The Adultification Of Children of Colour
There’s therapy in being honest with yourself. Honesty opens the door to self-reflection and evaluation and will lead to self-improvement.
I won’t be vomiting too many words of the anger; at the trauma and the emotion overspill, I felt at what Child Q endured, in what was supposed to be a safe environment, her school. A child. A fifteen-year-old child. A black child. I will reiterate the fact that if it were a 15-year-old white child that had endured this treatment, the uproar would be greater across all media.
Safeguarding went out of the window. What is the back story? As a writer, I like to understand backstories because it shines a light on your current behaviour.
What biases consume the minds of these teachers who felt they needed police intervention for a 15-year-old school girl suspected of smelling of marijuana? What about calling her parents?
What possessed these Metropolitan female police officers to carry out such a degrading and inhumane act on a child? Did they not see the child? The 15-year-old teenager may have displayed the attitude of a teen, which would have been taken as teenage behaviour, had her skin colour being white.
The adultification of black children is the norm for institutions globally, but let me speak for the UK, for London, a multi-cultural hub, a melting pot of humans, who all have their own BAME (Black and Asian Minority Ethnic) issues, that have been lumped together for the comfort of white society.
You would think after the murder of George Floyd that the white populous would understand that black people bleed. That if you cut us, we will bleed just like a white person. Yet black people continue to be treated like sub-humans by the white privileged, who are happy and comfortable with violence and abuse against black and brown people.
White fragility cannot digest honesty as a therapy. White fragility is fragile and likes nothing to disturb their narrative to their own perception of themselves.
Let me get controversial now in trying to explain adultification that is rolled out on BAME children. Shemima Begum, one of the jihadi brides who left London to marry a terrorist, gave birth to three babies, all dying in her arms. I do not condone what she did, in fact, I strongly condemn her actions and feel there should be some kind of payback from her. And now she wants to come back to the UK but Priti Patel under her boss, Boris Johnson won’t allow this. ‘She knew exactly what she was doing,’ is the outcry from many who want to see her stripped of her British Nationality.
And of course, she knew everything at fifteen. What fifteen-year-old don’t know everything in their ‘teen-delusion’ of grandeur view? Think back to when you were fifteen. Didn’t you know everything? Me? I Did. My parents didn’t know as much as I did. And I was smarter than my teachers and every adult I knew. At fifteen years old I was still believing only old people died until my sister’s 19-month-old Godson died. Then I was thrown into confusion. Bottom line, at fifteen you think you know it all, but in fact, you know jack-shit. Shemima Begum isn’t being judged as a fifteen-year-old child, she’s a fifteen-year-old adult who knew exactly what she was doing.
Child Q wasn’t looked at as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. Through the eyes of the police and the teachers, she was an adult. A black adult who is deemed sub-human, and that treatment is the norm. A review found teachers had “insufficient focus on the safeguarding needs of Child Q” by allowing the police strip-search. In a quote from Lee Jasper, Child Q accused by her teachers of ‘smelling like marijuana’ was subjected to treatment reserved for international drug couriers. In short, she was handled as if she were a bona fide member of Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel.
We have learnt that the two female police officers, who carried out the strip search have been placed on desk duty till the IOPC investigation is carried out. This is not good enough. They should have been sacked. After this debacle, the teachers and the supporting headteacher should all be sacked with immediate effect.
When it comes to justice for black people there always seems to be a lack of urgency. So, let’s keep putting on the pressure and keep this story at the forefront of the news and people’s minds.
Nearly 90% of those convicted of wider child abuse offences and on the sex offenders register are white men.
When the most traces of cocaine are found in the corridors and toilets in Westminster, in Parliament, why aren’t the police there carrying out searches? The same kind of searches and body searches they do on young black boys and girls, who fit the description of gang members, drug selling, weapon welding gangsters.
Most paedophiles are white males between 15–70. Why are they not randomly stopped and their laptops searched for evidence of inappropriate child sexual abuse images?
Black boys, known to have an affinity to gangs, are randomly stopped and searched for knives. And as Naz Shah MP wrote on 12th August 2017, “Yes Pakistani men are disproportionately involved in grooming gangs and this particular model of abuse. And no that is not a racist statement. Neither is it racist to say that when it comes to wider child abuse nearly 90 per cent of those convicted and on the sex offenders register are white men.”
The government told us that it doesn’t routinely publish information on the ethnicity of people convicted of wider sexual offences. What is available suggests that the majority of offenders are white.
In the overall population of England and Wales 86% of people were white in 2011 (at the last census), 8% of the population was of Asian ethnicity, and 3% was black. Of course, this will vary from place to place around the country.
My point? All the institutions need a shake-up. They all put black and brown people at the bottom of everything. The justice system metes out the most draconian sentences to black people, compared to their white counterparts who commit the same crime. The schools stereotype our children, re-enforcing the school to prison pipeline. The NHS neglect of black and brown people’s medical issues is well known and well documented. The racism that strolls unhindered in the workforce is often unchallenged because black people are aware of what they are up against, and they need to feed their families. What we experience as people of colour fully exposes the deep-rooted racism and white supremacy that exist in the west.
