When Age Is Just a Number

The House is now contemplating a child-soldier bill, which has already passed in the Senate. Like the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the legislation deems young soldiers under 18 as fundamentally different from adults, and one provision would seek to prosecute anyone involved in the "recruitment or training" of juveniles under the age of 15. Nobody disputes that Omar Khadr was radicalized by his father as early as age 11, when he was trotted around Afghanistan to meet with Al Qaeda big shots, so how can it be that Khadr is both the "victim" of recruitment and training and also a full-fledged, culpable adult? Like the Texas Child Protective Services system, the child-soldier bill assumes that children are enormously susceptible to brainwashing—so much so that their own decisions, even the choice to take up arms, are not free and autonomous. Like the youngsters at the Yearning for Zion ranch, Khadr is thus a child by one legal model and an adult by a second.

So which one is it? Are these teens innocent teenage victims or incorrigible demons? Are they grown-ups with slightly less facial hair? Or the lapdogs of adults who brainwash them?

One way to reconcile the confused decisions about the Texas polygamists and Omar Khadr is to recognize that the legal system operates in broad caricatures when it comes to children, manifesting disproportionate fear of violent kids as wholly out of control while treating all victims as though they are incapable of protecting themselves. Maybe all this legal confusion is a function of the dual nature of American teenagers, who invariably seem too old and too young for their own good. Or maybe it just reflects our own larger uncertainty about whether to believe too broadly that teens are perfect and pure—or dangerous, unguided missiles.

© 2008