PoliticalDUAL-USE

Think of the Children

What it is

Invoking the protection of children to win support for a measure or to shut down objection to it, so that the appeal to the child stands in for the case that the measure actually protects anyone.

How it works

The appeal works because concern for children is among the most widely shared moral intuitions and among the least negotiable: opposing a measure "for the children" reads as indifference to children, which is why the phrase functions as a conversation-ending device. Best (1990) traced how claims-makers construct "threatened children" — the missing child, the abused child, the exploited child — with statistics that are often inflated and typologies that lump rare stranger abductions together with common family disputes. Jenkins (1998) showed how conceptions of the child molester have cycled with broader social anxieties. The technique has three moves: a real harm to some children is established; a proposed measure is attached to the harm without evidence that it addresses it; and skeptics of the measure are recast as opponents of children. Because the appeal is deployed by every political tendency — for censorship, for gun control, for immigration restriction, for school policy — it is better understood as a structure than as a cause. The tell is the missing link between the harm and the measure, and the speed with which opposition becomes an accusation.

Real-world examples

  • •The 1985 Senate hearings on rock lyrics organized by the Parents Music Resource Center, whose founders included Tipper Gore and Susan Baker — the wives of a Democratic senator and a Republican Treasury secretary — produced the "Parental Advisory" label.
  • •The Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 were passed to shield minors from online material and struck down (Reno v. ACLU, 1997; Ashcroft v. ACLU, 2004) as overbroad restrictions on adult speech.
  • •Encryption debates since the 1990s have leaned on child-safety framing — cypherpunk Timothy May named the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse" (terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, money launderers) as the standard justifications — and the EARN IT Act (introduced 2020) and Britain's Online Safety Act (2023) were argued largely on that ground.
  • •After the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, gun-control advocates campaigned under the protection of children; campaigns against "critical race theory" and school-library books in 2021–2023 used the same appeal from the other direction. In each case the question a listener needed answered was whether the specific measure would protect the specific children named.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

It is legitimate to argue for a measure on the ground that it protects children when the harm is documented and the measure is shown to reduce it; the line is crossed when the child is invoked to substitute for that showing, or to make questioning the measure look like indifference to children.

  • ●Children's welfare is a legitimate and often decisive consideration; invoking it is honest when the harm is real, measured, and the measure plausibly reduces it.
  • ●Using children to foreclose scrutiny of a measure — casting doubters as enemies of children — is manipulation regardless of the measure's merits.
  • ●Statistics about threats to children (missing-child counts, online-predator numbers) must be reported with their definitions; conflating runaways and custody disputes with stranger abductions is the classic inflation.

How to defend against it

  • ►Ask the linking question out loud — "How does this measure reduce that harm to those children, and what is the evidence?" — and refuse to accept the emotional stakes as the answer.
  • ►Check the definitions behind the numbers: Best showed that "missing children" figures mixed categories whose risks differed by orders of magnitude.
  • ►Notice the role reversal — when your question about a policy is answered with a question about your feelings toward children, the device is running.
  • ►Look for who else benefits: measures sold on child safety often expand surveillance, licensing, or content control that applies to everyone.

References

  1. Best, J. (1990). Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims. University of Chicago Press
    How claims-makers construct child-victim statistics and typologies, including the missing-children inflation.
  2. Jenkins, P. (1998). Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. Yale University Press
    The cyclical construction of child-threat figures alongside broader anxieties.
  3. U.S. Supreme Court (1997). Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844. U.S. Supreme Court
    The Communications Decency Act struck down as an overbroad restriction on adult speech despite its child-protection rationale.
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