Children as an Oppressed Group: An Analysis of Childism in a Brazilian Childfree Facebook Page

Abstract

This study investigates the occurrence of childist discourses in the Facebook page “Childfree Brasil”, which gathers together Brazilian people who have chosen not to have children. Although being childfree does not mean being oppressive towards children, my recent visits to this page and other social media platforms have shown that it is not uncommon to find childist discourses in discussions within the childfree community. As one step towards understanding childism (Young-Bruehl, 2012) and its underpinnings, this study seeks to analyze some discussions in the aforementioned Facebook page in order to identify common childist discourses and their sociological foundations, and analyze how they may produce and simultaneously reflect childism. This is a qualitative study that looks into posts from 2022 that appear when searching the word “odeio” (“[I] hate” in Portuguese) in the public Facebook page “Childfree Brasil”, as well as the comments under those posts. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was used in the analysis of data. The results show that children were frequently perceived as not-yet human, inherently bad and as their parents’ possessions. Consequently, children were not seen as active members of society and the care for children was mostly perceived to be solely the parents’ responsibility. I argue that there is a strong connection between the childist discourses shown in these posts and other forms of oppression, as well as an individualistic perception of adults as independent and children as dependent, with latter viewed as negative. In response, I also argue for the perception of all humans as interdependent, with the belief that such a perception is necessarily connected to abolishing oppressions.