My law professor said something today that resonated with me.He said:
You only possess the rights that you assert.
In other words, liberty is no longer (if it ever truly was) the default in our society.
In a nation that ever increasingly exhibits aspects characteristic of a police state, in the era of the PATRIOT Act, it is more important than ever that citizens of all ages actively engage themselves in the protection of their fundamental rights.
Young people are especially vulnerable to constitutional rights violations, as many of us believe that we lack the clout or resources necessary to fight back.This mentality stymies the youth rights movement, and is as incorrect as it is dangerous.True, young people lack some of the traditional indicators of social power, such as substantial financial means, and, in the case of those under eighteen, the right to vote.But lack of cash-on-hand and even the lack of the right to cast a ballot do not render youth powerless.Youth have significant power indeed, if channeled correctly.
Every person, young or old, rich or poor, has a voice—the ability to speak out.The question is: do we use it?
Merely complaining about an issue, as many who claim to be a part of the youth rights movement do, is at the very best unproductive, and at the worst destructive to the cause.We must do more than complain.
Simply writing a letter about an issue, or timidly discussing a rights violation, while certainly more constructive than complaining, still doesn’t fit the bill.We must do more than hide behind paper and social convention.
We must speak.
But is one person’s voice enough?The answer is almost always no.We must speak as a group—a unified force.In order to do this, we must find like-minded individuals to rally around us.For, certainly, the voice of one hundred is greater than the voice of one.
And so I call upon young people everywhere to unite for the cause of equality.Turn complaints into campaigns, and mobilize whatever resources that may be at your disposal.Form a group you can rely upon, a group sizable enough to attract attention, and make yourselves heard as a unit.This is the single most powerful way to effect change, whether the forum be a school, a city, a state, a nation, or the world.Unite as many, yet speak as one—this is my charge to you, readers.
If you don’t like a school policy, advocate against it with the full force of the student body.If the police in your city are harassing young people, remind the mayor that his job depends on the satisfaction of his constituents, or future constituents as the case may be.If a law discriminates against youth, fight it as a collective voice, all the way to the courts if necessary.
Do these things, and you will find yourself a formidable change agent in a world that worships the status quo.As my law professor so wisely stated:
You only possess the rights that you assert.
So go assert them, together with as many allies as you can attain.
I used to direct an after-school program, which was housed in a public school classroom, and I tried to implement a democratic meeting with my middle school students (a diverse group in terms of race and family income). As well-intentioned as I was, the students didn’t respect me as a leader because I was offering them decision-making power. They seemed so used to an authoritarian school day that they didn’t know what to do with an unexpected dose of freedom. It was also just a drop in the bucket compared to the way they spent the majority of their time. How would you have handled this situation?
- Redwood City, CA
Jonah Canner responded to the above scenario with an excellent post about how we are all democratic by nature, even little kids respond to each other democratically while playing, and it is school that imposes an authoritarian structure upon us. The following years stuck in school become a long, tired battle between authority and resistance to it. With all the harm that school does it is hard to reverse it over night, it is hard also to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of that ongoing battle of authority and resistance. Especially when you don’t seem to fit easily into expected roles. I definitely encourage you to click the link and read the post. It was an insightful response. (more…)
At 4 o’clock this afternoon, NYRA-Southeast Florida filed their lawsuit against the city of West Palm Beach, Florida. After months of attempting to negotiate with the city council to repeal their unconstitutional curfew law, the chapter has now taken their battle to federal court.
NYRA is making history!
This is the first time a NYRA chapter has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the rights of youth. This is also, as far as we are aware, the first time a youth-led civil rights organization has filed a lawsuit against a curfew law anywhere in the country.
Earlier this month the Rochester, NY curfew law was struck down in court, now it is our turn!
NYRA-SEFL is working with veteran civil rights attorney Barry Silver who successfully fought West Palm Beach on another matter. Jeffrey Nadel, chapter president, is confident Silver will beat the city once more. First the curfew in Rochester fell, soon West Palm Beach’s curfew will fall as well, and NYRA is leading the charge!
Could this be the case that makes it to the US Supreme Court? Could NYRA-SEFL v. West Palm Beach be remembered for all time as the case that eradicated all curfew laws? Only time will tell.
NYRA members have led successful efforts against curfews in New York, Missouri, New Jersey, Washington, DC and elsewhere around the country. This is NYRA’s first effort through the courts.
If you want to help, please write a letter to the editor of the West Palm Beach Post and tell them what you think of NYRA-SEFL’s suit against their curfew law: letters@pbpost.com (be polite though)
Increasingly, children seem to have no standing in the public sphere as citizens and as such are denied any sense of entitlement and agency. Children have fewer rights than almost any other group, and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs. This is not to suggest that adults do not care about youth, but most of those concerns are framed within the realm of the private sphere of the family and can be seen most clearly in the moral panics mobilized around drugs, truancy and kids killing each other.
And:
As the protocols of governance become indistinguishable from military operations and crime-control missions, youth are more and more losing the protections, rights, security or compassion they deserve in a viable democracy. The model of policing that now governs all kinds of social behaviors constructs a narrow range of meaning through which young people define themselves. Moreover, the rhetoric and practice of policing, surveillance and punishment have little to do with the project of social investment and a great deal to do with increasing powerful modes of regulation, pacification and control - together comprising a “youth control complex” whose prominence in American society points to a state of affairs in which democracy has lost its claim and the claiming of democracy goes unheard.
As if hearing such a forceful defense of youth from one of the foremost advocates of our cause wasn’t enough to make my day, I noticed he also quoted me. Very cool.
The other day I was perusing the aisles of Wal-Mart, walking though the aisles until I found my self in an aisle filled with vitamins and supplements. I wasn’t looking for anything but I looked around anyways, and something caught my attention. Right at eye level, there was a bright orange package reading “One-a-day Teen Advantage for her” right next to the women’s One-a-day. Wondering if there was even a difference between the ‘teen’ and the ‘normal’ vitamin, I stopped to pick it up and inspect the package. It had all the good stuff that vitamins have, vitamin A, B, vitamins to make your hair shiny, bones strong, etcetera. The normal One-a-day Women’s multi-vitamin, was priced a full 2 dollars cheaper and sold in larger quantities.
“Now, what would make such a price difference?” I wondered.
Politicians and public interest groups are always looking to protect youth. They have a long list of so-called bad guys that they believe are a danger to young people. Even if in all this, they ignore the very many actual dangers youth face every day. Maybe there are things they find much more important than the well-being of young citizens. But then, who’s going to help young people? Who really cares about them? I’ll tell you who.
That’s us! We’re the National Youth Rights Association, or NYRA for short. I’m Katrina Moncure, secretary of NYRA and board member. There I am holding my cat, Midnight.
Anyway, NYRA has many goals. We want to lower the voting age to 16. We want to lower the drinking age to 18. We want all youth curfew laws abolished. Those are our major goals, but we have lots of others, too. (more…)
The difference in time between parts 1 and 2 and parts 2 and 3 should show you just how quickly this issue snowballed, as should the following sentence. On Monday night, October 22, the local curfew law was repealed. This comes about a month after the village board proposed the bill to repeal it. And what a month it has been.
Shortly after the bill was proposed, I was contacted by a reporter from The New York Times, who found out about the campaign through the New York Civil Liberties Union. I spoke to him for a while, and the article came out the following week. In print, it had a good picture of me and a few other members of the club that they didn’t put on the site. Oh, well. Picking up on the story in the Times, two radio stations covered the story and a local TV station interviewed me for a very good segment they ran that night. An article in a regional paper came out the following day, and a local paper followed a couple weeks later.
Following this publicity, I printed out piles of paper with petitions for people to sign and talking points for why the curfew should be repealed. A friend of mine made a nice informative flyer that we gave out as well. In the middle of all of this, I had a meeting with the deputy chief of police. I hoped to get the support of the police, since a major reason that the curfew was being kept was that the police liked it. The meeting wasn’t as successful as I had hoped, but it was worth a try.
Finally, the day of the bill’s public hearing arrived. On Monday, I gave out last-minute reminders to village residents who had said they would attend the meeting (and told them to bring parents, since unfortunately, elected officials listen more to the people who can remove them from office.) A little after 7, a friend and I drove over to the meeting. Butterflies in my stomach, I parked in the lot by the village hall, and noticed something I definitely didn’t expect. A news van was parked in the next row. As was another news van. Now even more nervous, we walked inside and were greeted by a crowd of high school students, at least three times as many people as I had expected. There were opponents there as well, of course, but they were outnumbered. (I found out later that a number of the students came from other towns as part of a government class assignment where they had to attend a village board meeting, and they decided that this was the most interesting local issue on Long Island.) It was really quite intimidating speaking at the meeting. As soon as you stood up, you were handed a microphone so the people who were overflowing into the next room and outside the building could hear, and three TV cameras and a number of microphones swiveled toward you (turns out several of my friends were quoted on local news channels and I was on the radio). One after the other, a former mayor, myself, and a cascade of students and worried residents made their cases. With a few exceptions, I was extremely impressed.
Then, finally, the board ended the discussion and voted, unanimously, in favor of the bill. The only regret any of us had was that it is effective after this year, and so the curfew is still on for this Tuesday and Wednesday, giving the village a year to consider what measures they can put in place (up to and including another curfew) for next year. I signed up to be on a committee to decide what should be put in place of the curfew, and I will, of course, argue against another curfew. However, there are a lot of people arguing very vocally for it to be put back on the books, and they may get their way. However, at least the status quo is now on our side, and if nothing else is pushed through before October 30th, 2008, there will be no curfew next year. This shows just how much any of us can do with a few dedicated people, some good, respectful, well-reasoned arguments and a slow news month.
The following is a rough transcript of this video.
I’ve lived in the DC area my whole life. I ride metro sometimes. I love the Redskins.
But there is one thing about the city that I am utterly ashamed of, and that is that Washington DC has a youth curfew law in effect. Under the law, if you’re under the age of 17, you cannot be out past 11pm. The city officials created this law back in 1999 (I think?) to make residents believe they were doing something about a crime problem. But it doesn’t make any sense. How exactly do you solve a crime problem by blaming on a scapegoat demographic, a group of people everybody already hates anyway?
And this is dangerous. If there is a crime problem, then it’s because law enforcement is inadequate. All a curfew law does is give inadequate law enforcement more to do. Last year, there were several hundred counts of homicide, several hundred counts of sexual assault, and two thousand counts each of car theft, assault with a deadly weapon, robbery, arson, and of all kinds of other things.
What do you tell these victims when you’re sending law enforcement after innocent teenagers?
What do you tell a woman who was raped, but the cops were busy arresting a 16-year-old who was coming home from work a little bit late?
What do you tell a family when their house was broken into late at night when the police were waiting outside a club somewhere that was full of teenagers so they could arrest good kids for curfew violation?
What do you tell little kids when Daddy won’t be coming home anymore because he was shot to death by a 30-year-old mugger while the police were busy hassling a 19-year-old who looked like he was too young to be out?
What do you tell a good mother who must go to the police station late at night to pick up her 14-year-old daughter, who was picked up for being outside, and to have to be told that she is an irresponsible parent because she allowed her daughter to be out?
What do you tell a disabled uncle, whose only helper is his 15-year-old nephew, and he needs an errand run late at night, but if that 15-year-old were to help him, he’d be a criminal?
Who’s helping any of these people? The curfew isn’t protecting anybody. Instead it’s just distracting the main protection that they have. You’re sending law enforcement after a scapegoated demographic and not after criminals, which makes everybody more vulnerable, everybody more unsafe.
Curfews aren’t the answer. They just increase crime. You can’t solve a crime problem by just discriminating against people and taking away their constitutional right to be outside. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t do anyone any good. It’s just a “feel good” law which accomplishes nothing.
So please, if you want to solve a crime problem, get rid of the curfew, strengthen law enforcement, and go after the real criminals!
It may seem strange that I posted “Part 2″ after this title, but there was in fact a Part 1. It was posted December 8, 2006, so you have to go back quite a bit to find it. The post was about the opposition a few other students and myself were putting up to a local 7PM curfew for October 30 and 31. I hoped to post an update sooner than this, but it’s better late than never. Here’s the update I promised.
After about 8 months of near-silence (with the exception of a couple e-mails) from the village, I e-mailed the local chapter of New York’s ACLU affiliate. They contacted the village, who agreed to discuss the curfew again at their meeting this past Monday night. I spoke again, and the reaction of the board was fairly similar to last November. The trustees didn’t even remember seeing our suggestions for alternatives to a curfew, which were sent to the village in January. However, one board member did seem more supportive, on constitutional grounds. I had to leave early, but someone from NYCLU who came spoke after I left and was, I heard, received in a similar way.
Tuesday, I heard from a fellow activist that she had been called by the village clerk, who said that a bill had been introduced to repeal the curfew, which would have a public hearing on October 22. An e-mail to the clerk confirmed this. I quickly sprang into action, contacting other supporters, and attempting to get people to attend the public hearing. I’m also attempting to meet with the police, whose recommendation to keep the curfew is a major reason it’s still on the books.
It’ll be tough getting the support together in a month, but if we can and we get the bill passed, it will be a major step for youth rights. Our opponents are many and determined (one approached me after I left the meeting on Monday and began arguing with me about it and vowing to prevent it from being repealed), but mass movements can get something done. Hopefully, this can become a mass movement. Only time will tell.
Children organizing for political rights will probably be treated initially with ridicule and derision, and then with misunderstanding and perhaps eventually violence if the experience of the struggle for women's suffrage is any precedent. - Bob Franklin
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