‘Adultification of Child Q rooted in slavery’

Black academics say history must be understood in order to get justice. Leah Mahon investigates.

Demands are rising for an end to child strip-searches. Generic stock pic. (Pic: Getty)

THE ‘ADULTIFICATION’ of Child Q is just another way to describe the racist dehumanising of black children, experts say.

The term was widely used last month as the harrowing story of the black schoolgirl who was strip-searched while she was menstruating hit the news.

However, black academics say the concept of adultification needs to be understood in its’ historical context to understand what happened at the Hackney-based school, and to frame demands for institutional reform and justice.

Child Q was wrongly accused of carrying cannabis by a teacher and subjected to an intimate search by two police officers. 

SUSPICION: Jahnine Davis says attitudes that decrease the innocence of black children simultaneously increase the chances of seeing victims as somehow culpable

No other adult was present, and her mother wasn’t called. Three officers remain under investigation by the police watchdog and two others have only recently been removed from front-line duties following the public outcry.

To many who followed her ordeal, her name is only known as Child Q, who in a safeguarding review revealed that racism “was likely to have been an influencing factor” in what happened to her, and that if she had been a white child, she wouldn’t have endured what she did when taken away from her classroom.

Several areas of concern arose from the disturbing case, but what ultimately led to her experience that day two years ago was due two things: she was black and a girl.

Adultification bias is a complex discrimination that sees the identities of race and childhood collide, while ridding black children of their innocence and the necessary safeguarding treatment of them too.

The Georgetown Law Centre on Poverty and Inequality confirmed the phenomenon as recently as 2017 in a study of 300 parents. 

Researchers found that participants believed black girls, particularly those aged 5 to 14, were less innocent than white girls.

Jahnine Davis, a PhD Researcher and Co-founder of Listen Up, a charity that aims to safeguard and protect black children, says that black children are perceived as “potential perpetrators” due to this dangerous bias. 

RESPONSIBILITY

“The innate vulnerability and innocence that all children have, some children, in particular black children, are excluded from that sense of vulnerability,” she tells The Voice.

“So on one hand, we have this decrease of vulnerability, decrease of innocence, but an increase of responsibility and culpability. 

HISTORICAL: Dr Louise Owusu-Kwarteng argues that the perception of young black girls has roots in slavery

“It means that black children are more likely to be met with suspicion and to be engaged with as potential perpetrators engaged with as those we somehow need to safeguard others from rather than acknowledging that black children need to be protected and safeguarded too.”

This form of bias and what happened to Child Q needs to be looked through the “intersectional lens” that shaped her ordeal, says Davis. 

In 2018, she led research into adultification bias called, “Where Are All The Black Girls?” that steered its focus away from the often-told experiences of American girls in North America, and instead moved towards black girls growing up in the UK.

She says that although there are “commonalities,” she warned they are not all the same.

“Sometimes we may be at risk of decontextualising those experiences because we don’t necessarily have enough literature within the UK [about how adultification bias impacts black girls],” she explains.

“I’m a black woman with two black children in Hackney, the various different stereotypes which are associated with me are going to be based on gendered racism, classism and all of the other intersections, meaning that I’m more likely to be perceived as being angry, aggressive, loud, rude, fiery, innately sexual, the ‘hypersexual Jezebel,’ all of these various different things. Having the somehow super strength to be so strong that you can just withstand abuses.

OBJECTIFYING

Value is “the core theme” throughout Davis’ research, arguing that if people could understand the “importance of belonging and identity and understanding oneself” the experiences of black girls could also be understood. 

“When it comes to black girls, the value is placed within objectifying black girls,” she adds. 

“It’s this erasure of value and this constant over surveillance of them in terms of how they look, not fitting the kind of Eurocentric standard of beauty, the colorism which exists. 

EXPERIMENTATION: The Tuskegee experiment was an example of medical apartheid

“All of these things were coming out in my research in terms of how black girls are being perceived, how they’re being dealt with, how they’ve been acknowledged just as children.”

Dr. Louise Owusu-Kwarteng, an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Greenwich, told The Voice that the perception of young black girls today in school like Child Q, can be understood as far back as slavery.

Slaves were taken away and they were separated from their families and people had to grow up very, very quickly,” she explains.

“I think this is also connected to the way that black bodies were seen in the past. Scientists used to see black bodies in a particular way to justify the horrendous treatment of them. That black bodies were more developed than those of white people.”

The 19th and 20th centuries saw some of the most deadly medical experiments on black people take place across the US and Europe. 

Many patients were unwittingly used in medical studies, because their bodies and mental capacity were deemed as different or inferior. 

From 1932 to 1972, the infamous Tuskegee study saw US government researchers recruit 600 poor black men in Alabama who thought they were receiving free treatment for syphilis. 

TRIANGULATION

However, the medical study never allowed 399 of the men to receive treatment and instead they were observed until they died. 

Scores of black people were used as “guinea pigs”, suffering through experiments in some of the world’s deadliest diseases like cancer and polio. 

DEHUMANISATION: Prof Michael Mumisa says ‘adultification’ is a European attempt to understand institutional racism

Psychological experiments also tried to justify the enslavement of African people, with doctors and scientists perpetuating concepts like that they were naturally more “submissive” than white people. 

The medical phenomenon of black people being able to withstand more pain was also born out of ideologies in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, where black women and girls in particular faced near-death through experiments in pregnancy and childbirth without anaesthesia. 

Black women were only seen as just for breeding, but also you take examples like Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Bartman, where there was the fetishisation of her body, her bottom. 

“Then we have the media, and all this historical ideas and representations of black women, it all becomes commodified to almost sell a products. It’s a triangulation of what happens in the media and how this feeds into our institutions like the police today,” says Dr. Kwarteng. 

Speaking to The Voice, Michael Mumisa, a Professor of Classical Literature and Intellectual History at Cambridge University, believes that adultification bias is a recent “European attempt” to understand how institutional racism manifests in society today, but is only one part of a much more endemic problem. 

“Before adultification bias didn’t exist as a concept, we used to use the term dehumanisation. I think dehumanisation is a more accurate term, because it is someone treating another person as if they’re not human to justify how you treat them. That can be traced back to slavery, colonialisation, and it also goes back to a key part in Western civilisation,” he explains.

EXCLUDED

“There are definitely links [to what is happening today against black people], but the only problem I have is that when we try to rationalise it, we end up almost as if we are saying, it wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have eugenics. For instance, the medical experiments on black women are justified, by saying we wouldn’t have found this [medical knowledge] out otherwise. 

“Eugenics is a pseudoscience, it’s a manifestation of racism. Racism will always be there. It will manifest itself differently, eugenics did not cause racism, it was a practice in racism. 

“There are explanations for it that are moral, historical, social, political, legal…but we shouldn’t try to rationalise it.” 

​​”When racist adultification is not properly defined and critiqued, it turns what are clearly despicable racist crimes against black children into ‘mistakes’ or ‘errors’ of judgement”

Prof Michael Mumisa

He adds: “So, what happened to Child Q wasn’t caused by anything, it is an example of how racist minds and hearts behave towards black people. 

“We could end up over analysing it alot, instead of simply describing it as it is: it is an evil act against black children.”

The stories of black boys and girls in a school system stacked against them have always taken precedence.

During the academic year from 2019-20, black Caribbean girls were permanently excluded from school at twice the rate compared to white British schoolgirls.  The figure tripled for mixed white and Caribbean girls.

However, black boys remained the most likely demographic to be barred from schools with a 27% rise in the last five years, but the rates among girls had skyrocketed to 66%, according to Agenda.

The Voice previously reported on the increasing issue of schools practising “non-formal school exclusions” to advance their position on league tables that left black children disproportionately targeted.

​​Black students described being seen as “potential trouble-makers” both inside and outside of school, with black boys in particular facing unwarranted attention from the police.

Black girls were also reportedly being sent into isolation rooms for wearing coloured braids.

INTERSECTIONALITY

Ms Davis says that adultification bias affects all of our black children, but that she wants a new-found onus to be put on the experiences of black girls, who she believes have been left out of debates around black injustice.

“We live in a society, in a world where patriarchy is a core foundation. We need to understand how patriarchy can influence the ways in which whose voices and experience are amplified more than others,” she explains.

From a policy perspective, when we talk about gangs, there is an assumption automatically we’re talking about black boys. When you’re talking about child criminal exploitation, it’s an assumption it’s going to be gendered, so we’re talking about boys.

Professor Kimberley Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality, her work map in the margins outlined some of that that historically our policies on anti-racist practise have very much focused on the experiences of black men. 

“And then when it comes to the experiences of women, historically anything to do with feminism very much focused on the experiences of the white Western woman, and therefore everyone else fell in between. 

“Their voices became marginalised and therefore black girls and black women are at that kind of liminal intersectionality.”

Earlier this month, The Voice reported on the disproportionate number of black people subjected to strip searches in London, which was higher than their white counterparts. 

JUSTICE

A Freedom of Information Request revealed that 9,088 strip-searches were carried out on children, including 2,360 on children under the age of 16 between 2016 and 2021. 

However, figures were unable to show how many of these children were from African or Caribbean backgrounds. 

As questions arose on the safeguarding in place to protect black children, the Met announced the roll-out of a pilot scheme in Hackney and Tower Hamlets for officers to now seek approval from their inspector before carrying out strip-searches on children. 

Prof. Mumisa believes that a complete restructuring of laws and policies is needed, but warns that the ones in place, which have always been against black people, including children, are co-existent among deeper societal flaws.

“History shows that black children as young as 7 years old, who looked 7 years old, were lynched after ‘the correct legal procedures’ were followed.

“​​When racist adultification is not properly defined and critiqued, it turns what are clearly despicable racist crimes against black children into ‘mistakes’ or ‘errors’ of judgement.”

“Institutions, and even some black professionals, are now focused on procedural mistakes: ‘how it was done, who was present, what the school knew.’ Instead of asking whether this should be happening to Black children under any circumstances.

“In societies in which we now have more laws and ‘procedures’ designed to protect white children, adultification is the process through which we exclude black children from those laws, procedures and basic human rights.”

He adds: There’s no science behind what they did. They are not eugenics, nor pseudoscience. These were police officers. They are not medical doctors. So so there is not any other explanation for what they have done except to describe it as a sexual assault.”

Ms Davis’ work is now focusing on the safeguarding and child protection responses to “black children who experience harm outside the home.”

She hopes that her research and progress being made at Listen Up can propel change to prevent another Child Q and unearth the stories of other black children who haven’t yet found justice.

I think it’s absolutely devastating what happened to Child Q. It hurts on a personal level,” says Davis.

“I’ve been in this space [working in child protection] for 20 years because of my experiences. I’ve been a care experienced black girl from Bristol in a predominantly white children’s home, so I think this comes with passion.

“It comes with life experience and we’re still here. We’re still here trying. But it’s a long journey, and I think that’s what people need to understand. This isn’t changing overnight. 

“That’s why we need as many people as possible to support this whether that is through the research you do, whether it’s within your practice, whether it’s turning up to various different trustee roles or being school governors. That’s how we’re going to see change.”

Comments Form

2 Comments

  1. | Chaka Artwell

    Since Pope Nicholas V Papal Bull of 1452 authorised the enslavement of West African people on the grounds that they were inferior and heathen, African people have been regarded by Caucasian European as inferior.
    1452 was the beginning of the Creed of African Inferiority that is still influencing Caucasian and African people today.
    The Creed of African Inferiority was made respectable by the Cardinal and Bishops of the Catholic and Anglican Protestant Churches of Western Caucasian Europe.
    The Creed of African inferiority was taught by Bishops; academics, scientists, politicians and historians in England’s leading universities.
    The illegal strip-searching of African-skin pupil Child-Q is the fruit of Caucasian Europe’s Creed of African Inferiority.
    African-heritage people must understand that we are not historically; biologically, theologically, politically, financially or socially treated as being EQUAL with our Caucasian spouses; friends and colleagues.
    The reducing of the skin-colour prejudice; discrimination and racism historically endured by African-heritage people to an EQUALITY issue has been given authority and acceptance by Harriet Harman’s 2010 Equalities Act.
    Skin-colour prejudice; discrimination and racism should never have been reduced to an “equality” issue.

    Reply

  2. | Asundu Bayerurmbu

    Talk about a previous reply soapboaxing a separate issue to the one under discussion. Chaka Artwell, anyone would think you are standing for election in the next few weeks. Is it appropriate to subvery a poor girl’s exeperiences of being a drug delaer’s mule to sell into London schools? It is another world in Oxford and empathy is clearly under question.

    Reply

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