How can we actually protect children?

Content warning: this piece discusses harm to children, including child sexual abuse (CSA).

I think we all need to be alert to the fact that there are a lot of those kinds of things going on and we never know about it. All of us, citizens of South Carolina, citizens of this country, have to be on the lookout for that.

-South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, in response to allegations againt Rep. RJ May

As I’ve often written, the “parental rights” movement has never struck me as being especially concerned with a vision of parenting focused on protecting children, or even with protecting the rights of all parents.

I assume many individuals in the movement care deeply about kids, but the policy goals of the movement as a whole— and its loudest voices, like Moms for Liberty, the national Freedom Caucus, or the Heritage Foundation— quickly diverge from anything research or even common sense tell us actually serve the needs of most children and families.

To be sure, groups like these offer cures to many real and imagined social ills facing children and families, but these offered solutions rarely seem based in what we know about how to actually help children (if they are even interested in their impacts on children beyond a superficial level).

Moms for Liberty, for example, claims, “We fight for children” on the main page of its website. But as “Current Issues,” the group focuses on censorsing books, “CRT,” “gender ideology,” and “school choice”.

And their rhetoric often focuses on the rights of “parents” (as in, almost exclusively parents on the political right, Christian nationalists, supporters of school vouchers, and opponents of vaccination requirements) and frequently forgets to even mention the nuts-and-bolts issues facing children. (Why, for example, doesn’t Moms for Liberty have more to say about gun violence, the leading cause of death among American children under 18? Why have the Heritage Foundation and Freedom Caucus gone to war on research-supported methods of supporting LGBTQ+ children, who are much more likely than their non-LGBTQ+ peers to engage in self-harm and suicide?)

Screenshot from the Moms for Liberty national website.

To give another example, the kind of “parental rights” prioritized by the South Carolina Freedom Caucus— a few months after former chair and founder RJ May was first raided for what has now been established were suspicions of posessing and distrubuting child pornography— is at least partly exemplified by its opposition to a bipartisan SC House bill intended to create “social media education programs”.

In a post explaining its objections to the proposed legislation, the Freedom Caucus explicitly said the bill consituted “Prental Rights Infringement” because it allowed school professionals to establish a media literacy program.

The Caucus argued it was the sole purview of parents to “educate kids regarding the merit of social media content”. Rather than providing a good-faith argument that the proposed programs would have a negative impact on kids, they made a vague allusion to “Fox News” reporting (somewhere— they didn’t provide a citation) that the curriculum “is bad for their mental health”.

Their objections, many of which were voiced by current SC House Freedom Caucus Chair Jordan Pace on the House floor during debates on the bill, received a lot of bipartisan scorn in the House, and ultimately the bill easily passed out of the GOP-dominated chamber (with 89 representatives voting for the bill and only 14 members— most of them members of the Freedom Caucus— voting against it).

Screenshot from the South Carolina Freedom Caucus’ official Substack.

But what their objections suggest is that their view of “parental rights” is based on the obviously-faulty premise that parents (or at least what “parental rights” groups see as the right kind of parents) always have their childrens’ best interests at heart, that any attempt for the community (or “the government”) to take meaningful responsibility for keeping students safe, is somehow a violation of these supposedly sacrosanct parental rights, and that the focus of protecting “parental rights” should be on ensuring children are exposed only to viewpoints approved by “parental rights” groups.

The contradiction inherent in that premise was well-exemplified when SC Governor Henry McMaster argued that state schools needed to reopen during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic because without children seeing students every day, reports of abuse and neglect had fallen.

Teachers and other school employees are mandated reporters because we know that children suffer violence and harm outside of schools. Yet shortly after reopening schools, banning mask requirements, and fomenting vaccine paranoia, many in South Carolina’s Republican supermajority shifted to attacking the same school employees who were supposedly so invaluable for protecing students from abuse at home.

Schools face many real problems, from safety risks and violence to inequitable outcomes. But the primary solution the “parental rights” movement has embraced is “school choice” (formerly called school vouchers, until that polled poorly with most Americans). And research has repeatedly indicated that school vouchers are, at best, a way for a small number of families to opt out of the system, at the cost of defunding it for the majority of families left behind.

Adults who care about children are also rightly concerned about political bias in schools.

This is something we should be on guard against even in the best of times— and about the impact media— particularly social media— is having on child psychology. But the primary solutions “parental rights” activists push are school censorship and anti- “woke” (formerly anti- “CRT”) curricula (or, in the SC Freedom Caucus’ case, an incoherent objection to any social media curriculum at all), as if limiting student access to a handful of material— disporportionatly about systemic racism and the LGBTQ+ experience— will do anything to address social media addiction, spikes in anxiety and depression, and other real issues facing young people.

And in addition to being wrongheaded, this censorship movement can be a smokescreen for using the power of national, state, and local governments to enforce ideological preferences in schools— again, something we should be on guard against, whether we share those ideological preference or not.

This is why the allegations against RJ May should be a topic of conversation because of more than a desire to mock hypocrisy. At least three members of the state Freedom Caucus paid money to May’s consulting business even after his home was first raided in October, which is a crucial detail in understanding whether they are as concerned about real harm to children as they are about scoring political points at the expense of librarians and teachers. (May was, incidentally, also Moms for Liberty’s 2023 “Legislator of the Year,” although of course that predates the criminal indictments. Both the Freedom Caucus and Moms for Liberty distanced themselves from May after the formal indictments were made publicly.)

Perhaps above all, we are right to be concerned about child sexual abuse (CSA).

Sexual exploitation, abuse, and sexual grooming are real, present dangers for many of our students. Yet, although the vast majority of victims of abuse and child sexual exploitation are being victimized by family members and family friends, the “parental rights” movement has largely, and wrongly, conflated actual sexual grooming with information about LGBTQ+ identies and nontraditional famillies, and has largerly targeted education workers as if they were the primary drivers of child exploitation. (In my experience, schools do not handle incidencts of sexual misconduct against children effectively, but banning books or targetting teachers for lessons doesn’t help us address this problem, either.)

Snake oil cures aren’t popular because we are stupid. They are popular because we are emotional. And when it comes to children, the average person is automatically and naturally protective. It’s frightening to think that there are threats to children that don’t have easy solutions.

It’s frightening to think that multinational billion-dollar companies have created sophisticated algorithms to hold our attention and to trap us in information bubbles— and that our children were born into these bubbles and have essentially no context to help them find their own ways out.

It’s frightening to know that adults— including, yes, some school employees— are harming children and exploiting their vulnerabilities.

But, like most problems in life, solutions that trade research and good faith efforts for political talking points won’t address the realities that inspire these fears.

I won’t pretend to know exactly how we do protect children, but I think we can at least start with what research and logic tell us.

Unfortunately, one thing the research seems to be telling us is that we need to know more about how to prevent CSA. According to the the CDC,

Until recently, there have been few effective evidence-based strategies available to proactively protect children from child sexual abuse. More resources are needed to develop, evaluate, disseminate, and implement evidence-based child sexual abuse primary prevention strategies.

One of the evidence-based strategies CDC does highlight, however, is an effort to “Shift in perceived responsibility for children—from personal to shared responsibility”. This includes changes in our societal understanding of our responsibility towards children to one where instead of looking away from CSA or other harms towards children, we get involved.

This general concept seems supported by a recent study focusing on statewide efforts in Pennsylvania which resulted in a measurable decrease in reports of CSA. The interventions studied included “(1) exposing 5% of the adult population (approximately 72 000) to online and in-person trainings with an accompanying countywide media campaign, (2) delivering a psychoeducation program to 100% of second-grade students (approximately 17 000), and (3) providing parent training to 100% of parents served by the child welfare system (approximately 300).”

Obviously, these interventions were community-level actions, including education and adult training, and could not be achieved by a strict “parental rights” approach.

Unfortunately, the explicit messaging of the “parental rights” movement, which rests on the premise that a parent should be the sole decision-maker when it comes to how children are treated and raised, is frequently at odds with what research suggets will actually prevent harm to children. This obviously becomes a problem when the parent is committing or facilitating the crimes, as is unfortunately true in a very large number of CSA cases.

One of the reasons the judge gave in denying bond for RJ May after his indictments on CSA materials charges was that evidence suggested “he has a sexual interest in children the same age as his own children” and “a sexual interest in incest”. Obviously, if the allegations against May are true, relying on May or others in his household to be the sole decision-makers in protecting May’s young children would be a mistake.

May has not been convicted of these crimes, and there is at this time no publicly available evidence that he has harmed his own children, but if he is guilty of these crimes, it raises the question of who may have known, and what they may have done or not done. It seems likely that at least some of the people in May’s orbit believe in an expansive view of “parental rights” that would make them less likely to investigate or question his actions.

Do the social pressure to stay in our own lanes—or the more explicit pressure lawmakers like May, himself, and groups like Moms for Liberty and the Freedom Caucus, place on educators to respect “parental rights”— discourage the people often best-placed to offer help to kids from intervening or reporting suspicions or knowledge of CSA or other crimes against children?

I think we are generally too slow to act, out of a cultural prejudice that tells us that children are the property of their parents, that our responsibility to children is limited to what their parents say it is. It’s a very difficult and complex issue to balance what parents, especially those acting in good faith, believe is best for children, and what the other people in a child’s life believe is best for them.

Often we opt out of this tension for understandable reasons, but sometimes we do so at the cost of preventing crimes against children that can have extreme and lifelong negative impacts. This is a conversation we need to find a way to have as a country and in our local communities, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.

Any view of “parental rights” that gives parents the sole deciding power over whether to protect children from harm seems flawed on its face. Presumably, that’s why SC Governor Henry McMaster called on South Carolinians and Americans to “be on the lookout” for the very kinds of crimes of which Representative May has been accused, rather than simply calling on parents to protect their individual children.

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