Broad Summary Privacy

“Should children have the same right to privacy as adults?” is a question that irks me, in a way. The question broadly lumps all people under the age of 18 together and fails to recognize differences in maturity levels. While many things make us different from each other, our maturity level is one of the things that can (and should) heavily affect our right to privacy.

There are many different things that one might want to keep private. A bedroom, a diary, a phone, a secret. The main question is, can we be trusted to maintain our own safety if we keep these things private, and can we be trusted to ask for help if it turns out that we cannot? Circumstances are another difference that can come into play here. Especially with something like the internet, sometimes kids can accidentally get themselves into dangerous situations. Now, hypothetically, let’s say we have a mature 12-year-old and an immature 17-year-old. The 12-year-old, despite being younger, realizes that what has happened online has put themself in danger, and gets help from a trusted adult. The 17-year-old, on the other hand, does not. Possibly they don’t take the situation seriously, possibly they think they can handle it themself. Which one of these kids is more deserving of privacy? Most of you reading this would say the 12-year-old, for knowing when to stop and get help. But what if, say, the 17-year-old does not have a trusted adult to tell? What if they would get into bigger trouble by admitting what they’d done than they would just trying to handle the situation themself? Knowing this, does your answer change?

I personally think that a reasonable expectation of privacy allows for children to teach themself responsibility. But to be entirely honest, the lack of nuance here hurts the question. The world is never so black and white. Do children deserve the right to privacy? Yes. No. Who cares? Say yes, and you put immature kids in dangerous situations. Say no, and you deprive mature children of comfortability in their own spaces. This isn’t to say that immature children don’t deserve to be comfortable in their own spaces, but I am saying that it needs to be handled in a different way. Sure, yes, in an ideal world, every child would be mature and capable of handling privacy in a responsible way. But it’s not an ideal world, and that’s why we should be striving for equity, not equality.

“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.”

– Marin Health and Human Services

“PRIVATE NO ENTRY” by Brad Higham is licensed under CC BY 2.0.