#Debate: Is What We Call Childhood Really a Fixed Idea?

Many scholars believe the childhood we know today is a fairly recent invention — and that it is changing again.

#debate is a new column from QDaily, for interesting and contested questions. We know we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.

Two recent cases have revived the argument in China over crimes committed by children. On September 19, the People's Procuratorate of Lushan County, Henan Province, said on Weibo that a case in which a second-year junior high school student raped a 17-year-old girl had been settled through mediation by a prosecutor, with both sides signing a settlement agreement. Less than a month later, the official Weibo account of the Chengdu Evening News mistakenly ran a six-year-old case as news: a 13-year-old girl had dismembered a classmate. The line explaining that she was "not held criminally liable under the law because she was under 14" set off the argument again.

Public anger pointed at one question: could an act that brutal go unpunished simply because the girl was younger than 14, the age at which the Criminal Law says a person becomes criminally responsible?

Countries everywhere have run into the same problem. In 2009, 11-year-old Jordan Brown shot and killed his father's fiancée in the United States. In 2007, an eight-year-old boy in India killed three infants. In 1997, a 14-year-old boy known by the code name "Boy A" killed a 10-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy in Japan. In 1993, two boys in Britain abducted and murdered a two-year-old — the notorious James Bulger murder.

Each case caused an uproar at the time. People were shocked that children, held to be the purest and most innocent of beings, could commit crimes so appalling. Tony Blair, then Britain's shadow home secretary, said of the Bulger murder: "This case is so horrific that it has provoked both anger and disbelief in people."

It overturned the British understanding of childhood. In the 17th century the English philosopher John Locke argued that a person is born a blank slate, to be written on however experience dictates — a hint that children are innocent and pure. But in the years after the Bulger murder, every British call to raise the age of criminal responsibility has been answered by pointing back to that case, now 25 years old.

Sparing children from criminal punishment is in fact a recent idea. In Britain, before 1800, a child who broke the law was treated no differently from an adult: prison, and even execution. Only after 1800 do you find children sentenced to death but not put to death. In 1847 a law was passed setting up courts for offenders under 14. Not until 1854, when reformatory schools for young offenders appeared, did children become, in the eyes of the law, a group entirely separate from adults.

What had shifted in the social mind during that period — progress, or regression?

One forceful argument holds that adolescence and childhood are inventions of modern society, not stages a person actually has to pass through.

The first to make this case, and to make the public notice it, was the French historian Philippe Ariès. In Centuries of Childhood, published in English in 1962, he wrote: "Until the twelfth century, medieval art never depicted childhood or tried to capture it. It is hard to believe this neglect was due to a painter's incompetence at drawing children; it is more likely that there was no place for childhood in the medieval world."

Working through a range of historical sources, Ariès concluded that the Middle Ages lacked any sense that childhood had a nature of its own. To people of that time, once a child no longer needed a mother or a nurse watching over him every hour, he already belonged to the world of adults.

If Ariès showed in time that the childhood we understand is a recent idea, early anthropologists suggested that in space it may be no more than a Western one. Bronisław Malinowski, working in the islands of Papua New Guinea, found that children there folded sex into their games as a matter of course, and adults did not object. Around the world, different societies set different ages at which children and adolescents may marry or work, which also supports the idea that a society's own structure does much to determine how its people understand childhood.

Since then scholars have studied the relationship between society and childhood and produced many competing theories. The media scholar Neil Postman stressed what media did. In The Disappearance of Childhood he wrote: "Because of the emergence of printing and a literate culture, a new communication environment took shape in the sixteenth century. Print created a new definition of adulthood — an adult is someone who can read; and correspondingly a new definition of childhood — a child is someone who cannot."

Ariès stressed instead that people discovered the emotional value of children. That value began with the mother: caring for a child, she would feel a natural fellow feeling, and take happiness and pleasure from it. Children became a source of comfort for adults. At the same time, churchmen and moralists in the 16th and 17th centuries began to change their view of children, seeing them as fragile creations of God who therefore had to be cared for and educated properly. Those two feelings together created the idea of the child, and slowly made children the center of the family.

Sociologists such as Viviana Zelizer looked instead at economics. After studying how American society changed between the 1870s and the 1930s, she argued that in the 19th century a child's worth was economic — labor that brought income into the household. Only later, as that economic worth to the family faded, did children gradually become the objects on which people spent their love and care.

These explanations — emotional, media, economic — help make sense of the positions people take today on the age of criminal responsibility.

Take Postman's media theory. The line separating children, adolescents and adults is cognitive ability. The natural inference is that anyone whose cognition is fully formed should carry the same criminal responsibility as an adult. Many of the comments on the cases above — "She's 13, how could she not know what she did was wrong?" — rest on exactly that view. It also seems to match Postman's own.

Once television arrived, people no longer had to work at learning in order to grasp what the media were saying. "People watch television, they do not read television, nor do they listen to it. It makes no difference whether they are adults or children, intellectuals or laborers, fools or the wise... The information television conveys comes in a form that requires no sorting of who may have access to it, which means television programs need not be sorted into 'children's' and 'adult' categories."

On crimes by children, Postman laid out a run of figures showing that the share of crime committed by American adolescents kept rising, and noted how many US states had found ways to bring adolescents who would once have been exempt from criminal liability into legal proceedings.

But take Ariès's account as your way of understanding childhood and you lean the other way. As long as children are still, on the whole, regarded as a group deserving tenderness and forbearance, a clear line remains between childhood and adulthood — and that line can serve as the basis for setting an age of criminal responsibility.

Postman's theory and Ariès's lead to two conflicting readings of the age of criminal responsibility, which suggests that the idea of childhood people now accept is blurred at its edges and does not hold up well as a practical standard. As Postman himself put it, people are waiting for some philosophy to appear that will make the disappearance of childhood look reasonable. That is, they are searching urgently for a new way to understand childhood, and for the moral meaning behind it.

If we turn to science, the most promising place at present looks to be child psychology. The pioneer of the field was Jean Piaget. Through a series of works from the 1920s onward, Piaget argued that a child's cognitive development comes in stages tied to age: children cannot think with mental symbols until after two, and cannot handle abstract logical operations until after 11.

In 1932 Piaget published The Moral Judgment of the Child. That book, and Lawrence Kohlberg's Essays on Moral Development, which grew out of it, became the foundation of theories of moral development in children. Kohlberg divided moral development into six stages across three levels, and insisted that a person's moral development rises steadily.

Kohlberg's theory drew hard criticism. Its best-known critic, Carol Gilligan, argued that he had already adopted a particular moral standpoint when he designed his experiments, and had built his stages on it — a frame that leaves out whole parts of morality, such as care between people, and so cannot measure how children develop morally.

Still, Piaget and Kohlberg gave later work a foundation, and empirical research since has borne out part of what they said, above all their central claim: how a child's moral ideas develop correlates fairly systematically with age. In 1983 four psychologists, Kohlberg among them, published a paper following the moral development of 58 children over 20 years. It confirmed that moral level rises with age, but reached no clear conclusion about the age at which a child becomes morally mature.

The findings of child psychology seem to lead straight to a test for criminal responsibility; the intuitive thought is that once a person can perceive right and wrong, he has reached the point of answering for what he does. But they also make a legal age of criminal responsibility harder to fix, because the same research shows that people reach moral maturity at different ages.

Research on children's moral development in recent years has also paid more attention to cultural and social differences. Indians, for example, are more likely than Americans to treat caring for others as a moral duty rather than a personal choice. In Finland, religious young people are likelier to see many social customs as moral requirements rather than as norms particular to one society. Again this shows that a child's moral ideas form in step with the surrounding society, and that child psychology cannot tell us when children ought to answer for their own actions.

If the understanding of childhood Postman described cannot rest on a universal scientific standard, then perhaps people will have to accept that setting the age of criminal responsibility will be like other social questions: a battleground for competing views, its outcome the product of bargaining and compromise. And that in turn will depend on a society's structure, its political system, its cultural traditions and, most practically, the actual state of juvenile crime.

In the United States, several states, including New York and North Carolina, have passed laws in recent years raising the age of criminal responsibility. The forces behind them include new neuroscience showing that the human brain does not fully develop until 25, evidence that young offenders given lighter sentences are less likely to offend again, and the fact that handling juvenile cases in juvenile courts saves administrative money.

South Korean government agencies, by contrast, proposed this September to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 14 to 13. Juvenile crime there has risen in recent years, and several cases have caused a sensation. A 2017 Yonhap News Agency survey found that more than 90% of the public supported revising or abolishing the Juvenile Act. That is probably the main reason South Korea is trying to change the age.

In China, many people in the legal profession have cited a string of violent juvenile cases in recent years to demand that the age be lowered. Official data, however, show no marked rise in juvenile crime overall. Chinese culture also has a tradition of indulgence toward children, and parents often excuse a child's mistakes by saying "he's still young, he doesn't understand" — which sits badly with the widespread belief that children now take in vast amounts of information through the internet and grow up early.

On juvenile crime and the age of criminal responsibility, China is nowhere near a consensus.

Cover image from Douban