Jill Filipovic: A Big New Report on American Children Is Out. It's Horrific.

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/09/human-rights-watch-usa-child-abuse-labor-report.html


A new Human Rights Watch report paints a damning portrait of children’s rights in the United States. That is, children here have remarkably few rights and are particularly ill-treated in the conservative states that claim the mantle of “family values.” According to HRW, “Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states.” Over and over again, the worst states for children are clustered around the “pro-life” Bible Belt, and the map of the states that are the worst for children looks a lot like a map of red-state America. (Liberal states, too, have a long ways to go when it comes to protecting kids, but they generally do a bit better.)

The report doesn’t look at forced births, but the U.S. states that ban abortion also routinely force children, including child rape victims, to carry pregnancies to term and become young (sometimes very young) mothers against their will.

The report also doesn’t look at outcomes like child poverty and child hunger, but we know that states that restrict abortion tend to have higher rates of children living in poverty, have lower spending on K–12 education, and make it harder for kids in poor families to get health care.

Most U.S. states also allow for some form of child marriage. The widely accepted international human rights standard is to mandate that people be 18 before they can marry. But the report states that in the U.S., more than a quarter of a million children were married off between the years 2000 and 2018, and some of them were girls as young as 10. Most of these child marriages were between underage girls and adult men.

*snip*