Children cannot advocate for themselves. They are typically not experienced in advocacy, do not have the resources and the knowledge to talk to governments, and when they possess that knowledge, society largely ignores them. At least in the United States, children are not taken seriously when they voice complaints.
The US has a variety of child unfriendly laws. As this video mentions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2i4oaRoaG0), many US states allow spanking of kids in schools, and the rates are not low. Physical punishment in the household is also common and legal. While the rates are decreasing, many US kids still face physical punishment. This causes a lot of suffering and worse outcomes at a societal level. The vast majority of people care about children, but this issue has not been brought to the forefront of people’s minds. The United States, in particular, lags behind other countries.
Right now there are many children in the US living in poverty, one of the highest rates of any developed country. There has been a history of advocacy to spend more government money on reducing the poverty rate of children, and it had moderate success. This issue has been talked about by prominent sources, such as Freakonomics (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-does-the-richest-country-in-the-world-have-so-many-poor-kids/). There have been some attempts to pass bills featuring re-distribution targeting children, such as the Build Back Better act. It has traction inside the federal government. However, it has not yet succeeded.
Because of existing support, I think the issue is extremely tractable. It is not as neglected as other issues, but the fact that children are unable to vote is a big issue. Children are not listened to and don’t have their preferences respected in the US, so other voices need to speak for them. Neglect is the result, as people forget about their childhood and stop caring.
This issue is important. The financial and wellbeing return of good upbringing is well documented. Poverty and physical abuse can be traumatic, and 18 years of relative suffering is a big deal. EA could fund advocacy in this space, and it is likely that reform could easily be pushed over the finishing line. We all know we played the birth lottery. Those of us in rich countries had a much healthier and happier life, on average. But the disparity within some rich countries is still substantial.
I think the lack of adult voices taking children’s issues seriously is a big problem. Children face many problems in the US and other developed countries, and their complaints are largely ignored and glossed over. Countries like the Netherlands where children are taken seriously have some of the happiest children, and I think 18 years of happiness has large moral value. Not being physically abused and not living in poverty seem like very important aspects of living a happy childhood. There are some issues with children that are seeing attention already, such as mental health problems. However, investment in advocacy for children’s happiness and wellbeing seems very neglected.
Meta: looks like this is Skye's first post on the EA Forum. Welcome, Skye! Thanks for your courage in posting this!
To echo this, I'm grateful to Skye for raising the topic here and providing an opening for the discussion between harfe, Lauren, and Linch. I hope that Skye wasn't dissuaded by the criticism, because I think there is a strong case that certain aspects of children's advocacy are (currently) more tractable in developed countries. We have lots of examples of changes to the law in favour of children happening via established institutions.
Differences between regional legal systems need to be taken into account, but to provide an interesting example from the UK: section 58 of the Children Act 2004 specifies that hitting a child can be justified by a parent or guardian as long as it is "reasonable punishment" and doesn't amount to "actual bodily harm" (long-term injury). This was revoked by the Children Act 2019 in Scotland and in 2020 in Wales, with each taking a couple of years to come into effect. Now children effectively have the same legal protection from assault and battery as adults in these countries, including from their parents. Any EAs based in the UK with any inclination towards national-scale advocacy would be well placed to push for similar changes in England and Northern Ireland.
How these acts came about might also make an interesting case study for possible replication in other places -- and to determine if these problems are "neglected" enough for EAs. I haven't read the history, but I suspect national charities like Barnado's and the NSPCC along with international organisations like UNICEF were involved to varying degrees.
I also agree with the broader thrust of Skye's post that children almost universally lack the legal and political framework to represent their own interests, so it is up to adults to advocate for them. Even if we can show that conditions are worse for children along most metrics in developing countries (as Lauren puts forward well), I still think children would be worth advocating for in developed countries for the right EAs.
Why do you think that advocating for children in developed countries is more effective than advocating for children in poor countries? You don't make this claim explicitly, but "developed countries" is in the title and you talk a lot about USA, and I assume you have thought about or researched the issue in other countries.
My (perhaps naive) view is that children in most poor countries have it much more difficult than in the US.
I agree with this comment. While less than 0.5% of American students face corporal punishment at school, some 70% of African students do. In school deaths are not incredibly uncommon.
26% of Zambian girls have been sexually abused in the last year. About 10% of Zambian boys and girls report having been sexually harassed at school within the last month.
I looked at your link and didn't see evidence of this? Instead, Wikipedia (your link) says:
Also, your source for
is a Tweet that says 26.4% of Zambian girls have been sexually abused at all, and 1.9% in school (the US comparatively has 15.2% at all, and 0% in school).
These number all sound very high to me. And my initial prior is very much that the situation is worse on average in developing countries than the US. But I don't think the evidence presented so far is conclusive here.
You're right; I misread Susannah's tweet (and read the "ever" bar as "in school").
Re. the Wikipedia article: those are ever harassed numbers; the Zambia number is within the last year. Assuming that sexual harassment is spread across all grades (K-12), "within the last year" (81/12) would be ~7% (which is how I got a quarter of the 26% I quote, though you're right that I was misreading the tweet). Upon further thought, dividing by 12 is a little aggressive, since sexual harassment is more likely in last six years of that (grades 6-12), so say, 15% risk per year.
Lee and Susannah have a longer blog post in which they examine sexual violence in schools, and find somewhat higher rates of sexual violence in developing countries than developed.
Qualitatively, my impression is that what counts as "the kind of violence you'd remember and report in surveys" is a significantly lower bar in the US than in SSA. (I once tried to report being harassed in Uganda, and got completely blank looks like "this is normal, why are you are complaining".). But I don't have data to hand to back that up beyond my own experience.
(Edited to add: I edited my comment above to be correct.)
Interesting. I think I disagree with this renewed assessment, as:
1. We shouldn't assume that "reported sexual harassment in school" is the same thing as "have ever been sexually harassed exactly once in school." If anything there should be a presumption that this have happened to many people significantly more than once.
2. The survey is of "2064 students in 8th through 11th grade," so of course many surveyed students literally were not around for the full span of grades 6-12.
I do agree that reporting bias differences are pretty likely. And I'm sorry to hear that you've been harassed in Uganda.
Brilliant Harfe and Laura. Here in Uganda many primary students are beaten badly, while in high schools there's a common system, which is borderline torture, where many students only get 4-6 hours sleep a night. My wife works in advocacy and has considered trying to tackle this - I'm not sure where this might fit on the effectiveness scale, but potentially reducing suffering in millions of kids could be a pretty good intervention.
Like you both I struggle to see a scenario where this would be more effective in Richer countries than places like here in Uganda.
(Writing in cluelessness from the USA) I accept the argument for importance, and notice myself defaulting to considering the problem intractable because I don't know how tractable it is to meaningfully improve school safety in Uganda. Will you please share more about how hard it might be, and what it would take, to make this better?
Thanks Cienna! I'm sure you are far from clueless :)
Like with any large scale policy issue, tractability is a big issue - but in this kind of case I have a couple of vaguely similar examples which show that it could well be tractable. I'm an enormous fan of advocacy and actvism as one of the most cost effective ways to solve specific, clear problems, perhaps even a bigger fan than most effective altruists as I've seen my wife succeed spectacularly a couple of times at least.
My wife worked on something 5 years ago which has some similarity in that it was a policy that was changed, having a big positve effect. Her and a community group from scratch managed to get a local district level law passed to effectively ban alcohol "sachets", tiny 50ml plastic bags of heavy spirits of varying qualities. 2 years later later this was followed up with a nation al ban. This was based on both strong community will to ban the sachets as they could see the enormous harm caused by them, and a large amount of research that shows if you increase the quantity of the minimum size unit of alcohol (e.g. from 50 to 150ml like what happened here) , you hugely lower the damage done by alcohol.
Also the banning of lead paint thing in Malawi has some similarities in that it's a harmful policy being overturned through government advocacy, and that seems to be going pretty well.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ErKzbKWnQMwvzRX4m/seven-things-that-surprised-us-in-our-first-year-working-in
What it would take (for example the high school sleep issue) specifically is advocacy to the ministry of education to pass a local (district wide) or national ordinance decreeing minimum sleep in a high school, then ensuring enforcement (harder than getting the law passed). The physical abuse of primary school children would be much harder as it is culturally ingrained - it's such a well known and horrible issue there are in fact a number of BINGOS (big international NGOs like world vision etc.) doing a terrible job already trying to fix that problem mainly through education (posters, trainings, etc.). High level advocacy would be far better.
The thing is you could throw $30,000 or something at a specific problem such as the borderline torture of sleep deprivation in high school kids and probably have something like a 1 in 10 chance of success(with astronomical uncertainly and probably better odds if it's someone like my wife working on it!) . I'm not going to do the math but it might well be a relatively cost-effective campaign.
Wow I just wrote an essay oh dear...
Neat about the alcohol sachets!
I don't see how "decreeing minimum sleep" would work. Why aren't the high school students getting enough sleep? Are they also working jobs? Do they live far away from the schools?
Sorry I forget there's a bunch of context I forget to lay out
Maybe 80% of high schools here are boarding schools, that's what I'm talking about.
So most of these these boarding schools force the students to get up at 4:00am-5:00am to prepare ,and work until 10pm in the evening. It sounds crazy but the schools honestly think this torrid regime will get better results for their students. Of course students end up trying to steal extra sleep wherever they can, just to get by.
With 2 students we were helping with high school where I think this contributed to serious mental health problems at the school, and one ended up leaving school.
Thanks! Now it makes sense how a decree would help. I imagine some additional culture shift would be needed to make sure that the kids weren't still under a lot of pressure, just less overt.
I'd like to see someone in the EA community do some work related to preventing bullying, which seems likely to be one the most intense forms of suffering for children.
I agree that reducing childhood trauma in the USA looks quite tractable, and that it's not as neglected as other issues. Examples of things which are happening:
1. There's already work being done to understand, prevent, and overcome Adverse Childhood Experiences (notably in California, under Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris). ACEs are dose-dependent, with people who report more childhood trauma having worse health outcomes, including a higher risk of early death.
2. the intactivist movement appears to be making progress over the last decade on shifting public opinion toward opposing childhood genital cutting.