Children treated as adult property

Children treated as adult property is a recurring idea about power disguised as authority and care. The novel connects it to the historical treatment of women as property, then returns to it in a modern system where adults claim the right to punish, raise, and direct children according to their own rules. Its sharpest contradiction appears in the Home of Shadows: a promised land described as belonging to children, yet imagined and administered by adults for their own purposes.

Historical roots and the language of property

In a conversation with Victoria Bergman, Lars Mikkelsen explains bride kidnapping as an example of how marriage and sexual violence could be understood through ownership. In his account of the Dark Ages, a man could force a marriage by abducting and assaulting a woman; her exploitation then served to bind her to him and give him a claim over her property. The woman’s wishes did not determine her fate. The structure treated her first as something owned, rather than as a person whose rights had been violated.

Lars extends this history to the framing of rape. He describes laws and attitudes that protected a man’s claim to what he regarded as valuable sexual property, whether by arranging a woman’s marriage or keeping her for himself. He also identifies familiar ways of discrediting a woman’s refusal: claiming that she meant yes, that her clothing invited what happened, or that her response was revenge. These examples show how the language of ownership can survive after its original legal form has changed. The woman’s account is subordinated to the authority of men who decide what she meant and what should happen to her.

The comparison gives the concept a wider reach than the treatment of children alone. Lars argues that adults continue to regard children as their own property, punishing and raising them according to rules they set for themselves. The connection is not that children and women occupy identical circumstances, but that both can be denied authority over their own lives when another person’s possession or control is taken for granted. Victoria is surprised that a man can make this argument; she dislikes police officers, but Lars’s willingness to question inherited assumptions distinguishes him from the role she expects him to embody.

Adult authority disguised as upbringing

The concept turns on the ordinary legitimacy adults claim over children. Punishment and upbringing may be presented as parental responsibilities, but Lars’s account draws attention to what that authority permits: adults can make rules, impose consequences, and decide a child’s future while treating the child’s wishes as secondary. The issue is therefore not simply that adults exercise power. It is that power can be represented as natural ownership, making a child’s separate interests easy to overlook.

This distinction matters because the language of care does not by itself establish that a child has been treated as a person. An adult may describe decisions as protection, education, or a better future while retaining the authority to decide everything. The novel’s historical comparison makes that logic visible: a claim that someone is being cared for can coexist with a system that limits their choice. In this sense, property is both a material idea and a model of relationship, one in which the person with greater power assumes the right to define another person’s needs.

The Home of Shadows and its children

The idea returns in Annette Lundström’s account of the Home of Shadows. She describes it as an original country, a land of children where people may live close to God, while also including adults who understand ancient ways of life. In her explanation, everyone is a child inside. The language appears to place children at the center of a sacred community, but Sofia Zetterlund recognizes a disturbing reversal: this is a country for children created by adults for their own desires. A vision ostensibly organized around childhood may therefore conceal adult control rather than end it.

Annette describes children called Viggo Dürer’s adopted children. She says that he helped them come to Sweden from terrible conditions abroad, and that they lived on the farm until he found new families for them. Their stays could last only days or extend to several months. Annette also says that the adults raised them according to the word of Pythia. These details give the idealized account a concrete institutional shape: children cross borders, live under adult supervision, and are moved onward to households chosen by an adult. The account presents rescue and placement, but the children’s own voices and decisions are absent from the explanation supplied here.

Sofia does not treat Annette’s speech as a straightforward, fully verified confession. She suspects that Annette’s psychosis contains some element of truth and may be prompting her to confess, while recognizing that the statements come through a psychotic state. That uncertainty is important: the narrative places a possible disclosure beside an account whose reliability cannot simply be assumed. Even so, the juxtaposition of the Home of Shadows and the children’s movements on the farm makes the language of sacred care difficult to separate from the question of who possesses the power to decide a child’s life.

Narrative significance

Across these scenes, the concept links historical gendered ownership to the authority adults exercise over children. Lars supplies an explicit argument: assumptions about women as property persist in attitudes toward sexual violence, while a related assumption allows adults to regard children as theirs to shape. Annette’s account supplies a darker narrative echo, presenting a child-centered religious ideal alongside a system in which adults bring children to a farm, determine how long they stay, choose their next families, and prescribe their upbringing.

The contrast between ideal and practice is the concept’s central force. The Home of Shadows claims a special relation to children, yet Sofia’s response makes the adults’ desires the troubling center of that promise. The novel thus asks readers to distinguish protection from possession and care from unilateral control. Its critique is not that every adult decision is ownership, but that the language of good intentions can obscure children’s dependence and the absence of meaningful choice. By making that tension recur in both Lars’s historical explanation and Annette’s account of the farm, the narrative frames the child’s status not as a private family matter alone, but as a question about whose authority society accepts and whose personhood it recognizes.