Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [122]

With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organisations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. … All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak – ‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used – had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 122

Note

The full dramatization of internalized surveillance: the family — usually the one private refuge — has been colonized, so that the watcher is the child in the home. The phrase ‘child hero’ for the informer reframes virtue as denunciation, and the observation ‘it was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children’ turns the panopticon inward on the domestic sphere.