my property!” The psychological imperative is: “Be like me!” or “Make me feel great!” The biological imperative is: ”Be my progeny and no other man’s!” The religious imperative is: “You must be sacrificed to the gods so that I (or we) can be saved!” In patriarchal societies, the image of children as property attaches more obviously to male children as heirs to one’s line and securers of one’s destiny,  or as laborers and soldiers extending one’s power,  but girls are considered property when they are married off for money, trafficked, or enslaved. Boys are often felt to be more threatening as overthrowers,  but females are often imagined as either masculinized Amazonian  rebels or as adjuncts to male parricides.  Potential overthrowers can be defeated by a multitude of abusive means, but the most effective –short of killing them—is to erase their sense of themselves.  Or, in modern parlance, to attack their self-esteem.  Narcissistic defensive means are used to attack a child’s self and sense of self.

In a third group of childist images, commonly found among hysterical people, children are represented as repositories of sexual energy, youthful vigor, lasciviousness, seductiveness, which makes them desirable or threatening (or both) in sexual terms. They have to be tamed or subject to moral-sexual prescriptions. Sometimes they have to be put into sexual service –being treated as sexual objects, often in an adult role. Negations or denials of these sexualized images feature children as innocents, without any sexuality, and such innocent asexual children can also be represented as clean and non-polluting, so they also negate the first kind of image of children as pestilent.  In patriarchal societies, sexualized images attach  more frequently to female children than to males –and they justify the sexual abuse of females, who are said to be seductive or to need controlling  or to require initiating; but these images do attach to males, and often combine with the second image type , in which males are a threat to paternal power.  Sexual abuse is not the only way to attack or manipulate children’s sexuality, but it is the most common (particularly if it is broadly defined to include, for example, child marriage).  Children can be represented as playing other roles in families that belong to adults –like being the parent, being the healer, being the provider—but all of these roles have a sexual charge to them, and hysterical defenses are used to buttress them or contain them.

Modern people who project any of these three kinds of images (or combinations of them) onto children,  suffusing the images with images from other prejudices, and then go on to inflict various kinds of  maltreatment,  also usually develop a further phase of prejudice against the very children they have maltreated.  Before the scientific discovery of child abuse and neglect, prejudice against maltreated children took the simple form of denying that they were maltreated, rationalizing and institutionalizing all kinds of maltreatment as normal, necessary, righteous or rightful. But in times and places where child maltreatment is acknowledged as wrong, maltreated children become like a family secret that must be kept in order to preserve the family from harm, from exposure, from shame. With their injuries and their failure to develop normally, the children, if discovered, would announce “these are not good people.”  So they have to be kept out of sight, kept from discovery.  They have to be dissociated, in the social sense of that word: split off from the group that wants them kept secret.  Prejudice against the abused is speaking when you hear: there are no abused children here, any claim that  there are abused children here is a lie,  children are not abused here but only punished, kept in their place,  tamed (sexually).  The prejudice against abused children mimics in its way what children who are abused do to protect their experience from becoming known (even to themselves): they split it off.  They encapsulate their experience and bury the capsule in their memories, they dissociate it (to use this word as a technical psychoanalytic term). The child’s defense is more frequently psychological than an adolescent’s or an adult’s would be in a similar situation of oppression, for small children cannot run away or rise up in protest. They are too dependent on adult care and love, and, even if they could attack back in self-defense or make a revolution, that would mean losing their parents. So child abuse and neglect is the child’s secret as well as the adult’s .

The other main way that prejudice against abused children is expressed is through identification of abusers as psychopaths, sex fiends, monstrous or satanic child killers and serial killers –people totally out of the bounds of social normality, and, most importantly, outside of families, living on the social margins as complete misfits. The construction of the child maltreater or molester as a monster does not permit parental maltreatment  to come into focus or to be for very long a source of  social or legal concern.  Abused children, then, are denied the kinds of approaches to child maltreatment that would benefit them: assuring them decent living situations and adequate social welfare,  child nurturing child-rearing practices,  and familial and social attention to the conditions conducive to their growth and development.  The monstrous child maltreater is a deflection away from everyday childism –and from recognizing childism as a prejudice.

There are many kinds of obstacles that have stood in the way of the discovery of child abuse and of the childism that these images carry. But I think that the fundamental obstacle is a basic incredulity, an unwillingness to know that people –but especially parents –abuse their own children and that they do so in their family contexts, at home, intimately.  Most child maltreatment is not the work of strangers preying on other people’s children (although this is the case, of course, with sex trafficking and child pornography) or of children being harmed outside their own homes. But, that said, we do need to acknowledge that tremendous harm comes to children as a consequence of or as part of activities that begin outside the home –like wars—or as a consequence of community-sanctioned violence or community-backed social policy that harms children.

Our incredulity that parents can do to their children what they do arises out of a basic expectation,  one that, I think, we are all born with: an expectation of being loved and lovingly cared for (the very expectation that maltreating people proeject upon their children). For this expectation, some languages have a particular word, as Japanese has the word amae. Japan’s most famous post-War social theorist, Takeo Doi, writing in the early 1960’s, just as the scientific discovery of child maltreatment began to make progress in America, claimed that English had no equivalent of amae, “the expectation to be sweetly and indulgently loved.” He claimed  that such a word was missing because Westerners generally denigrated their children’s expectation of love and their dependency needs. In effect, he was arguing that denigration of children’s dependency needs is the essence of childism in the West. It may very well be that we in America,  or  in “the West,” need a word for the inborn expectation to be cherished so obvious in all children as much or  more than we need a word for prejudice against the children who are motivated by this expectation.  In its most general meaning, childism is denial of the need for cherishment –in children and in ourselves as adults who continue to feel that elemental need.  To say that children are bad or that they want to overthrow their parents or that they are lascivious is to say, in effect, that they are not dependent beings expecting love. Childist images arise from a failure to acknowledge children as children with children’s needs.  (It should be noted that child-cherishing societies and child-rejecting societies can be found in all parts of the world, and this has been shown by the comparative anthropological studies of  Ronald Rohner in a series of books, starting with They Love Me, They Love Me Not in 1975).

We expect to be not just cared for, but lovingly cared for, in our natal helplessness and, to some degree, always. Human beings are born more helpless than any of the other mammalian species, and we are expectant in proportion to our dependency. More than the other species, we are specially equipped not for any particular activity  (not even the use of our extraordinarily complex brains) but for getting and receiving the care we need to survive and to flourish and eventually to become caregivers as well as care receivers.   The other mammals, being born more mature, are less in need, less dependent, and less expectant or vulnerable to disappointment (which certainly does not mean that they do not have emotions).

Long before we are conscious of expecting love, or able to be conscious of expecting love, when we are infants sucking at our mother’s breasts, clinging to her with tiny hands, we are able to feel disappointment –if we wake up hungry, if she is not there, if we are not secure—and disappointment is the spur to searching for what we need.  The idea that we might seek and not find, ask and not be given, is hardly tolerable; the idea that we might be rejected for our expectations is completely intolerable. A parent who hits, a parent who neglects, a parent who hates must be transformed, by the extraordinarily powerful human mental capacity, into a good parent, a parent who really does love and care, a parent who must be justified in punishing because the child is bad, rebellious, too exciting. Anyone who has worked with maltreated children knows that they all have in common–regardless of the form of maltreatment they have suffered—that they blame themselves, not their caregivers, not their parents, for what has befallen them.  (Similarly,  many religious people blame themselves if their God harms them; their God must omnisciently know that they have done something wrong or must have a reason –beyond their limited knowledge–for punishing them.)

The expectation of cherishment that we have as children is the ultimate obstacle to the discovery of child maltreatment and the forms of prejudice against children that fuels maltreatment.  But children –and we as adults who were once children–although refusing to admit disappointment are, nonetheless, deeply discerning about why parents have disappointed.  Children do not want to know why they have been hurt; but they –and we– do know.  The ability children have to know the adults who harm them has not been spoken in the field of “Child Abuse and Neglect” because it has been assumed that children not only cannot speak, because they are too young or too afraid, but that they do not know. “To the informed physician,” wrote Dr. C. Henry Kempe, the pioneer discoverer  of “the battered child syndrome,” “the bones tell a story the child is too young or to frightened to tell.”  So among pediatricians and child psychologists, as in the Children’s Rights Movement, children’s stories are represented and interpreted by adults.  Their wisdom has been hard for us to hear, as adults who once had the child’s discernment  and the child’s defense against disappointment, and now retain mostly a do not want to know. But it is also hard for us to hear as adults who are now implicated, responsible for our own children and grandchildren and children generally. But we need to make an effort to give voice to maltreated childrens’ experiences in a form that allows us to learn from them about the prejudice they –and we, too–have suffered. Reforming our thinking about what is to be done will depend on listening to those experiences.