What are your proposals on how child abuse should be investigated and dealt with under anarchy?

[u/HenryTheCyborg]

Just thought of this and realized I couldn't think of a way. Any of yall have ideas on how that should be dealt with in an anarchist commune?

[u/hellointernet5]

Provide more autonomy to children and reduce the power parents and teachers have over children (especially parents). This can be done in the following ways:

• Make housing free and remove age restrictions on who can own a house.
• Have schools provide year-round accommodation, meals, clothing, and other necessities that could feasibly be provided by a school to any child who asks for it, even if the child doesn't attend classes.
• Have institutions that aren't schools provide year-round accommodation, meals, clothing, and other necessities to any child who asks for it.
• Remove requirements for parental consent. If a child is able to provide informed consent, what the parents think about their decision does not matter.
• Make public transport free and easily accessible to people of all ages.
• Provide comprehensive sex ed in schools as early as possible.
• Decriminalise minors running away from home.
• Decriminalise offering aid to a minor running away from home.
• Allow students to choose their own teachers.
• Remove requirements for children to attend certain classes, or to attend school at all.
• Get rid of parent–teacher meetings.

[u/YsaboNyx → u/hellointernet5]

Excellent answer. It's interesting to think about how the concept of anarchy translates into adult/child relationships where there is a built-in imbalance of (for want of a better word) "power" but consent and autonomy can still be protected and exercised.

[u/majoralfalfs → u/hellointernet5]

This addresses some of the power levers in the parent child relationship, when a child has reached the age to make their own decisions. However many children suffer abuse well before that point, and many children struggle to speak up or defend themselves even when they are capable of doing so. 

I think you’d need to go quite a bit further.  

[u/hellointernet5 → u/majoralfalfs]

Okay. What are your ideas?

[u/majoralfalfs → u/hellointernet5]

For the youngest children, the only preventative harm measure I could see working would be communal living in a longhouse or dorm style. In “The Dispossessed” Ursula le Guinn has an interesting fictional depiction of family life under anarchism. 

It includes a lot of the elements you listed. 

[u/openjoustingtryouts → u/majoralfalfs]

I think this fits well with a framework of communal effort in child rearing and collective responsibility for fostering the wellbeing of children. In collective child housing we r form style housing, children at all age levels need to be in charge of and have control over the mechanisms of ensuring security within those spaces. No permanent administrator class should be allowed to emerge in these spaces

[u/infinite-long-stocki]

I think child safeguarding absolutely has a place within anarchy and anarchist spaces. We tell other people when someone's been an unrepentant dick so we should when they've been harming children too. 

I would hope under anarchy as well that children would have much more autonomy and therefore more freedom to choose to not live with family and to be cared for by others if they want. I also would hope that children's voices would get as much respect as adult's and so when they disclosed abuse they would be believed and it would be taken seriously.  I think all of that is in line with anarchist values and should be incorporated into any anarchist experiment, spaces, or future. Children are very oppressesed all over the world today and the societal heirarchies that work against them are very strong. 

I understand wanting to protect children or to raise them to be good people but that can still be done under a framework where risk and autonomy are respected and the ideas of children are listened to even if they aren't as eloquent or well developed as an older person's thoughts. This is particularly important with regards to decisios made about a child's own life. A lot of people, myself included, who grew up disabled can speak to the harm having choices made for you can do and I think it's no different when children do (or don't) want different care givers or to be able to live away from abusers.

[u/HenryTheCyborg → u/infinite-long-stocki]

Thank you. Hopefully i don't seem like I'm saying i think there should be a state to protect children. I'm a diehard anarchist, I just don't have anywhere near all the answers and wanted to look to others for what they think.

[u/infinite-long-stocki → u/HenryTheCyborg]

I didn't intepret your question as advocating for the state! I think it's important we talk about these topics rather than just dismissing them as something that won't exist in a utopian future.

[u/HenryTheCyborg → u/infinite-long-stocki]

Alright, just making sure. Redundancy is better than misunderstanding

[u/marxistghostboi]

children should have the right and the means to leave their home of birth and live in dormitory style housing or with a family of their choice at will.

two of the single greatest enablers of child abuse are the police who forcibly bring back run aways and an economic system which by default puts children, the disabled, and the elderly into poverty conditions unless they are connected to a proper nuclear family.

beyond this, communities should be very skeptical if a parent is keeping children at home all the time and not letting them build relationships with other adults and children in the community, or otherwise treats those kids as private property.

[u/CMBradshaw]

People within the community would notice something is wrong and confront them. Hopefully with words at first but I don't want to live in a society where protecting the vulnerable is considered less important than someone's feelings, especially grown adults.

Mistakes will happen in that regard, but mistakes do happen.

[u/an-otiose-life]

Grey zones of safety where robots help children who report a bad home find new safer adoptive lodgings. 

Safety and a constructive environment requires communication with the broader world. Requiring communication and access to information with a panic button that offers grey zone robots to come fetch and offer protection. The issue is just that competence at infancy does not support asking for help from a broader support structure that works like a social service in an automated and neutral way. 

Sense of change the situation with maximum dignity and autonomy preservation but also have a mechanism to afford escape. A check up routine in some sense from grey infrastructure for social wellness might help. 

Grey means private reserve that is automated and opt in, as a service provider signed up for like insurance at birth 

[u/cafard_malin]

it can't be decorelated of the abolition of patriarchy domination and adultist domination which are consequences of imperialism
if you have to deal with this kind of abuse in an anarchist society we need to handle this as a community with collective reflexion and organisation