Denialism is a useful lens through which to think about children's legal and social situation. Diagnosing it might also be a relatively effective way of producing progress. By pinpointing explicit or implicit premises in the reasoning of those who would justify unjust treatment of a group and showing the premises entail denial of something demonstrably true, one might make greater headway in converting those others than one might by presenting the case in favour of just treatment. Many people cannot open their minds to others’ views until forced to see problems with their own views.

FORMS OF DENIALISM REGARDING CHILDREN

I identify below four forms denialism takes in discourse concerning children, or in other words, four types of premises – usually implicit rather than explicit, perhaps even unconscious in most instances – that underlie asserted justifications for treating children in certain ways that, from an objective perspective, are harmful. The four forms of denialism are moral, conceptual, descriptive and empirical. One could categorise or characterise the phenomenon I describe differently; the typology I adopt is not itself important, but simply a means of imposing order on the analysis. The four forms I identify are inter-related and mutually reinforcing.

MORAL DENIALISM

The problematic moral premise is a denial of children's equal moral status. By ‘moral status’ I mean the relative position a being occupies, in a moral hierarchy, by virtue of which it commands moral concern. To the extent a being has moral status, moral agents must pay its interests or integrity some regard in their decision making. If a being is of lesser or no moral status, moral agents may give less or no weight to its interests in rational decision making.

The view that children are of inferior moral status relative to autonomous adults, and therefore less worthy of moral regard, used to be explicit, just as a similar view was once explicit regarding slaves, women, and mentally disabled persons. Today it is more commonly implicit. Outwardly almost no one today says children are of lesser moral worth relative to adults. But it seems implicit in many arguments as to why children should not receive certain protections or benefits that they are simply less deserving of moral regard than are adults.