Defending My Individual Rights

Honorable Mention Winner, Teen Category

By Alberto Mingardi (age 17)
[email protected]

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

         In my opinion, it's impossible to express the essential rights of young people apart from this fact: for the Italian State (I live in Italy), until 14 years old a person is mentally incapable, so absolutely subjected to an authority qualified for deciding for him, as the family or a teacher or maybe a coach that he is totally responsible for his small team.
         This thing, from a particular point of view, may be "right", from another I think it's "wrong".
         In order to show why, I'll cite an actual instance mentioned too by David Friedman in his book, The Machinery of Freedom. It isn't a legend. It's history.
         During the 60s, a 12-year-old child ran away from home. The police found him again after some months; at that time, he was dressed up, he lived on his own salary, he was well-liked by his neighbours.
         The police carried him home by force. Now that boy is in a mental hospital.
         Usually, where the people think of an episode in which the youth's rights are ridden roughshod over, the people move away with the mind: the hard work in the mines, the sexual tourism in Latin America or in South-Eastern Asia. What does it unite those episodes with the first I've cited?
         It's simply, in both the cases, the boys aren't free (really because he is "mentally incapable"), in the first case he is enslaved, in the second he isn't free to choose where and how to grow up.
         Then, of course the boys that are able to live alone at 12 years old are a very few number. Their life isn't certainly nice, sure it is rough, it's harder than the life a child who lives with his parents and has their moral and economic support.
         Nevertheless, I believe that when a boy runs away from home and he doesn't return after a few days, then he hasn't done it for whim, there's behind a real malaise we can't answer it simply to return the child to two characters he doesn't want and they perhaps don't want him.
         Another story David Friedman cites is this: in the U.S.A., a girl asked for being in the custody of her aunt. Her parents were still living. Well off, the girl has reached the choice when the aunt has reproved her bad manners. Her parents very probably haven't ever reproved her before.
         Here another essential right is!
         The right to have an education based on moral values. It seems discounted to the people as me have had it, but really it is granted -- the right to study is fundamental too, it has to have at anyone's disposal, but at condition it hasn't become a simple and barren construct.
         Another decisive factor is juvenile work: if it's exploitation, it's of course "wrong", it goes against the rights.
         Nevertheless the juvenile work has been in Italy too a resource of the peasant culture, in which it wasn't exploitation but a system to teach the sons, starting since they're very young, usually as a game, a job.
         This kind of work isn't to criminalize as some often do, at condition that it doesn't clash with our freedom to choose.
         To study, to have a moral education, to be free: also to work?
         Can we speak about a right to work for young people?
         In my opinion, we can, at least since a minimum age as long as it doesn't become an imposition and a duty.
         I think there's another right, that I've deliberately left as the last: the right to love.
         Now all people speak a lot about pedophilia, but in my opinion we have to examine our conscience about the fact a youngs' sexuality exists or doesn't. At 14 years old (when for the Italian state I was too "mentally incapable"), in my opinion but as the facts teach, it exists of course.
         I can't believe all the girls pregnant at that age were ravished. A part, of course, but not all.
         Right to love for young people I think means at first the right to have parents who love sons, but the right to discover, according to one's own will and ripeness the sex and the Love with capital "L", one's own to be man or woman.
         The pedophilia kills that right, but it isn't right to say that youngs' sexuality doesn't exist gives the problem's solution. Our days' problem is that these rights are everyday trod on, in our civil, Western homes too: children's exploitation, pedophilia are terrible things, but it's terrible too to create a myth of innocence, that is only an absurd request of "authority".
         My generation needs "authority", but moral authority. And the (often invoked) state's cudgel can't help us in this situation.

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