Interrogating the Baker Act through Young’s framework of oppression as a form of violence within Florida schools

• In Event: Conceptualizing Iris Young’s (1990) “Five Faces of Oppression” to protest violence in education against humans and animals

Proposal

In 1971, the Florida Legislature passed the Florida Mental Health Act also known as the Baker Act with the intent to safeguard patient rights who were suffering from mental illness. Though the objective of the legislation was to protect the liberties of the patient, the act essentially still allowed for a person exhibiting a mental illness with no criminal intent or activity to be taken away and confined against their will. There has been an increasing number of cases where the Baker Act is invoked in the school setting with children. Between 2020-2021, more than 38,000 children under the age of 18 in Florida were “Baker Acted”—a 77% increase in the past 10 years (Butler 2021). Children as young as six have been handcuffed at school by police officers, put in the back of police cars, and taken to a facility (Aguilera 2020).

The Baker Act—essentially the arrest, transport, surveillance, hold, and examination of so many children in the state of Florida–is an insidious manifestation of Young’s conceptualization of oppression, specifically violence. Young (1990) writes that “what makes violence a face of oppression is less the particular acts themselves… than the social context surrounding them…What makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, and not merely an individual moral wrong, is its system character, its existence as a social practice” (57). The Baker Act can therefore be framed as systemic violence that manifests itself as a form carcerality within schools and unfairly targeting students of color. This paper seeks to make visible the oppressive violence that the Baker Act creates. By underscoring the institutionalized violence associated with the legislation, the paper highlights the way the Baker Act does not distinguish between children and adults, can harm students mentally and academically, and pushes out certain populations of students.

Education should be a space and a protective force that elevates students out of their struggles, instead of bringing this institutionalized violence to them. Therefore, this paper also calls for the powerful element of love as protest. To be loved is to be seen; the paper will incorporate a personal narrative to humanize what is happening within Florida’s education system. Since oppression often seeks to dehumanize people, schools need to serve as a location filled with life-affirming energy that counters the carceral state and not enhances it with laws like the Baker Act. Freire (1970/2000) writes that “love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation” (p. 89). To protest this violent and oppressive practice, Freire’s pedagogy of love must be invoked in schools—not the Baker Act.

Author

• Charlene Krieger, Florida International University