The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Isn't Finished ...We Need to Address Child Radicalization
UDHR 31 must protect humanity's most vulnerable population: children
“No child or youth is to be subject to perversion of childhood that destroys the inherent dignity of a child. A child’s curiosity and wonder for the world is to be protected against all psychologically and physically violent environments that crush an innate desire to explore the world free from influence. Any manipulation that distorts the child’s independent perspective of reality until they have reached biological maturity may be viewed as an abomination of the natural order and a threat to mankind.”
— UDHR 31 drafted by Shireen Qudosi
America’s historic strides in social justice evolved over the last century to include greater freedoms for individuals against oppression across a broader spectrum of society. However, these waves in human evolution have left behind a vulnerable population group: children.
According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, over the last 40 years U.S. extremist movements have shifted between ideologies every decade across what can be coined as the war of extremes. However, the last decade witnessed a convergence of extremist movements with increased inclination toward violence and lethality. In other words, not only are more extremist ideologies being added to the fold, but they’re now gaining prominence in step with one another while becoming increasingly violent. What the study doesn’t include is the fact that children are a new source of supply for extremists. Through both design and circumstance, more children are being pulled into the radicalization process than ever before in human history.
This week, members of Congress have the opportunity to take action in a bi-partisan initiative that helps protect all children in their district against the threat of radicalization. By bringing Clarion Project’s Preventing Violent Extremism Training Program to their districts as a resource for educators, families, social workers, law enforcement, and other community leaders that serve as points of influence in a child’s life, Congress can work to build a wall against child radicalization and a bridge toward the restoration of human potential each child carries as a seed to be nurtured. Locally led initiatives, such as the one currently being developed in Richmond Hill, Georgia, serve as the natural next chapter in the story of human rights in American history.
In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that in part stemmed from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s visionary Four Freedoms Speech. The speech, which outlined freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear became the foundation for the preamble declaring universal human rights:
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world, Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights, have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”
Undoubtedly, these are powerful words that summon the collective potential of a world of people in service to humanity. However, the message is incomplete.
In the 21st century — given the weaponization of children as extremists and chaos agents — it’s imperative we include a new article. Article 31 of the Declaration of Human Rights should read along the lines of:
No child or youth is to be subject to perversion of childhood that destroys the inherent dignity of a child. A child’s curiosity and wonder for the world is to be protected against all psychologically and physically violent environments that crush an innate desire to explore the world free from influence. Any manipulation that distorts the child’s independent perspective of reality until they have reached biological maturity may be viewed as an abomination of the natural order and a threat to mankind. [UDHR 31 | Drafted by Shireen Qudosi]
As a mother and as a reformer, I see no greater threat to humanity’s potential for peace and prosperity than the perversion of childhood. As I write this, my own small child is off enjoying the summer holiday. He spends his time daydreaming and building a rich imaginary world that he immerses himself in for hours at a time. Elsewhere in the world, children are not so fortunate.
Summer camps and festivals in Gaza are teaching children as young as five how to stab Jews. Move your finger a few inches on the map and there ideological fanatics are exploiting a child’s unconditional ability to love (and their need to be loved) by creating dangerous levels of co-dependency to be deployed later as child soldiers and suicide bombers. The worth of a child is not seen in their capacity for growth, but in their ability to comply as weapons of war.
A perversion of childhood is not happening in just far-flung corners of the world. It’s happening everywhere, including right here at home. In 2018, news broke about a New Mexico militant training compound that was training 11 children to be school shooters. The 12th child was killed in a ritualistic exorcism by his father who believed his disability was demonic possession. He was just three-years-old.
The question is how does this happen?
It starts with the desecration of identity. Instead of seeing a child as a brilliant little human exploring a world with absolutely no prior point of reference, driven by raw wonder and play, the child is instead seen as an extension of the self or the community. This is a bitter cruelty that snuffs a child’s voice and sense of self for the sake of an ideology slowly coded onto them.
The role of identity destabilization by creating conflict and confusion against a child’s own ability to understand the world is a well-documented radicalization strategy cited in several research papers, including the June 2018 U.S. Department of Justice paper on “How Radicalization to Terrorism Occurs in the United States.” However, we can trace the thread of radicalization beyond the point of first contact with recruiters.
Long before a child is radicalized by an outside influence, s/he is primed by his environment within the home and the community. Oppressive environments indoctrinate a child from infancy into modifying thought and behavior patterns that mirror the group versus the autonomy and expression of the individual child. Whether it’s a child in the Middle East conditioned to hate by community programming, or an American child at a dinner table conditioned by either positive or negative reinforcement to accept the dominant narrative, the abuse is the same. The abuse is a primer that fertilizes the landscape for radicalizing elements the child will face in later years through social media, extensions of their community, peer pressure, and pressure cooker politics. There is no other way to describe this process of slow-growth radicalization than to call it possession or voodoo, and a violation of natural law.
While the perversion of childhood is most extreme in cases of child soldiers for religious wars, the reality is that abuse against children in this manner is widespread and has no barrier between ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, or class. It’s not something limited to religious fanatics or unassimilated immigrant communities. It’s happening everywhere, including the politicization of childhood as seen in the U.S. and Europe right now through climate change initiatives. The end result is the same: a perversion of childhood.
Child radicalization impacts both educated and uneducated demographics, rich and poor alike. Furthermore, the method of radicalization that targets youth has in many ways become a blueprint for other ideologies, including neo-Nazis and race supremacists, especially as it impacts a youth population in school settings and in online portals. In the last year, my home state of California has seen as at least three instances of uncontrollable, shameless, neo-Nazi rhetoric among students despite attempts to bring in educational programming after the fact.
Popular memes lament “the Nazis are back,” pointing to the difficult to reconcile truth that sinister ideologies never went away; they just went underground. Yet it’s not just Nazi supremacists who pose a threat to youth populations. Generation Z, for example, is most vulnerable to both Antifa and ISIS, in part due to the way that this demographic consumes new media. In other areas, ISIS recruitment tactics are no different than the recruitment tactics of inner city gangs by first making youth feel like they belong before subjecting them through a funnel of initiation tactics.
At the same time, while communities are working to unpack how radicalization targets children, we also have to inoculate the next generation against vulnerability to extremism, especially as peer bullying and tech consumption now occurs at younger ages than in generation prior. We have to nurture resilience against radicalization as a means of nurturing human dignity, and also as a means of wage peace without weaponizing children. We do this by protecting the raw power of human imagination and expression in the most untainted population: children.
