In El Dorado nobody can hear you scream
They want to escape, but they can’t. (The article is from 2006.)
Police in the polygamous border towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Ariz., say they’re seeing a number of teenagers who are fed up with the Fundamentalist LDS Church and leaving on their own…”One of the biggest problems that we have with the individuals that are wanting out is they’re underage and there’s not much we can do for them legally,” said Gary Engels, a special investigator for the Mohave County Attorney’s Office…[S]ervice providers cannot help them because they’re minors and runaways…”At HOPE, we follow the law and with a runaway we’ve got to call law enforcement and child and family services,” said HOPE director Elaine Tyler. “With the last two we’ve dealt with they’ve gone right back to their parents.”…While most of the teenagers who leave the border towns are not reported as runaways because their polygamous families do not want to attract government attention, it still becomes problematic to deliver services.
Their polygamous families do not want to attract government attention – why not, exactly? What a sinister ring that has.
In May [2006], Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. signed HB30 into law. It allows 16-and-17-year-olds to petition the juvenile courts for emancipation from their parents.
Good, good – but what about 15-year-olds? 14-year-olds?
Tyler said many children are waiting until they’re adults before coming to The HOPE Organization for help. “Some have come to us after they’ve turned 18 and then we’re able to help them. There was a girl who was living in a basement of another girl I was helping. She said ‘I was living in rags and I couldn’t tell you I was there,’ ” Tyler recalled. “It broke my heart.”
The Utah Department of Human Services has been considering changing laws and policies to help children leaving polygamy…Price said they need to move quickly to provide resources to teenagers leaving a closed society before they succumb to the temptations of the world.
What a mess.
And the ACLU joined the suit, siding with the parents – which I find horrifying. They’re defending the parents’ ‘rights’ to raise their children as prisoners kept away from any possibility of outside help. Why aren’t they defending the children’s rights instead? Why aren’t they worried about what’s going on behind those fences?
But children’s rights are not enshrined anywhere, not in the US constitution, nor in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But families are given rights in the latter document. This has always troubled me, and now I see why.
I’ve always thought parents have too many rights.
Isn’t the idea supposed to be that children are not mature enough to exercise all of their rights so the parents temporarily do it for them? So how can parents be allowed to exercise those rights in direct contradiction to the interests of their child? Why do parents have the “right” to prevent their child from being vaccinated, or force them to live in cults?
So not vaccinating your chid is as bad as forcing them to live in a cult in your eyes Jakob?
Yo, Richard, we’ve already established that you know nothing about epidemiology, please don’t derail this into another one of your misguided rants against “the greater good”.
Richard, I don’ know a great deal about chids, but failing to vaccinate one’s children against a range of diseases (MMR) is unfair, both to one’s own children, and to the children of others. And refusal to do so is really a bit cultish, since there is no reasonable scientific basis for this refusal, claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
I assume this is what dzd means by referring to your lack of knowledge in epidemiology, a subject on which I am uninformed as well, but I do know that there is nothing more than anecdotal evidence for the harmfulness of MMR. Anecdotal evidence is notoriously unreliable. Homeopathy, spiritualism, psychokinesis, reincarnation, astrology, even prayer, laying on of hands, etc., all have anecdotal evidence to support them – doesn’t make them more reliable though.
The real problem with the issue of children’s rights is how to protect children while at the same time not giving excessive power to the state. That is why famlies make their appearance in the UDHR, I assume, but in cases like the FLDS children, and the refusal to vaccinate, the balance has tipped the other way. How to protect children appropriately is a challenge, and someone should be working on this. Maybe they are. If so, I wish someone would point me in the right direction.
I’m guessing that in 1948 the people who drew up the UDHR were worried about states grabbing children away from parents for indoctrination, especially of the commy variety. I’m also guessing that the possibilities of familial indoctrination and tyranny just weren’t really on the radar – as they still aren’t on the radar of a lot of people. This is why I find valorization of the Amish highly troubling – Amish societies are closed, though not as ferociously closed as FLDS ones.
Ophelia, can you confirm something for me? I read – wherever, the net is a very evanescent medium, like writing in water or reading something written there sometimes – that Eleanor Roosevelt had written the UDHR. Is this true?
And, of course, you’re right, the rights of children are not on the radar, except, sometimes, when they are misunderstood. Sometimes, it’s impossible for teachers to teach, because children’s rights trump discipline. I agree with you about the valorisation of Amish society, quaint and colourful as it may be. The closed FLDS societies are another thing, more savage altogether.
Eric, she was centrally involved anyway – I don’t know if she actually wrote it – I doubt that any one person wrote it, really; it seems most likely that it was committee work. But it is sort of her baby, as it were.
Yes, true about children’s rights and teaching. That’s another whole can of worms.
God people are such a lot of trouble!
I’m guessing that in 1948 the people who drew up the UDHR were worried about states grabbing children away from parents for indoctrination, especially of the commy variety.
Stuff like this is often a problem, unfortunately. Most people with experience in social services can tell you horror stories about (theoretically) well intentioned state intervention gone wrong.
In this case, though, you’re dealing with teenagers, not five-year-olds. IMO, if a minor is old enough to get over to a social worker and say “I do not want to live here any more for these reasons,” then that minor ought to be given the right to apply for emancipation.
The ACLU thing is just weird. They support these 14-year-old girls’ right to have abortions and obtain contraception without parental consent–rightly–but not their right to leave the house, or escape from a polygamous marriage?
In this case, though, you’re dealing with teenagers, not five-year-olds.
To clarify (since obviously 5-year-olds’ have rights that must be safeguarded), since you’re dealing with teenagers, the state doesn’t have to make the decision to intervene based on the opinions of a govt employee. The teenager can make the decision to ask for help/emancipation, since a teenager has the cognitive capacity to do this. So the problems of giving the state too much power are actually easy to avoid here.
In fact, you’re reducing state power–reducing the state’s power over the teenager, by taking away its ability to act as enforcers for parents and force the teen back into an unwanted living situation.
And, since I’m making multiple comments, I might as well also clarify that I don’t think commie indoctrination is a problem in the U.S. (haha) but tyrannical decision-making about child custody is.
OT, but I have to post this. Can’t think of anything to say.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/01/iraq
Oh, fuck. They got her. God damn it to hell.
Bugger I have only just got her daubters cold blooded murder out of my head, more rage!
Shit. Leila Hussein deserved better, and so did her daughter.
Probably the best “change” we could make is to fight the idea that children are somehow the property of their parents. This isn’t just a religious view–plenty of secular people will fight tooth and claw to defend their parental rights to fuck their kids over. This kind of thinking has a long history outside of organized religion.
Somehow, people have gotten the idea that the point of “parental rights” is to give parents power for its own sake, rather than as a means to safeguard the welfare of the CHILDREN.