Women and Children as Slaves
John R. Seeley
"invalidation by ascription or presumption"
...Before we can turn at all to what is commonly taken to be the problem of ... "juvenile delinquency" -- we must recognize that a whole series of prior, surrounding, major injustices presents questions that logically precede any possible coming to any point of adjudication on the more petty issues at all.
...At this remove in history, with the scales part-struck from our eyes, we might be able to recognize something odd about conjoining the word "justice", with "slave", as in asking a question about "slave justice", as, for example, in a situation where a "slave" struck his or her "master". We might now think it an odd way of proceeding if the analysis failed to take count of the crucial elements of circumstance,
a) of the slave's having been given, on unwarrantable pretext, slave status is law, i.e. virtually total invalidation by ascription or presumption;
b) the slave's being routinely and regularly robbed of all but a minimum return on the fruits of his or her labour;
(c) of the supposed culprit's being judged in a court of masters; and
d) it being known, by common knowledge, that he or she is, in virtue of that very status, also enmeshed in a designed system of irritations and provocations, which constitute continuous surplus gratuitous punishment, not even prima facie rationally related to the slave-system itself. The question that might well arise for us now -- in connection with a problem distant from us in time and space -- is why so little violence, vandalism, sabotage, rule-breaking, retaliation, rebellion, revolt, revolution, or riot attended so durable and unendurable a state of affairs.
But surely this is the normal juvenile situation (neglecting minor side benefits in both cases): being a "juvenile" means living, distinguished by age instead of by race, but as clearly by pure ascription and imputation of inferiority, incompleteness, and defect, as in invalid, in-valid status. (Remember the till recently valid legal trilogy of "women, idiots, and children"!) Ascriptive invalidation -- earned invalidation or "objectively" based invalidism is bad enough -- is a juridically sufficient condition to make all subsequent questions of justice obviously subsidiary. It is rich ground, if sensed or perceived, for a growth of grounded grievance of explosive magnitude. (Note the parallel potential, and the revealed reality, as women woke up to their similar, though perhaps presumptively more palatable, evisceration at the core of self-conception by such or similar means.) So the child, indulged or not, petted or not, is role-cast as invalid, less than a full person, less equal than others, at best in process of being made or becoming something other and more fully creditable.
Children or juveniles are also (as hitherto with most women, and thitherto with slaves, and even now, though less patently, with all workers) robbed of, expropriated from, all or nearly all the fruits of their labour, and alienated in their production process from the labour itself, from their human co-labourers, and finally from their own nature and from Nature itself..
Excerpted from an article entitled The Juvenile Justice System and the Helping Professions, pp 5-20, Vol 8, Nos 1-2, 1977/78 of INTERCHANGE, ISSN 0020-5230. John Seeley is perhaps best known for his book The Americanization of the Unconscious published by International Science Press New York in 1967 and distributed by J.B. Lippincott Co. LCCCN 66-29488