Policing the Young: Criminalization, Vilification and the Securitization of Child Activism

Introduction 

In December 2017, 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi was arrested after slapping an Israeli soldier outside her home in Nabi Saleh. The incident, filmed and circulated worldwide, turned her into a global symbol of Palestinian resistance representing the thousands of Aheds living under occupation. At the same time it  turned her into a target of vilification and fragmented her in thousands of competing narratives. Thousands of kilometers away, high school students in Thailand’s “Bad Student” movement faced similar surveillance, disciplinary measures or criminal charges for calling for democratic reforms, holding speeches or attending marches. 

The line between dissent and disorder is thin, and children who exercise their right to protest and dissent walk it precariously (knowing that the child" in itself  is not so self-evident nor biologically fixed (meaning fixed by an age limit), but rather socially constructed, context-dependent, and discursively produced.) Too young to be fully recognized as political subjects, yet too visible to be ignored, child activists occupy a fragile space between tokenistic inclusion and paternalistic dismissal. Their repression raises urgent questions especially on what the treatment of child dissent reveals about the broader conditions of participation, dissent, and social control?

This article examines child activism as a test case of how societies manage dissent. Two case studies, Thailand’s “Bad Student” movement and the media framing of Ahed Tamimi serve as illustrative examples. They are not exhaustive but highlight recurring patterns that may be symptomatic of broader global trends. At the heart of the analysis lies a paradox: recognition does not equal protection. Visibility can elevate child activists to global recognition, but it just as often exposes them to surveillance, stigmatization, or symbolic appropriation. 

Through a tryptic frame of analysis emerge perspectives illuminating how CHRDs come to be marginalized not only through direct repression but  through discursive and structural mechanisms that render their agency illegitimate and at times morally seeked. 

1. Johan Galtung’s concepts of structural and cultural violence highlights  how we normalize children’s exclusion from politics. 
2.  Ole Wæver’s theory of securitization underlines how youth activism becomes constructed as a threat to public order via strategies of rebranding. 
3. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power and “legitimate speaker” forecasts  how specific norms define whose voices get to be heard and whose are silenced. 

The article develops three principal findings: the fragility of inclusive political spaces, the paradox of visibility, and narrative editing as a mode of social control. Together, they aim to reveal how child activism is systematically criminalized and vilified. 

Result 1: Fragility of inclusive political spaces and the erosion of the right to dissent 

Political spaces are rarely as inclusive as rights frameworks suggest. In practice, they remain adult-centric arenas where children’s participation is conditional, revocable, and fragile. 

Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of the “legitimate speaker” speech can be emancipating but only if recognized. Thompson in Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power  préface draws from this assumption and crafts what he calls a “borrowed authority”. This concept refers to when a locutor doesn't manifest an authority by his own intervention but manifests an authority borrowed from the institution that grants the locutor the authority to speak, deciding or not of the legitimacy of the discourse. 

Authority and legitimacy are both concepts key in adult-centric models of verification of political agency. Both depend on who is recognized as having the right to speak. In their position as “citizens in waiting” children enter only when their voices conform to adult expectations; once they cross that line, their dissent can be seen in instances to be recoded as deviance. Children who act outside the institutional maps of the “acceptable” or the “expected” are not merely protesting or dissenting. By raising their voices they reveal the limits of how legitimacy itself is constructed in civic participation. Their very presence becomes subversive because it exposes alternative models of engagement that coexist beneath the dominant, adult-centric order. Once those boundaries come to be crossed repression could follow through for instance through criminalization and vilification. 

In Thailand, this fragility manifests through both law and practice. Amnesty International’s 2023 report highlights three particularly striking cases: Showing a nexus of Parent-State-School prevailing over dissent.

• Thanakorn “Petch” Phiraban, a 17-year-old activist convicted under the lèse-majesté law, was subjected to “corrective” training programs and intrusive assessments in a juvenile vocational correction facility. According to his testimony, he was pressured to plead guilty and follow corrective training in exchange for leniency : demonstrating a conflation of legal sanction with ideological re-education. 
• Thanapat “Poon” Kapeng was charged under both Section 112 and Section 14for sharing posts critical of the monarchy. He was charged for national subversion. Section 112 refers to “Insulting or Defaming Royal Family“Whoever, defames, insults or threatens the King, the Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years.”Thailand Law Library, 2015.
  Computer Crime Act Section 14 refers to: “If any person commits any offence of the following acts shall be subject to imprisonment for not more than five years or a fine of not more than one hundred thousand baht or both: 1. that involves import to a computer system of forged computer data, either in whole or in part, or false computer data, in a manner that is likely to cause damage to that third party or the public; 2. that involves import to a computer system of false computer data in a manner that is likely to damage the country's security or cause a public panic; 3. that involves import to a computer system of any computer data related with an of ence against the Kingdom's security under the Criminal Code(...) Consultant, s. d.
• Sand, a queer student activist, was charged in 11 cases and reportedly shared that her school shared her personal data including names, parental identities, and home addresses: with police for surveillance purposes. She described this as state harassment mediated through educational institutions. 

In Palestine, fragility can be also discursive rather than strictly legal. Ahed Tamimi’s activism has been repeatedly reframed through competing adult-driven narratives: from heroic icon to manipulated child, or even enemy of the state. Labels such as “propaganda tool,” “Pallywood actress,” or “terrorist in the making” deny her recognition as a legitimate protester. Her 2017 arrest, for slapping a soldier, became in this constant reprisal of her narrative less about political dissent than a battle of representations, illustrating what Kozol & Furtado (2018) describe as the “politics of representation.” 

Media coverage often shifted focus from Israeli settler colonialism to Ahed’s personal characteristics, her gender and youth, becoming aesthetic frames depoliticizing her resistance, transforming structural oppression into spectacle. As raised by Wendy Kozol, TRUTHOUT questions of why she acted were quickly replaced by speculation about who she was as the actor rather than investigating the reasons for her actions. Displacing systemic critique in favor of individualized portrayals 

Both cases illustrate that fragility in this instance can be systemic and not incidental. Their agency exists only on adult-defined terms, confirming that the right to protest exists in theory but collapses in practice when exercised by children. 

Result 2: The Visibility Paradox 

Visibility is often assumed to protect activists, but for children, it can also function as a double-edged sword: it provides a platform, but simultaneously increases exposure to stigma and discursive reconfiguration. 

One mechanism of securitization involves the performance of “speech acts”, which entails myth-making: generating a sense of urgency justifying exceptional measures whether or not the threat is real. Once internalized, these myths become the new status quo, reinforced by collective belief. Symbolic recognition does not guarantee political legitimacy or insured security; instead, it can expose activists to intensified repression or appropriation. 

According to Amnesty’s 2024 report on Thailand’s Bad Student’s movement;  visibility through protests and social media quickly drew surveillance and intimidation. Satapat, a high school activist, was warned by police to “stay away or to lose his freedom.”. Officers sent videos of him protesting to his mother, who in response cut his allowance and restricted his movements. He withdrew from activism, not through direct arrest, but through structural psychological violence meaning the fear of anticipated harm. Fear does not require overt violence to be effective. As Galtung (1969) argued, structural psychological violence operates through anticipation: the mere expectation of harm can compel self-censorship. For example, Satapat in Thailand did not need to be arrested to reduce his activism; the combined pressure from police, parents, and the uncertainty of surveillance was sufficient to drive him into withdrawal. Schools reinforced this logic. Teachers threatened to lower grades or bar students from elections. These acts made visibility costly, embedding censorship into everyday life. 

This aligns with Chachavalpongpun (2022) notion of “governing by fear”: repression that relies on ambient intimidation rather than overt coercion. 

For Ahed Tamimi too, visibility did not secure protection. According to Kozol & Furtado, 2018’s work  Once  images enter the global media market, their meanings have been studied to undergo disjointement between their original meaning and the reappropriated one. Arguments or images become at risk of being compartmentalized. In Ahed’s Tamimi her family’s work of digital documenting  came to be reduced to viral clips detached from their situational contexts and reinterpreted through editorial and ideological lenses. Ahed’s slap became “the slap seen around the world” a symbol open to infinite appropriation and completely disconnected to the struggles giving birth to said act. The same image went through signifying empowerment to one audience and terrorism to another. 

Transforming a child into a national security threat elaborates on how criminalization functions both through law and media channels conjunctly. This is not solely about criminalization but about being narrated into criminality. Her body became a site of meaning production. This echoes the common criticism that visibility or symbolic elevation does not necessarily mean empowerment. Paradoxically, increased visibility can result in tighter control over voices and greater constraints on agency. 

The paradox is clear: visibility can offer attention but also strip autonomy. Figures like Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai are celebrated only when their activism is depoliticized meanwhile Tamimi comes to be vilified precisely because her dissent directly challenges state power. For CHRDs, visibility can at times not signify empowerment but a double-edged condition that simultaneously amplifies and endangers.

Result 3: Narrative Editing as Social Control 

Repression does not depend solely on arrests or legal charges. It also operates through narrative “editing” where law and media co-produce frameworks that redefine dissent as deviance. 

A speech act  existentially aims to justify liberticide measures. Combined with Bourdieu’s insight that symbolic power shapes who may speak, this produces structural conditions where activism can be delegitimized before it even occurs. 

In Thailand, the very label “Bad Students” marked young activists as morally deviant. Official speeches warned protests would “destroy the nation,” reframing peaceful dissent as existential danger and concrete threat. It can also be argued to create a sense of “them” versus “us” fragmenting and marginalizing the dissenters from the ones behaving “rightly”. The result can be self-censorship, as students internalize norms that cast activism as both risky and immoral. This can be compared to a highly similar sense of internal balkanization. This process functions through the construction of an “internal enemy” and it hinges, crucially, on the power of securitization via speech acts. If elites succeed in framing a particular group as a threat to the internal order via language that equates protest with disruption or dissent with subversion for example they may legitimize the implementation of extraordinary measures aimed at silencing or neutralizing that group. The force of this framing lies not only in its legal or institutional consequences but in its social assimilability. The public can internalize the logic that security must be preserved at all costs, even at the expense of civil liberties and become the right arm in its institutionalisation.

In Palestine, Tamimi’s case shows the same mechanism through the media. Israeli outlets actively attacked alternative interpretations to foreclose pluralism. 

Both send a very strong message to the moral code linked to dissenting. It becomes apparent that dissent comes to be codified as something disturbing, needing to be dealt with in order to fulfill the protection of the sacrosanct order. If such a statement is internalized by the main group following the order the statement becomes the new myth and becomes accepted as the new truth or the new standard of morality. 

What emerges is a system where repression becomes hegemonic: it shapes not only what activists can do, but how they and others think about dissent. Families disown children, schools discipline them, peers monitor one another and we end up in a distributed enforcement system where repression becomes internalized and at times even seeked or exercised on her own. 

This is narrative editing as social control. By repeatedly recoding dissent as illegitimate, law and media create a consensus where silencing appears natural, even moral. For CHRDs, the cost is their subjectivity: they are never simply political actors, but characters in someone else’s script. 

Conclusion 

While focused on Thailand and Palestine, these cases suggest structural logics that likely operate across multiple contexts. The repression of child activists is not marginal. It is a microcosm of broader patterns of social control, where dissent is tolerated only when it conforms and crushed when it threatens dominant orders. The cases demonstrate how this occurs through fragile inclusivity, erosion of the right to protest, the visibility paradox, and narrative editing that recasts activism as deviance. 

Child activists end up double subalterns repressed once for being young, and again for being political. Their visibility amplifies their vulnerability, while law and media can work hand in hand to reframe their actions as threats. Recognition does not equal protection; symbolic elevation often coincides with silencing.

If participation is to be more than tokenistic, this dynamic must be confronted. Protecting child activism does not mean encouraging all children to protest or dissent for the sake of dissenting, but ensuring that when they do, their voices are not dismissed, criminalized, or vilified. 

As Galtung evoked, violence is not only physical but structural and cultural: it narrows what is socially thinkable and politically possible. Liberation, therefore, requires more than policy change; it demands a shift in how dissent itself is understood and legitimized. To de-securitize child activism is to recognize it not as a threat but as a legitimate contribution to public life. Only then can participation and protection coexist. 

Resources

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