America's War on Children

The US is a country that consistently puts the needs of its children far behind the needs, wants and notions of adults -- it has to stop.

School shootings in the United States, horrifyingly, are nothing new. They date back to at least 1966 when Charles Joseph Whitman gunned down 14 people at the University of Texas. Colombine High School, Virginia Tech, and Stoneman Douglas High School are names now painfully etched in the national memory.

In 2012 the bizarre American predilection for random mass-murder reached a new low, when 20 year old Adam Lanza shot dead 20 six and seven year olds at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. (He also killed his mother, four teachers, the school principal and the school psychologist.) The ages of the children and the fact that it happened 10 days before Christmas made the case particularly excruciating.

Yesterday's mass murder of small children, this time in Uvalde, Texas, was a new new low. 

Every time this happens, the nation erupts in a wrenching debate over gun control and mental health. Unhelpfully, the two issues are often pitted against each other, as Democrats and Republicans blame their pet peeves for the atrocity du jour.

Meanwhile, American children continue to suffer. 

Mass killings of small children as they sit defenceless in classrooms should not be a political issue. Could gun laws and/or mental health services help? Yes. But how to stop disturbed young men from killing rampages is an issue for those with the wisdom of Solomon, not me. 

But while we are highly reactive when these killings happen, I see them against a backdrop of hostility to children and a lack of common sense understanding of their needs, that is just part of the fabric of American life.

If that sounds inflammatory, or crazy, then you haven't been paying attention.

While these nightmarish mass shootings understandably soak up all of the public attention, American children die violently all the time. In 2020, 55 children were shot dead in Philadelphia, and 174 were shot but survived. In 2021, it was reported that more children were shot dead in Chicago than died from COVID in the entire country.

In January of this year, there was a particularly awful spate of murders across the country, as reported by NPR:

Grayson Matthew Fleming-Gray, 6 months old, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Atlanta on Monday.

That same day, Grace Elliott, 10, was allegedly killed by her father in Somerville, Ohio, in what the local sheriff describes as a murder-suicide that also claimed the life of her older brother.

On Jan. 22, an unnamed 4-year-old in Port St. Lucie, Fla., was allegedly killed by a woman in another murder-suicide.

On that same weekend, Melissa Ortega, 8 years old, was fatally shot. Her death has shaken Chicago.

1,055 children killed or injured by gunfire in 2021, up from 999 in 2020, and 695 in 2019. So far this year, the tally is at 74.”

At the risk of overgeneralising, the United States is a country that consistently puts the needs of its children far behind the needs, wants and notions of adults — from school administrators to employers to political activists. And it has to stop.

The list that follows does not come close to covering it.

Journalist Megyn Kelly in 2020 pulled her kids out of their fancy private school after the school approvingly shared a letter, written by the executive director of the Orleans Public Education Network, which stated: “white children are being raised from infancy to violate Black bodies with no remorse;” and that “white children are left unchecked and unbothered in their schools, homes and communities.” 

The American teacher’s unions fought against returning to in-school teaching, even though it was widely understood that remote learning was a poor substitute for being in the classroom, and by keeping kids locked up in their homes we were doing them immeasurable harm.

And when schools did reopen, masks were recommended for kids as young as 2 — an insidiously cruel experiment that was unseen on this side of the Atlantic. Kids were forced to wear them in hot summer weather, even while participating in outdoor activities, sports and dance. 

Then my Twitter feed began filling up with truly disturbing videos of unhinged teachers — a hugely overweight teacher viciously berating a vaccinated teen boy, belittling him and calling him a jerk for not wearing a mask; or teachers sharing their sexual kinks with students — that has not stopped since. 

The masks and other ill-effects of COVID mitigation attempts gained a lot of attention. Not so the many children who are incarcerated in prison-like juvenile detention facilities, 4,535 of whom,  or nearly 1 in 10 “are incarcerated in adult jails and prisons, where they face greater safety risks and fewer age-appropriate services are available to them,” according to a 2019 study by advocacy group Prison Policy. More than 500 of the detained children were “no more than 12 years old,” the study found, and large numbers of children and teenagers are locked up for minor offences like truancy or violating curfew. Why is no one talking about these kids?

Even the relatively mundane details of the family lives of many Americans are shocking from an outside perspective. People in the UK might be surprised to learn that many American teenagers start school before 8am, with some starting as early as 7:30, because of competing priorities. I’m not comparing shootings to early school start times, but putting young people through such gruelling schedules because of bureaucracy is inhumane. It’s bad for kids on every level: lack of sleep leads to poor cognitive function, weight gain, and depression.

And then of course there is the notoriously bad maternity leave American mothers grapple with. I had a mere 12 weeks of unpaid leave when my son was born, but I was lucky. I knew mothers who went back to work as early as 10 days after giving birth. 

Despite a shared strangle-hold on policy-making at all levels of American government, the Republican and Democrat ruling classes have failed to make the United States more liveable for families, in ways large and small. 

The horrors being experienced by families in Uvalde Texas today cannot be imagined. But the sad reality is that the well-being of children has not been a priority in the United States in my lifetime. I was a little kid in a public elementary school in blue-collar Brooklyn in the 1980’s, and it was utterly grim.  The United Kingdom is far from perfect, but those of us raising children here should count our blessings, and be vigilant that we don’t allow this country to follow in America’s footsteps.