Short post, because should be working.
Kirstie Allsop, who is some sort of television presenter (1) is being hauled over the coals because she let her 15 year old son go interrailing with his older brother (or someone older, I can’t be bothered to read beyond the headlines) Some (e.g. Ally Fogg) are suggesting this moral panic is being whipped up to punish her for various comments she has made that are supportive of trans-rights. IDK, and that’s not my point. My point is that who gets to be an adult at 15 is a moveable feast.
So, for example, Shamima Begum, who went and joined those murderous thugs Islamic State at aged 15, and has been stripped of her UK citizenship, treated like a responsible adult instead of the vulnerable groomed (and idiotic – but who DOESN’T do idiotic things at 15?) child.
Smarter people than me, with lived experience of racism, talk about how young people of colour are held to entirely different standards of culpability – they are “adultified” for the purposes of the carceral state/criminal justice system etc. A quick google finds this;
Childhood, goes the conventional wisdom, should be a time of innocence, discovery, and careful guidance. Unless—as generations of Black people can attest—the kids are Black. In this country, Black children do not get the luxury of having their innocence presumed and protected by the majority-White society in which they live.
Known as “adultification,” examples of this disturbing phenomenon are rife. In a recent viral video, a White NYPD officer can be seen repeatedly punching 14-year-old Kyonna Robinson in the head; in November, a 12-year-old boy in Richmond, VA was pinned to the ground and given a concussion by officers who had volunteered to run the tennis program he attended; in October, a White woman in Caldwell, NJ called police when she saw 9-year-old Bobbi Wilson spraying a homemade insecticide on lanternflies in their neighborhood. “There’s a little Black woman walking, spraying stuff on the sidewalks and trees,” the woman told the dispatcher. “I don’t know what the hell she’s doing. Scares me, though.”
This is a banal point, but it needs making repeatedly, because white privilege is a water that white people like me swim in and mostly cannot see.
- See also
2023 New Economics Foundation report who gets to be a kid. - 2022 Guardian piece – ‘They saw me as calculating, not a child’: how adultification leads to black children being treated as criminals
- Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation report : Adultification bias within child protection and safeguarding
Back to work.
Footnotes
(1) I am one of those assholes who constantly “casually” mentions he doesn’t actually have a television. Like in this footnote. See article in The Onion from 2000.
marchudson.net 
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