A child, being the owner of his or her body just as much as any adult is the owner of their body, has an inalienable right to his or her person. Only they can dictate how their body is used. Therefore hitting the child without their consent is violating their own right to their body as much as hitting a grown up is, the same applies for sexual abuse etc.
However a child shares a very special relationship with their parent. This relationship is a de facto contract, unspoken and understood (to whatever limited extent a child is able to understand) by both parties. For example if you try and take a two year old from their parent, they will begin to cry knowing that something that is rightfully there’s is being stolen. Similarly the situation in vice versa is true.
These sorts of contracts are found everywhere in our society. For example when you go to a restaurant, although you never sign or even establish through word of mouth in any explicit manner, you are expected to pay the bill at the end of your meal and the bill is expected to be what you ordered. There need not be any writing for it to be understood that refusal to pay the bill is stealing and that the bill being composed of items not ordered is fraud.
The contract between a child and a parent is that the parent will provide nourishment and nurture and in return the child will give certain permissions to his person. Thus corporal punishment of disobedience which would otherwise constitute genuine aggression, is, in fact, accounted for. This is similar to two boxers in a boxing match. It would be silly after the match to punish the initiator of the violence as committing assault.
However a distinction must be made between disciplining your child for his or her nurture or nourishment and negligent disciplining (note this is not the traditional definition of negligence in terms of child abuse) because the parent is simply fed up or not pleased with the child. In the latter case the parent fails to fulfill his part of the contract, and thus surrenders any special provisions given to him by the child as their guardian. This means that all acts of violence in this case are genuine acts of aggression, and are punishable as such. Furthermore sexual abuse, in our current society, is by almost everyone viewed is bad for the child, holding true for the parents who abuse their children. In this situation too, the parent is knowingly violating the child’s rights to his or her body without holding his part of the deal, which once again constitutes punishable aggression.
Now an important note must be made that if the parent genuinely believes that a hard beating is good for the child and a regular part of his nurture, or that his sexual relations with the child are beneficial, then he has every right to continue doing so. Now by all means I do not support such actions, I think they are perverted and sick and very very immoral. I am also hard pressed to believe any parent would truly believe this in our society (which incidentally means all such cases would be punishable). However if we take ourselves to a different context, lets say a primitive tribe who believes in a certain rights of passage initiation ceremony very sexual in nature, it would be silly of us to say that these people are necessarily bad humans. I personally would think the act barbaric, horrible, and would wish it were not so, but me proceeding to lock all these people up for their time honored custom and tradition would make me the aggressor, and not they.
When a child is old enough or conscious enough to be able to say he or she wishes no longer be part of this contract, that he is unsatisfied with the nurture provided and no longer wishes to give the right of punishment to their parents, he or she is free to leave. Any attempt to prevent them leaving would be an act of aggression on the part of the parents. This means that in the above examples if the child was old enough to consciously state his objection and wish to run away, then the parents would indeed be aggressors despite their opinion that their nurture is good. This is not to say a three year old running down the street screaming “I hate you I hate you I hate you” is exempt from the parent picking him up and taking him home for a five minute time out, as this would make the parent the aggressor. The wish for independence must be a clear and rational wish. Indeed it would be hard to find any three year olds who could explicitly state “I understand that you provide me the means of my survival, shelter, food water and the basic necessities, but the way you chose to discipline me is unsatisfactory and I wish to provide for myself from now on”
At this point the reader might question “Well how do we decide what a clear wish is anyway? How do we know the parent through his barbaric beatings actually means to nurture the child?” These topics are precisely what is subject to a judge or arbiter at a court of law. Just like with any crime, or accusation of crime, evidence must be both provided by the defendant and the prosecution. In the hypothetical posed by the first question the child and the custodians he ran away to, or the agency he contacted, would need to prove that he is fully aware of the consequences of living on his own, and express genuine and comprehensible dissatisfaction with his parent’s nurture. The defendant would need to prove the opposite. This method of arbitration to solve a dispute should not at all be surprising or deemed inadequate to anyone born in the last two hundred or so years!
Something must be said about the original sense of “negligence” in child abuse. This of course refers to those parents who have their children taken away because they do not clothe them adequately or feed them. This however is not negligent at all. Only the parents can decide how much of their property is to be given to the child. They can abandon the child altogether and they would have broken no natural law. As long as they don’t break the contract of parenting by violating the child’s right to their own body in a negligent manner as stipulated in the argument above, no child abuse has occurred.
A statist might ask “If the child runs away, where will the child go if there is no state run institution facilitating a foster family?”. To answer it, the child would turn to his relatives or his neighbors. Surely, as in all cases of domestic abuse against young children today, it is a responsible adult who learns about the crimes and helps the child notify the proper authorities for legal action to take place. It is this person who becomes the child’s new guardian, or failing that would put the child and his or her contract of parenthood on the market. Here an orphanage or those couples who wish to have children but can not, would be able to a pay a fee to adopt the disadvantaged boy or girl.
What about the argument that we should decide when the child has the full rights of an adult with some pseudo-scientific rationale of whether the child is able to make a rational decision and at what age? If you pay attention closely, the whole point is that the child does have the full rights of any adult, but is not aware of them and thus hands over what he lacks in faculty to his parents. As for age, you can see with my expose above, that age shouldn’t matter. Emphasis should instead be placed on the criterion of maturity which (instead of some one size fits all arbitrary number as given by the state today) can be measured by each individual child’s own wishes and development and be subject to the arbitration of private courts of law. Till the child is not conscious enough and still completely satisfied with the parental contract, it is the parents or their guardians that are responsible for the childrens’ decisions. How much they do so varies from parent to parent. From letting the child make his own decisions entirely and just providing them with food, shelter and water, to completely regimenting out the child’s life. This means that the parents have every right to punish their child for whatever contract he or she might engage in with a third party. Furthermore any third party who signs a contract that gives consent of aggression against the child is subject to proportional subject on the part of the parents. As long as the child has not the awareness of the contract and has yet not expressed any wish to break free or any discomfort, everyone must respect the parent’s chosen methods of upbringing. By saying “it is only at 16 when children are allowed to have sex” as the state does in Australia, it is aggressing and coercing the child or the child’s parent’s. It is denying them the full use of their own body which is a self-evident right or, providing that part of these rights have been given over to the parents by the de facto contract of parenthood, the state is aggressing against the property of the child thereby given to their parents, and not respecting contract.
The proponents of the age argument or the mental development argument often point to date rape (where someone slips a substance into someone’s drink in order to reduce mental capacity) as an example where the usual rules of tacit consentual contract do not apply. Here, the argument goes, since the rational faculty of the rapee is hindered, we cannot recognize any consent and a valid contract. However the crime in date rape is not because an individual cannot consent to sex under the influence of drugs and alcohol. In fact, if this were the case, and it were properly enforced, individuals who drink a glass of champagne or treat a woman to a nice dinner and a glass of wine or two before going to bed would be considered rapists! Some couples might even like, as a recreational activity, to take psychoactive drugs to enhance the nature of their intercourse. Surely you can see how silly it would be for the police to come up to these people and arrest them for not being able to make rational decisions. Instead we must note that the crime in date rape is by the initial aggression of slipping in a drug or substance into a person’s drink or food, which the individual otherwise would have never taken. This violates the right to their own person as much as tying up their hands and forcing the substance into their mouth. Whether done by stealthy means or not does not make it any less a case of aggression and assault.
Therefore a Child can consent himself or herself to anything, provided that their parents allow it. If the parents do not allow it the contract is invalid, and any agression assumed valid by the contract instead constitutes real and punishable agression. If the child disagrees with his parents and should a conflict arise, then arbitration can determine whether the child choses to assume the full status of an adult or not. The criteria to decide this is not an assumed rational faculty that comes with age, but rather a maturity and understanding the child will need to prove. In the case of no conflicts no arbitration is necessary, as all parties are satisfied.
To finish up a note must be placed on punishment by denial of service. If let’s say, the scenario of parents pimping out their daughter, were to offend a large number of the society in which they live, which no doubt in most quarters would, I stated that no one could not aggress against this choice of lifestyle. However they can punish it and discourage it through denial of service. The baker might not sell bread to these people, the employer of the father might tell him there is no need to come to work tomorrow, the grocery store might refuse to trade etc. etc. This is all acceptable, and, incidentally, the only just way a society can chose to punish those who step outside the boundaries of accepted norms without aggression.
I wrote this because I think there needs to be greater clarification of how children should be treated under natural law and NAP theories.
So I’m looking for criticism, commentary etc.