From the Gallows to the Noose

Today at the Society for the History of Children and Youth conference, I presented a paper titled From the Gallows to the Noose: How the ‘Adultification’ Thesis Distorts the History of Child Executions and Lynchings in America.

The paper challenges the prevailing “adultification” thesis, which argues that Black children have historically been treated as older and more culpable than their years, thus justifying their exposure to adult forms of punishment. Instead, I argue that this framework misreads history by assuming childhood was ever a protected, innocent space for marginalized children.

Using the 1786 public execution of twelve-year-old Hannah Ocuish, a poor, neurodivergent, Black and Pequot girl in Connecticut, as a case study, the paper demonstrates that colonial American society did not treat children like Hannah as adults, but rather as children in a theological framework that viewed them as inherently sinful, irrational, and in need of violent correction. Her execution was not an exception, but part of a ritualized system of child sacrifice that combined Christian doctrine, racial hierarchy, and legal disposability.

I situate this violence in a transatlantic context, showing that European societies had long normalized the public punishment and execution of children. Colonists imported these logics to America, where they became racialized. White children themselves were historically brutalized, beaten, starved, executed, before being selectively absorbed into an ideal of sentimental “innocence” designed to preserve white supremacy. Meanwhile, Black and Indigenous children were permanently excluded from this protection.

The paper argues that the adultification thesis risks misdirecting analysis toward correcting perception, asking the state to see Black children as “properly” childlike, rather than confronting the deeper cultural reality that childhood itself was constructed as a violent, exclusionary, and racialized system. I call for scholars to abandon nostalgic frameworks that treat childhood as an innocent or universal stage, and instead recognize it as a historically contingent hierarchy built through labor, punishment, religious terror, and racial domination.

The paper demands that childhood studies move beyond sentimentality to structural critique, interrogating how ideas about childhood continue to ration empathy, reinforce white supremacy, and justify violence against marginalized children today.