And why can certain rights be taken away? Because when you commit certain acts, you DO surrender your rights. For example, when you commit a crime, you surrender your right of self-defense. And the government could not ethically put criminals in jail unless they had first surrendered their right to liberty by their unlawful actions.
The problem is when you are denied the experiences you would need as a child to comply with our laws as an adult.
The definition of adult should not include “I don’t care what happened to you as a child: deal with it and comply.”
That mindset is a gross violation of your natural rights. Natural instinct is to not comply. Compliance is tantamount to Stockholm Syndrome.
But it seems like you are expecting government to be successful in correcting years of truly horrible child abuse. I think the government ought to take steps to ameliorate such tragedies, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect that government can cure such trauma.
Like for example, if a child has a terrible (and preventable) disease, the impacts of the disease may be life-long, and sometimes very serious. I think the government ought to offer health care, counseling, social services, etc but I do not think it is reasonable to expect that such services will correct the problem.
This analysis breaks down, though, once you extend it beyond criminals. How do the mentally ill surrender their rights? How does somebody whose immigration status is revoked or expires surrender their rights?
They don’t surrender their rights, is the answer; their rights are taken away.
In the Declaration of Independence, the notion of “inalienable rights” as rights which you could not surrender is included to counter an objection to the DofI based on concepts of allegiance, fidelity, loyalty. Many (most? all?) of the signatories of the Declaration, remember, had previously taken oaths of allegiance to the Crown - as military officers, as members of colonial legislatures, as the holders of civic offices. Obviously, this might be used as the basis for an attack on the legitimacy and even basic morality of what they were now doing. So they appeal to “inalienable rights” as a pre-emptive defence against such an attack. You simply cannot surrender your fundamental rights, they say; no oath you take is valid or effective to deprive you of your right to life, liberty, etc, and no oath can bind you to the exent that you can no longer assert these rights for yourself.
But this does not mean that the government cannot limit your exercise of those rights. It can, and it does (mainly in order to ensure those rights to other people). This limitation is not founded on any notion that you have surrendered your rights, not only because we have already a priori excluded that as a possibility, but also because it’s not a terribly realistic characterisation of what happens when the government takes you into custody. Rather, the justification for restricting your rights is founded not on your (deemed) agreement to their limitation, but on the government’s duty to ensure the same rights to others in the community.