So far, I have investigated what is marked as human and inhuman behaviour through the (shifting) discourses used to demarcate the difference between human and non-human animals. I have also explored the ways in which the imposition of gender roles, overwritten in the convention of acknowledging adolescent activists as having ‘given up’ their childhood, or identifying adolescents who have had traumatic experiences and/or little care as having had ‘no’ childhood, can have traumatic effects in and of itself. These effects, I have argued, are disguised, rather than made visible, in the division of subjects into categories of perpetrator or victim, ‘innocent’ child or conscious adult. The quasi-legal arguments depicting human behaviour as either able to be explained or condemned with reference to (the shifting metaphors of) non-human animal behaviour, expose the arbitrariness and thus the inadequacy of the human/animal binary in constructing human rights even within a space constitutionally defined precisely in order to restore human dignity. The association of childhood with innocence, specifically innocence from both political and gendered impositions, and adulthood with precisely the inverse – namely, simultaneous full cognition of one's political and gendered rights and ethical responsibilities – marks the occlusion of adolescence, the traumatic silencing around the assumed but never explicitly acknowledged engendering of the child/adolescent, who is transformed by political activism, as if by magic, from ‘child’ into ‘adult’.