translated from Spanish: Indoctrination is adultcentrism – The Counter

The fascist, conservative and adult-centered offensive has launched a truly ridiculous persecution of the Children’s Advocate, Patricia Muñoz, for a video that the Ombudsman published on social media, showing children and adolescents singing a song, alluding to the right to participation.
This video and song, which is part of the Rights Campaign 2020, and in line with the 30th years of Chile’s ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Adolescent, has generated a series of criticisms in a sector of society, because part of the song mentions the phrase “jumping all tourniquets”. The right has therefore initiated a board of signatures to request a request for the removal of Patricia Muñoz, for alleged “negligence” in the exercise of her duties, and “political proselytism” in children.
This approach on the right shows us, once again, its deep ignorance and intellectual precariousness in understanding something as simple as a metaphor (“jumping all tourniquets” in relation to the barriers that adult-center society puts on children and adolescents), but also the basic concept of promoting rights, and in this case the right to participation. It is not surprising its hypocrisy and double standard for not reporting human rights violations to children and adolescents, such as when they threw a 16-year-old teenager, Anthony, from the Pio Nono Bridge, or when two teenagers were shot by police outside a SENAME home in Talcahuano. Just for the right, children and adolescence are objects of marketing and public policy. Their over-pathologization and conservatism does not allow them to understand that they are subjects of rights, social and political, that they not only have the right, but also the capacities to give an opinion, inform the thee, take a stand and actively participate in the social transforms that the people demand.
Now, beyond that, the comments made by social media about this controversy of the video are really regrettable. In line with what was criticized by the right, on social media the comments were stated under the phrase “indoctrination”. What underlies this reasoning of indoctrination is an extremely derogatory and discriminatory look at the alleged inability of children and adolescents to inform, review and participate, based on their own beliefs, ideas and perceptions, since there would always, in theory, be an adult behind them telling them what they have to think, say and do. That is, they are denied as subjects with a conscience of their own, as they would be only players of the discourse of the adult world. They are basically placed in a place of passive objects dependent on the mandates of adults and adults.
But indoctrination is not promoting their rights, let alone the right to participation and critical consciousness.
Indoctrination is to deny them the right to opinion, information and participation.
Indoctrination is imposing a particular religion on them.
Indoctrination is to impose on them a certain way of living sexuality (heteronorm and binary).
Indoctrination is forcing them a certain way of being, doing, thinking, and feeling.
Indoctrination is adultcentrism that constantly seeks, through different mechanisms and discourses, to keep children and adolescents in that passive and submissive place in intergenerational relationships, imposing a certain way of being a boy or girl
That a part of society has come out to repudiate the Ombudsman’s video, on the same arguments as the right, shows us that, with regard to a citizen awareness of the right to participation of children and adolescents, we are still a deeply adult-brained, authoritarian and conservative society.
Perhaps we should learn, from time to time, to speak less and listen more than children and adolescents have to say about themselves, what they think, do and feel, without falling into the cheap and retrograde moraline that they “should not talk about politics” or “do not know politics” because they are “helpless and innocent beings”. Like it or not, both adults and children, we are political subjects, because we live in a society, in a cop, and everything we do is political (which is different from the institutional politics of the parties).
Finally, as I read on social media, I hope that the annual report of the Children’s Ombudsman, in which he realizes of 818 serious allegations of HRD violations since the social outburst, would have caught their attention as the song

The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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