The Radical Idea That Children Are People
And they deserve rights too.
We're hosting our quarterly exclusive editorial hangout for Residents of the Bog on Thursday, March 26 at 6 p.m. CT. We'll spend an hour or so showcasing Flyteam pets, talking about upcoming coverage, and generally being convivial with our badass Flytrap community. You must register ahead of time to join us!
Not already a Resident of the Bog? New Bog members get a 10% discount on annual subscriptions! Use this link to get your deal.
In the first minutes of the film The Client (1994), 11-year-old Mark Sway (Brad Renfro) witnesses mob lawyer W. Jerome Clifford (Walter Olkewicz) kill himself by gunshot. Before this traumatic event, Clifford reveals to Sway where the body of a Louisiana senator, murdered by the mafia, is buried. This piece of information, which is important for a federal investigation, is used to justify the continued infringement of Sway's rights as a child witness for the rest of the film by almost all of the adults he encounters.
To protect himself, Sway hires Regina "Reggie" Love (Susan Sarandon), a lawyer and recovering alcoholic who lost the guardianship of her own children in a divorce after her husband set her up. Together, Sway and Reggie confront the system that failed them both. Reggie acts like a surrogate mother-lawyer, protecting Sway from the authorities, who see the 11-year-old boy as a means to an end rather than a human being, and the mob, who want to kill the boy because of what he knows.
The story of these two characters clearly depicts a necessary partnership between women and children, two populations whose rights are consistently dismissed and disrespected in a cishetero-patriarchal capitalist world. In 2026, it would be misleading to write that nothing has changed, both in the U.S. and globally, when in reality it seems that things for children and women have gotten so much worse in the three decades since The Client hit the movie theaters.
Most progressive movements hardly ever engage with the struggles of children directly, let alone recognize how the subjugation of children and the subjugation of women are inextricably intertwined.