“An analysis published Wednesday of available research about the pandemic’s impact on children’s well-being from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights shows its sweeping adverse impacts and trauma-inducing experiences disproportionately impact children that were already underserved before its onset.”

“But the adultification thesis gets things backwards, in part because it relies too heavily on popular representations of protected ‘childhood innocence’ rather than on the actual histories and experiences of children. In reality, the history of childhood in the west is a dark and brutal story of mistreatment, sexualization, and murder.”

“In the United States, systems of care and protection of children have been racialized at their inception, something that has only intensified between the 20th century and today.”

On Thursday, in a 6–3 decision authored by Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court decided that judges need not determine that a juvenile convicted of a crime is incapable of being rehabilitated before sentencing him or her to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Age also matters. Police are more likely to use or threaten to use force in their interactions with younger people than adults. And they are significantly more likely to shoot an unarmed, nonattacking teenager than an adult. Unarmed teenagers are nearly five times more likely to be shot to death by police than similarly nonattacking middle-aged people.

Advocates, scholars and doctors characterized the adultification bias emerging in the aftermath of Ma’Khia’s death as a form of misogynoir — a term coined by Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey. It’s a way to describe how “anti-Blackness and misogyny combine to malign Black women in our world,” Bailey wrote.