For a while, I have been paying attention to the news of "12-year-old girl taking the bus to be tailgated rape and pregnancy": some self-media broke the news that a 12-year-old girl in Hunan was sexually assaulted when she was on a bus, resulting in 4 months of pregnancy.
It is angry and sad to see, what kind of scum actually attacked a 12-year-old girl?
But with the intervention of the police in the investigation, the truth released is infuriating and even more incredible.
It turned out that it was the little girl who fell in love with the netizens who played the game together, and became pregnant after having sex with each other many times, because she was afraid of being scolded by her parents, so she made up the lie that she was raped after being seduced on the bus.
Of course, rape under the age of 14, whether voluntarily or not, is a matter of law and is beyond the scope of our discussion today.
It's worth discussing, are the children of today still the children of the past? 12 years old, shouldn't you all be playing marbles and watching cartoons?
Many netizens also expressed similar concerns: the girl was too mature, had sex many times, and could make up the reason for "bus tailing rape".
This news reminds me of another piece of information that shocked public opinion two days ago: the murder of his mother by a 12-year-old boy in Yuanjiang, Hunan Province.
These two cases completely subvert our understanding of children, and also make us think about why the childhood that should be full of innocence and happiness is now full of killing, sex, and lies.
How was childhood invented by humans?
When it comes to childhood, it is reasonable to think that every child has a childhood, just as there will be an infancy period after birth.
Media scholar Neil Bozeman argues in his book The Disappearance of Childhood that "children" are not a concept that has ever been naturally formed, but only formed after humans invented the printing press, and with the development of modern media and the Internet, the difference between "childhood" and "adulthood" is getting smaller and smaller – we are entering an era without childhood.
He believes that children were born because printing established a dividing line between children and adults.
In the past, young and old people were illiterate and everyone shared the same information environment and lived in the same social and knowledge world.
Children are only miniature adults, and they are to go to apprenticeships early, to do farm work, to have offspring.
Since the advent of printing, literacy education has become a necessity, and the road to adulthood, the need to enter the school, the packaging of thinking and etiquette, is allowed to enter the secret garden of adulthood.
Now, that dividing line is becoming increasingly blurred under the onslaught of television, media, the Internet, and games.
The issue of gender secrecy and violence in adults is transformed into readily visible entertainment.
As in the first two cases, I think that the performance of homicide and sexual behavior will not be taught to her by her parents, teachers, or classmates, but more likely to be pervasive television, media, and violent games.
Neil Bozeman wrote in The Passing of Childhood: "Childhood cannot exist without a highly developed sense of shame. Childhood requires avoiding adult secrets, especially sexual secrets. ”
But now, the adult world, for children, has long since stripped off the cloak of shame and is vividly exposed to the world of children.
Who was in the "murder" of our childhood
I watched a news report that a Sichuan mother found that a child in the fifth grade of primary school was addicted to an anime APP.
In order to understand the child's interest, she herself downloaded the APP, and after clicking on it, the content surprised her: the screen was full of pictures of girls wearing black stockings and short skirts, bare chests, with provocative and seductive sexual words.
While this content is commonplace to adults, it is like a poison to children who are not familiar with the world, allowing them to indulge in it.
Pornography, just the tip of the iceberg.
In the 1990s, the Hong Kong film industry gave birth to a series of murderous and non-mainstream ancient puzzle films, of which "People in the Rivers and Lakes" and "Raptors Crossing the River" starring Zheng Yijian and Chen Xiaochun were the most famous, which were known as the godfather-level textbooks of China's underworld.
According to some data, in the era when Gu Qiuzai was released, almost all minors in the Chinese Juvenile Detention Center had seen this film.
Although the intention of this drama is to warn children to study well and be a good person, the ending also focuses on depicting the misery of these ancient puzzle boys, either violent corpses on the street, or losing their lovers, or surviving, but 20 years later, we will find that the intention of the film is completely useless.
There is such a question on Douban: Did Gu Qiuzai really bring bad to many teenagers in the mainland at that time? There are hundreds of comments at the bottom, yes!
In the 1970s, movies gradually became popular in China, and many urban cinemas or rural circulation movies were screened, but at that time, there were no restrictions on the content of movies, adults and children could watch them, and the gap between the two narrowed.
The film industry has developed to this day, with a clear distinction. For example, the United States divides movies into G-rated, PG-rated, PG-13, R-rated, etc., and explicitly restricts scenes of sex, violence, and drug abuse that minors and children under 13 years of age cannot watch.
Although the starting point for distinguishing the film level is to protect children, it is undeniable that the development of the Internet has allowed children to share the same movie with adults almost effortlessly.
In addition to movies, TV series, variety shows and pornographic advertisements, it is easier to reach children and subtly affect children.
The audience can see the family variety show with the theme of sentiment analysis, the contradictory couples confront each other in the program, psychologists and hosts analyze a variety of emotions, directly explore infidelity, sex, etc., in order to attract the attention of the audience, the program often exaggerates this adult experience, and children passively accept the exaggerated adult life experience.
But in the age of books, the acquisition of these experiences is not simple. Because there is a price to pay to gain these experiences. It is necessary to learn, the accumulation of life experience, parents, school correct education can be truly understood.
Children must progress slowly and step by step, while at the same time enriching and expanding their capacities for self-discipline and conceptual thinking.
In contrast, television is an open-door technology that broadcasts 24 hours a day and impossible to distinguish viewers, and children as young as 6 and adults at 60 are equally qualified to feel what the media has to offer.
There are many ugly secrets in the adult world that should not be known to children in the past, and now they are no longer secrets or ugly, and have become children's daily lives. The consequences of such acts are undoubtedly devastating.
Domestically, the situation is more complex.
Video social software based on Kuaishou and Douyin has invaded people's lives in a more comprehensive way.
It's no surprise that videos with children or babies as the main body can often be seen and played tens of millions of times, because children's lives always attract the attention of adults.
A number of "post-00s mothers" have appeared on a video platform, ranging from 14 to 17 years old, most of whom dropped out of school when they were pregnant in junior high school, and became "Internet celebrities" by publishing pregnancy videos and mother-child interaction on the platform, attracting tens of thousands of fans at every turn.
But when the children in the video imitate the behavior and actions of adults and speak the language that only adults can speak, winning millions of likes, the parents of the children feel that their children are so smart, more mature than their peers, and feel that they have face, which is really worrying.
An era without children
In addition to this extreme case, showing the disappearance of childhood, Neil Bozeman in the book, gives many examples that we have overlooked, reminding us.
Clothing that used to be unequivocally recognized as "children's" has largely disappeared, and there is no difference between adult clothing and children's clothing.
Children's games that used to be seen everywhere in the streets and alleys of towns are also disappearing, and games such as jumping leather bands, passing home, and throwing handkerchiefs created by children have long been replaced by "eating chicken" and "glory of kings" prepared by the adult world.
Children sneak into the vast adult world, childhood, eroded by the advance of adult life, we enter a "childhoodless era".
For example, the Children's Victoria's Secret Show.
Sociologist Randall Collins said: "The sign of the end of an era is that it begins to be romanticized". The fading of childhood is marked by a growing interest in documenting anecdotes about childhood, trying to retain innocence with words.
In another of his books, Entertain to Death, Neil Bozeman writes that what destroys us is not what we hate, but precisely what we love.
The book "The Disappearance of Childhood" was published in 1982, and now it seems that the content of the book is almost a cliché.
The rapid development of entertainment, commerce and media is constantly squeezing the living space of childhood, and the speed of "adultization" of Chinese children is surprisingly fast, but many parents are complacent about this rapidity, and their own educational ability has not kept up, resulting in various tragedies.
Of course, there is also an overly conservative side to the book's views, for example, it is not recommended that children have access to adult secrets, including women.
However, the Internet has long since lost the barriers to protecting secrets, and adults should not continue to deceive themselves into keeping silent about children, they should understand "sex" scientifically and slowly.
To return childhood to the innocence and safety of the past, it requires the full cooperation of parents, the government and the media, for parents to guide the growth of children, rather than directly teaching children to become small adults; for the government, to protect the normal development of the children's industry, the media can no longer overemphasize the gimmicks and entertainment of news and programs, and should pay attention to the impact of sex, violence and crime on children.
As the book says: It is sad, embarrassing, and especially sad that we have to watch the innocence, plasticity and curiosity of children gradually degenerate and then distort into the inferior face of pseudo-adults.