RE: Adult Children: How "Slippery" Terms Serve the Authorities and Harm Kids, Teens, and Everybody Else
It's funny, when I was reading the first story I was thinking "why doesn't she just go to court and get emancipated?" That's when a child has themselves declared an adult by the court, so in fact it can go both ways.
I think the justification for charging kids as adults is not that they understand the consequences usually it takes the form of "they committed an adult crime thus they will be treated as an adult".
Society is starting to come around to the fact that cannabis is not so dangerous, in the recent legalization law in MA it explicitly states that people can't have their kids taken or have it held against them by social services for using cannabis. But how would you feel in the much more common case where people lose their kids because they are meth addicts? is a meth addict who is getting CPS called on them an acceptable parent?
She probably go that route but the goal of cps in that case was to dump her off as quickly as possible whether that was actually the best option or not. If that is something she wants to do, it would be on her and her guardian to go through the courts. I don't know how long that takes and she is 18 months or so away from being a legal adult.
I get where you are coming from with the adult crime thing but the ability for a teen to understand his or her actions comes into play. There was a famous case from the early 2000's in which two young teens (who didn't understand that the WWE stuff was fake) were "wrestling" and one accidentally broke the others neck and killed him. His ability to understand what he was doing was a major factor in his being tried as an adult.
As I mentioned, there are certainly times when stepping in to remove kids is necessary. With drugs of any type, I don't think a person being addicted to something is enough if there is no abuse or neglect related to it. If the meth head still does what he or she needs to do, I wouldn't support taking the kids. If on the other hand the user forgets to feed his or her kids then there is a just cause to take action but the reason for the action would be the lack of care and not the drug use itself.
I recall that case, I think it lead to some sentencing reform.
Which he promptly violated! And then a year later he robbed the pizza man with a gun!
Maybe they were right to put him in prison the first time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Tate#Original_sentence_overturned
They could have been but that is still an over used line of reasoning in my opinion.
The big issue for me though is the lack of consistency in the terms. I use the discussion of "child" and "adult" as a means to focus on that issue but this could be applied elsewhere too. In my mind, if someone is adult enough to be treated like one by the criminal justice system, he or she is also old enough to decide if he or she wants to live with a person or not. If they are not mature enough to do that, they cannot be held to the same standards as adults.
We have an image in our minds of what those words represent but their usage is so slick that they can be made to mean whatever the user wants them to mean. However, we maintain our preexisting image of what they mean. This creates a disconnect between what is being presented to us and the reality of a situation. That disconnect can be exploited by someone with an agenda (like an authority that wishes to push the public into supporting its actions) to mislead people.
That being said, I don't ask that people necessarily take my position. I only really ask that we take a little time to think about how the words are used and about whether that usage is serves a purpose for the user. From there, the conclusions a person comes to are on them.
whenever there is a law there is always some sort of exception or loophole so legally a child is a child until they are declared to be an adult or they turn 18 although in some cases people remain children even after they turn 18 because they are developmentally disabled. Someone might never really become an adult. In Sharia law women are always considered minors, I don't know if they have any exceptions though.
I agree that a line has to be drawn but that is a separate (but related) issue.
I cover these topics as stand alone pieces of work but the overarching theme is the an examination of the "abuse" of language and argument with the intention of generating a predetermined response in the target audience. These terms are supposed refer to that legal definition but in practice that is not how they seem to function.
We can see the same type of thing elsewhere to. I also covered the use of overly broad categories because that seems to essentially serve this same purpose as these slick terms but in that case, I chose to use the term "drugs" as my example.
I kind of view these types of things as a cleaver and semi-organized (I don't believe in any grand conspiracy but I do think that the established systems of order do all act to protect their interests, even when that action is harmful to the rest of the population) emotional manipulation. If someone chooses the right words and uses them in the right way to color a conversation, he or she can paint a very inaccurate picture of reality that is also convincing and moving enough to lead people into viewing issues in ways that aren't to their benefit of the benefit of the masses. Words like "child" work well in this capacity because we have a lot of emotion tied to their meanings.
For sure, just look at how the correct legal term is "illegal alien" but some years ago the media started calling them "illegal immigrants" and then "undocumented immigrants" and now just "immigrants" and sometimes simply "migrants" like anyone can just migrate wherever the fuck they want, like birds.
There there are a bunch of those terms. Now anyone who is kind of a dick might be called a Nazi (so much so, that when the media is referring to someone who really does support that ideology they have to say "actual Nazi" because the term has been so watered down). They also will classify suicide by gun shot as a "shooting." Technically, that is a "true" statement but the image the word conveys is misleading because when people hear shooting, they picture an act of violence committed by one person against another person. I briefly mentioned "enemy combatant" in relation to teens but that term can be applied to anyone for almost any reason but people picture will a "terrorist" in their minds when they hear it.
they call Nazis right wingers when "socialist" is in their name! What they did is created "white nationalist" which is anyone who is white and loves America but it also a synonym for "white supremacist" which is also used interchangeably with "Nazi". So if you are white and are a non globalist or any sort of patriot you are basically a Nazi. You hit the nail on the head with the terms "gun violence" and "gun deaths" which are all the suicides, accidents and murders and sometimes even legit self defense that involve guns added together. To inflate the number but also to control the debate. Suicide and gang murder and accidents and domestic violence are different problems with different solutions but the only solution to "the problem of gun violence" is more gun control or what they are now calling "Gun safety" or "commonsense gun reforms"! Apparently common sense suggests working the hardest to ban the guns that are the least often used in crimes and suicides.