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Title: Ephebiphobia Author: Alba Date: December 20 2021 Language: en Topics: youth liberation, childhood, teenagehood, ageism, crime Source: https://albamiccio.wordpress.com/2021/12/20/ephebiphobia-is-it-fear-or-hatred/
“Ephephiphobia”, or “kourophobia”, is a term used in the field of youth
studies to define adults’ fear of the cultural stereotype of the
adolescent. In our current society, adults are a privileged class that
holds power over children and youth, while children and youth are a
marginalized class. Children and youth are confined into narrow boxes
predetermined by adults, two of those are the stereotype of the angelic
child and the demonic child. The angelic child is most often
prepubescent, while the demonic child is most often pubescent,
reflecting a tendency of adults to fear adolescents more, because of
their greater physical strength and experience, they represent more of a
threat to adult hegemony.
Adolescents have been painted in adult society as both weak and strong,
as Eco wrote, it is typical of fascist societies to cast the enemy as
both pathetic and all-powerful. For adults, to claim that adolescents
are both weak, mentally and physically, and highly dangerous and
disruptive, means protecting the adult ego (An adult, especially a man,
who expresses fear of a youth is seen as a failure) while simultaneously
justifying the deployment of force towards teens. The hegemonic adult
view has defined adolescents as irrational and governed primarily by
their emotions, unfit for any sort of position of authority or even any
form of participation in society. This has been said of many
marginalized groups, primarily women and colonized individuals.
“Emotional” teens are contrasted with “rational” (implicitly male,
implicitly white) adults. The patriarchal distinction between
“irrational” and “rational” individuals is extremely old, the rational
has always been defined as:
“The Arian, the male, the white, the European, the economically
successful…and, of course, the adult”, children and youth, on the
contrary, are the “Other”. (“Human Rights in Light of Childhood”, Wall).
Weak, passive, easily dominated but also brutal, ruthless, rebellious
teens then need to be kept under the control of ” superior” adults. One
way ephebiphobia has manifested itself is through fear of youth crime.
Constructing a certain class of people as a criminal class has been a
very common way of othering and dehumanizing individuals, as we have
seen recently especially in the UK, through the transmisogynistic
construction of transgender females as sexually aggressive and prone to
committing sex crimes, even though transgender women and girls represent
one of the groups most vulnerable to GBV globally.
Moral panics focusing on crime committed by those under the age of
majority (the ones presumed to be too young to have the right to decide
for themselves) are often completely unfounded and not unlike Men’s
rights activists’ conspirational thesis that women are evil and commit a
lot, if not most violent crimes. Despite this, the idea that teenagers
are highly violent is hardly questioned even if disproved by facts.
Prepubescent children represent less than 1% of criminals, but that’s
not something anyone would doubt, despite a surge in paedophobia in the
last decades after the murder of the two-year-old James Bulger at the
hands of two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.
Bulger’s murder revived the “top down” approach to childhood among
adults (Wall, 2010), reviving also the common adultist fear that even
the cutest (and whitest!) child is hiding an evil nature. What might
surprise some is that even as children become teens, they remain a small
minority of all criminals. Youth under 15 represents 5% of all
criminals. Youth under 18 represents about 15% of all criminals. (The
Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems: Volume 2). Even without taking
many important factors into account, people society presumes to be too
incompetent to have autonomy over their own lives only represent a
relatively small minority of people society classifies as “dangerous”,
and the more they age the more they seem to commit crimes, while if we
accepted that teens’ brains make them inherently more prone to crime, we
should expect the reverse to be true.
It appears that the vast majority of criminals are young, but far from
being teens, they are men from their mid-twenties to their early
thirties (https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqb2pv4/revision/3,
“Aging of the State Prison Population, 1993–2013”). Conflating young
adults with teenagers in this context is a particularly violent form of
adultism considering that the most common “scientific” argument against
youth rights is that the brain isn’t fully developed until 25
(https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.inverse.com/article/33753-brain-changes-health-25-quarter-life-crisis-neurology/amp).
In addition to this, adults’ anxieties about disruptive teens attacking
adults and the adult world seem entirely baseless considering the vast
majority of victims of juvenile delinquents are juveniles themselves
(“Victims of Violent Juvenile Crime”). The American sociologist Mike
Males wrote several books on the topic of adult moral panics and the
fear of youth, exploring how media and politics encourage the exclusion
of teenagers from society through ephebiphobia. The moral panic on youth
violence also helps to erase the crimes of white men by promoting an
image of criminals as teens, mostly racialized teens (it should be
pointed out that these moral panics disproportionately target youth of
color, which represent the vast majority of incarcerated children,
https://eji.org/news/Black-children-five-times-more-likely-than-whites-to-be-incarcerated/).
Despite the attention that the media has given to instances of teens
committing mass shootings, the percentage of teen mass shooters is
comparatively low. Only 6.8% of all mass shooters are under the age of
18 (Lankford, Hoover, 2019). The average age of mass shooters is the one
that is generally considered the “perfect age” of men, the average mass
shooter is 33.2 years old
(https://rockinst.org/gun-violence/mass-shooting-factsheet/). Few people
would claim men between their mid-twenties and their early forties
should be stripped of all their rights and kept at home under the
supervision of rational teens for their safety and others, yet, if we
base ourselves on crime statistics, which isn’t advisable, that would be
the more logical decision.
In conclusion, even if we follow the racist and adultist premise that
crime rates are an appropriate way of measuring whether or not children
and youth should have rights, we find that adults commit the vast
majority of crimes. The peak years seem to be the ones when our brain
would be starting to “adult” as it has been put, disproving the argument
that teenagers’ brains make them prone to crime. This means that
genuinely caring about human rights also means refuting oppressive
stereotypes of adolescents, opposing the surveillance and restrictions
teenagers are subjected to in the public space, and their exclusion from
many aspects of life adults have access to on account of their
“superiority”.