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This is a summary of a paper presented to The United Nations Decade for Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for Children of the World 2000-2010 for the Conference on "Children and the Economics of Peace" (Co-Sponsored by the International Committee on Peace Action, UNESCO and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)), November 16, 2000, United Nations, New York. |
Centuries ago, children were directly murdered without attracting legal or moral notice, as the story of Abraham and Isaac reminds us. We are not yet out of civilization's blind eye to children. Children remain possessions under law, and have none of the rights to personhood that their parents have. Even their right to religious belief is claimed and exercised by parents. Until recent decades, systematic violent abuse itself was not pursued as an offence, and the law still permits assault and battery of children by way of "correction".
But the grisly story of abusing children as a way of life is hidden most in modern economic thought. Adam Smith sets the structure of life-blindness here (our emphasis): "Among the inferior ranks of people - - the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce."
The Economic Mind-Set:
What classical and neo-classical market paradigms share is a regulating mindset which blinkers out the lives of children as of any value. Children's lives only count to this value system to the extent that they have money-demand to buy profitable commodities.
The ruling principle of market distribution is that supply is to meet demand. It follows that any oversupply of labour must be reduced to meet this demand. Like any other commodity, human life too must cease to be produced in the market when it is not in demand. The market's invisible hand can manage this adjustment, Smith concludes, "in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children". Children demand food and other life-goods without paying a price.
Smith's prescription of death for children anticipates social Darwinism in its explanatory logic. Today as market and neo-Darwinian doctrines increasingly structure social and scientific thought, it is important to recognize this inner logic. Note that this logic fits perfectly with corporate globalization, whose overriding imperative is to reduce input costs and increase output revenues, whatever the costs to the lives of children. Deprived, malnourished and diseased children are "externalities" to this calculus.
The Consequences:
Rising hundreds of thousands of African children have died as a direct consequence of structural adjustment programs to conform to this program. Children across the world have been increasingly deprived of primary and secondary education by the same prescriptions. The majority of young families in most societies have taken steep falls in income and livelihood security. Child prostitution, forced labour and military enslavement (on the basis of profitable traded light arms) have skyrocketed in conditions of advancing economic insecurity and deprivation. Suicide and depression rates of the adolescent young in modern market societies are the highest ever recorded. Long-term employment in meaningful vocations of life service for today's children is becoming increasingly extinct. Higher education has become unaffordable to all but the children of the rich and those risking permanent debt. Environmental diseases and toxins which most affect the young are growing both more pervasive and uncontrolled by deregulation and its cumulative effects. Future planetary biodiversity is in a spasm of extinctions at least 1000 times the background evolutionary rate.
The raft of new commodities that specially target youth with money to spend in the new consumer culture are, at the same time, dominated by violence toys, video games and entertainment, cigarette-addiction conditioning, stimulant-loaded soft drinks, junk fast foods, chemical additives and strait-jacket pharmaceuticals to deal with their effects, dumb-down television programming, the co-modification and motorization of sport and play, and the corporate ad-invasion of public education itself.
All of these phenomena follow from global market principles, and cannot be recognized as problems by its value system.
Is Globalization A General System of Child Abuse?
If we understand child abuse as a disabling of children by the unhealthy and bio-deprived environmental conditions they are made to live within, the hazardous commodities and foods they are prescribed and fed, the one-sided propaganda they are saturated with, the substitution of mechanical and artificial stimuli for love and constructive attention, the deprivation of free play possibilities in the sun and open air, and the increasing insecurity and meaninglessness of their job futures, then we can see that the abuse of children in the global market system has become systematic.
But only its symptoms are recognised, and only then in disconnected glimpses. Much is made of the sexual abuse of children by family members, but targeting of children for corporate sex-and-violence entertainment day and night reaps economic rewards. Poisoning of the air children breathe may be reduced in rich jurisdictions, but countless pollutants, hazardous products and disease-causing additives go unregulated because market doctrine repudiates "big government" regulation to protect life at a cost to business. Numberless millions of children are by their immature immune-systems gravely diseased or die every year from market prescriptions, processes and products, but their cause is not abated.
All of these phenomena manifest an underlying program: to secure and to increase shareholder value as the first priority of the world economy, to reduce and privatize public goods, to deregulate government protections of human and environmental life, and to reduce taxes for lower business costs and increased commodity consumption.
The "necessary sacrifices" for "global business competitiveness" and "increased prosperity" have, without notice, become the present and future children of the world.