This is an extract taken from a history book written 40 years in the future from now:
In the hundreds of years leading up to the signing of the Declaration of the Child's Right to Liberty (in 2035), children were considered the property of citizens called 'parents'. Parents had contractual ownership of new beings as they manifested on the planet and used possessive terms such as 'my child' to describe their relationship with smaller beings.
Although this seems unimaginable to us in 2058, the designated 'parent' was compelled by society to 'educate' their child as if these smaller beings were in need of teaching. Despite the rapid collapse of their planetary ecosystem and a vast imbalance of resource allocation, older humans felt that their methods of life constituted valuable ideas which they imposed on the newly manifested beings by way of conditioning centres called 'schools'.
Today, we know schools as spaces where older beings are taught by newly manifested beings to get back in touch with the purer essence of their connection to the universe. But in the early 21st Century, the reverse policy was in place. Instead, older beings would, without irony, communicate the same ideas that were causing the breakdown of their planetary environment to the younger beings.
Towards the beginning of the 21st Century, many adult humans began to use new technologies to recall and process the earliest memories of their childhoods. In undergoing this process, they discovered the truth of their oppression: that they had been subjected to abuse and conditioning by a group that called themselves 'parents' and a misguided governmental state.
Out of these realizations, a political movement grew. This movement was called New Abolitionism. It echoed, in both name and intention, the earlier movement to abolish the enslavement of Africans decades before.
Just as with the earlier movement, the New Abolitionists campaigned to free children from the hierachical and, to some, invisible bonds of the parent child dynamic. The movement increased in momentum as a growing team of lawyers and academics established a definitive link between the way in which the law of property rights had been applied to the newly manifested beings — this conflation being the very definition of slavery.
As society grew increasingly aware of the violence and control that small beings were subjected to, questions were asked about how the parent-child slave system had been allowed to continue for so long. Several prominent trials of child-owners (at the time, still known as 'parents') determined that in many cases, they were simply unaware that they were practicing slavery because it had become so socially normalized. This was the same defence used by the owners of black slaves years before.
Eventually it was determined that the social normalization of the hierarchy of parent-child relationships was tacitly endorsed by the state. The state, at the time, normalized and institutionally enshrined the right of older beings to control younger beings because this was the means by which the state normalized its own primary act of violence: The state being 'parent' to the 'child' of the nation.
With the great collapse of nation states in 2038, came a return to communal living and the restoration of children's rights to be cared for by a community, without ownership, implicit or contractual. Historians now view this as a natural byproduct of the end of hierarchical government and advancements in human consciousness and technologies.
When watching today's newly manifested beings experiencing a broad life of ideas and adventures supported by a decentralized community of human family, it is difficult to imagine another world.
Today, in post-abolitionist times, it seems strange to imagine an era when older humans were permitted to own children. But, as with all history, we cannot judge those we look back on. Use of the word 'parent', today, is met with distaste and is still, in some territories, considered a derogatory term used to rebuke anyone establishing a hierarchy. It is also recorded that, as with the earlier African slave owners, some 'parents' did make efforts to provide a supportive environment to the smaller beings, despite the inherent design of the system to prevent this. Sadly, it was some of these 'good' child-owners that prolonged the illusion of a functional system.
At the time, it is also important to remember that humans were simply unconscious of what they were doing. It is interesting, for context, to note that just a few decades earlier (in the 1940s) these same societies engineered a holocaust. Given these circumstances, progress was made relatively quickly towards the abolition of parenting.
Today, there are memorials to those children who suffered under the slavery of parenting in major capital cities including Berlin, Tokyo and, of course, famously the Tomb of the Parented Children in London, which attracts millions of visitors every year to learn more about the horror of an age in which we thought we owned children.
