Who’s afraid of the big bad politically organised youth?

On 5 April 2024, thousands of school children and supporters across the country took to the street to march for climate justice, a free Palestine and te Tiriti. The students spoke with moral clarity, issuing a wero to the adults who are ‘not doing their job'. Rangatahi can see we’re hurtling towards planetary extinction and no one in the halls of power is doing anything about it. Lacking a proper democratic voice, taking to the street is one of the most effective ways rangatahi can exercise their political agency. The action of the youth in turn inspires us adults - one woman commenting “"I think that when people see how passionate the young people are, and us oldies, they will think, maybe there's something to this."

Rangatahi protesting for political change and their rights is not a new phenomenon. Across history, young people and children, traditionally excluded from institutional politics, are often the vanguard of political movements. In 1908, 100,000 child miners marched from the coal mines of Pennsylvania to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C to call for better working rights. Young people were critical actors in anti-apartheid and civil rights movements in the mid century from Soweto to Alabama, many losing their lives in the struggle for justice. In Aotearoa, the Progressive Youth Movement organised radical protests against the Vietnam War for years. Rangatahi played a vital role in Ngā Tamatoa and He Taua, organising for social and economic justice and political self determination for Māori around te Tiriti. Young people made up a large part of the Polynesian Panthers, who, amongst a climate where fanau were vulnerable to dawn raids and police repression, both fought back and built alternative means of community support.

*School Children in the Soweto Uprising, which ended with the tragic massacre of children by the apartheid South African Armed Police*

This century, protests during the Arab Spring were often led and organised by students and young people. Online, young people have been crucial for countering the spread of Zionist misinformation on Tik Tok. They've been so effective that the USA has floated a ban on the app. Palestinian Youth Aotearoa has been working tirelessly for six months organising protests and events to support ending the genocide in Gaza. And, of course, the student climate justice movement has been global. To many, it represents the renewed vigour amongst young people to push for political change.

But, on 5 April 2024, New Zealand media’s headlines weren’t about the striking students carrying on the proud and inspiring tradition of rangatahi exercising their political power. Instead, they quoted confused pundits and politicians who seemed unable to grasp the idea that children and young people care about the world around them.

According to thirty six year old radio host Lloyd Burr “It's not even a climate strike; there's Palestine thrown in there [and] there's the honour the Treaty Bill thrown in there as well.” Burr concluded that “children taking part in the School Strike 4 Climate appear to be confused about what they stand for.” The ACT Party twitter account made or retweeted over nine posts about the striking rangatahi. They labeled the strike as “sinister,” questioned whether the children were being scared witless by capricious adults, and retweeted a reporter who claimed the youth were “brainwashed.” Commenters echoed this rhetoric in the replies and argued that the kids were “indoctrinated” by activists stoking “unfounded fear in vulnerable children.” Five days after the protest, David Seymour, 40, took to the New Zealand Herald to pen an op-ed where he wrote “the strike was bad for attendance as well as mental health.”

This fear mongering didn’t translate to the ground level. Kotahitanga united the protest - School Strike 4 Climate recognised there can be no climate justice without indigenous justice - that the liberation of Palestine and te Tiriti o Waitangi are intertwined with the health of our planet. Students made chants up on the fly: “Tahi rua toru wha; Seymour is a hōhā”. It seemed like no one had informed the strikers they were meant to be scared and confused.

*Clearly terrified students, Credit to Star News*

However, much like the tradition of youth protest, the tradition of politicians and pundits whipping up moral panic around poor impressionable rangatahi being indoctrinated into adult’s radical agendas, isn’t limited to the School Strike 4 Climate protests. During the early red scare era following the Bolshevik revolution, teachers were targeted and loyalty tested, for fear they might “subvert” their students. Young people protesting the Vietnam war were similarly thought to be indoctrinated by the communists. Currently, pro-Palestinian young people are cast in national news as “weighing into a complex topic they have no capacity to understand.” Even after students at Parkland, Florida’s Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, experienced a school shooting that saw the deaths of 17 of their peers, their organised response against gun violence faced claims of coaching. Adults could not believe that the students could have possibly come up with ideas and demands themselves.

Those who stand for trans rights may see the echoes of eerily similar rhetoric - however, instead of undermining the ability of rangatahi to organise, this flavour undermines the right of young people to consent to their own medical care. In the U.S.A, right-wingers falsely claim they’re “protecting vulnerable children from abuse” to drive bans on trans health care. In the United Kingdom, the recently released “Cass Report '' argued that even 17 - 25 year olds shouldn’t be allowed to access clinics for gender care because young peoples brains are still developing until then. The U.K. Labour party considered this report was essential “to put children’s health and wellbeing above the political fray”. This political trend is facing a renewed push for those under sixteen here in Aotearoa.

Brian Tamaki’s comments that we must stop the “Trans-Rainbow Evil Stealing our Children” bleed through to Rishi Sunak’s claims that “we care above all about the wellbeing of children and it's clear that these things [social or medical transition] are not neutral acts.” Both are ultimately advocating control - a control required because young people couldn’t possibly understand their own gender and bodies.

Much the same as how young people can’t really care about the climate or form an opinion on a genocide or gun control reform, young people couldn’t possibly want to transition on their own terms as an exercise in bodily autonomy.

On one hand, this continued diminishment of young people’s agency is because of the social space children occupy. Across the West, children are seen as inhabiting a protected sphere, existing within the control of families and school, free of responsibilities and work. Childhood is cast as a blissful time of innocence. Young people certainly aren’t seen as political actors able to insist upon their rights. Correspondingly, their scope of legitimate political engagement and expression is limited. Therefore, despite often being on the forefront of social problems, young people are treated as less than full citizens. In this way, young people who demand to exercise their political agency are threatening the established order. Children are supposed to be dependent and irrational. Stop telling adults what to do.

However, this is not the full picture. The same people who worry about children being led horribly astray by a cabal of adults with a woke trans green agenda seem more than happy to assign adult responsibility to certain children: those that have committed crimes. For these children, the ACT Party says “if you can do the crime, you can cop the punishment.” Young people who offend, who tend to be poor, brown and come from the most horrifically deprived circumstances, are treated as tiny adults.

In many ways this reflects the fact that ultra-marginalised rangatahi who are willing to act outside of social norms are the biggest threat to the maxim that children should be seen and not heard. The underlying demand of youth offending is that if they and their whānau are not treated with dignity, they will not bother participating in society on its terms. Stripping them of their rights, taking them from their whānau, and sending them to prison removes their political agency. They can’t go on a strike. They can’t participate politically in their communities. They are defanged.

But despite their imprisonment, young people will still take action to be heard. In 2022, six rangatahi aged 17 to 19 at Hawke’s Bay Regional Prison rioted then gathered on the roof in what justice advocates saw as a “cry for help”. The reason given for the riot was that these rangatahi were denied access to the sports area.

*The teenagers who escaped the Hawkes Bay Youth Unit and climbed on the roof of the facility*

In 2023, a further group of young people climbed onto the roof of Korowai Manaaki facility in Wiri. Korowai Manaaki, despite the name, is a youth justice facility. This was one week after another group of youth climbed onto the roof at Te Puna Wai ō Tuhinapo, another justice facility, in Christchurch. They were able to be negotiated down by promises of KFC.

Some saw the rangatahi’s requests for KFC and sports access as trivial matters. But rangatahi see it as reflective of the ultimate denial of their agency. For rangatahi to protest for over 40 hours in the cold to end by accepting fried chicken is reflective of their desperation to be heard and treated as people. If middle class school students are ignored and undermined, the rangatahi imprisoned in these facilities are doubly so. This need to listen is underscored by the fact that around the same time as the Oranga Tamariki standoffs, it was revealed that youth justice staff at Korowai Manaaki were arranging and filming fights between teenagers.

The idea that the right thinks a child is mature enough to be sent to a youth prison but not to consent to medical treatment or join a protest march looks like simple hypocrisy. But when scratched, this posturing gives way to something more sinister. The neoconservative right wing don’t care about young people’s wellbeing. They do, however, care about their eventual political power.

As history shows us that when the youth are organised, they are powerful. And young people skew left. The ACT Party and the neoconservative right are already worried about what happens when children and young people are able to vote. As the party infamously said on the Electoral Commission’s recommendation to lower the voting age:

Combine voting at 16 with civics delivered by left-wing teacher unionists and you’ve got a recipe for cultural revolution, pitting indoctrinated socialist youth against the parents and taxpayers who pay their bills.

If they’re worried about voting, they are even more worried about young people politically organising.

The right doesn’t just belittle young people as a lazy political gotcha. They do so because they’re scared. They’re scared of politically organised and engaged young people who see their participation in the world extending beyond school into politics. They’re scared of confronting young people whose communities they have thoroughly dehumanised. It’s far easier for them to belittle rangatahi’s very real concerns than to take them as serious political actors who are exercising their agency.

*Students from Aorere College perform a haka at Ihumatao, credit Radio New Zealand*

*Tamariki putting up a sign at Ihumātao, credit NZ Herald*

Rangatahi deserve more than to be used as political pawns. Adults have been doing a lot of talking. It’s time we listen.

Lucy Birds is a Marxist feminist based in Tāmaki Makaurau who hates it when people enjoy things

Hey! David! Leave those kids alone