Poverty and circumstance can strip children of innocence before adolescence.

Evidence

Mohamed, who was no more than ten years old, met defeat at a far younger age than the elder Baldwin brother from Harlem. It stripped his innocence from him before he became a teenager and aborted any hopes or dreams the young boy might have had before they took form. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with James Baldwin’s concept of defeat in The Fire Next Time, which the passage itself invokes. — connects to: Frontier children grow up prematurely hardened into self-reliant adults — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 87