Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood

The contradictory nature of sexuality and censorship in children's contemporary lives

Kerry H. Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136304163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood provides a critical examination of the way we regulate children's access to certain knowledge and explores how this regulation contributes to the construction of childhood, to children's vulnerability and to the constitution of the 'good' future citizen in developed countries.

Through this controversial analysis, Kerry H. Robinson critically engages with the relationships between childhood, sexuality, innocence, moral panic, censorship and notions of citizenship. This book highlights how the strict regulation of children's knowledge, often in the name of protection or in the child's best interest, can ironically, increase children's prejudice around difference, increase their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse, and undermine their abilities to become competent adolescents and adults. Within her work Robinson draws upon empirical research to:

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• provide an overview of the regulation and governance of children's access to 'difficult knowledge', particularly knowledge of sexuality

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• explore and develop Foucault's work on the relationship between childhood and sexuality

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• identify the impact of these discourses on adults' understanding of childhood, and the tension that exists between their own perceptions of sexual knowledge, and the perceptions of children

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• reconceptualise children's education around sexuality.

Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood is essential reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking courses in education, particularly with a focus on early childhood or primary teaching, as well as in other disciplines such as sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

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The contradictory nature of
children's contemporary lives

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Writing this book and overview of the research

My interest in writing this book has developed over many years and has arisen from my professional experiences in several different and complementary contexts. It is based largely on a body of research I have undertaken over the past 15 years or so that has focused on children and sexuality issues. This body of work has involved multiple projects conducted either individually or collaboratively with colleagues, and has examined the various discourses, practices and policies associated with childhood, childhood and sexuality, childhood innocence, the sexualization of childhood, children's access to sexual knowledge, and children's early education around diversity and difference more generally. Each of these research projects was conducted in Australia, in regional, rural and metropolitan contexts, and included numerous interviews, focus groups and surveys with early childhood educators, parents, youth and children from a broad range of cultural, linguistic and socio-economic class backgrounds. The research projects can be grouped around three main foci. The first was an examination of early childhood educators' perspectives, pedagogical practices, workplace policies and curricula which regulate children's access to knowledge associated with diversity and difference, including a focus on sexuality and the inclusion of same-sex families. This research was conducted with my colleague Criss Jones Díaz (Robinson and Jones Díaz 2000, 2006). The second area of research involved a New South Wales state-wide survey of early childhood educators' perspectives, pedagogical practices, workplace policies and curricula specifically focusing on children and sexuality issues that I conducted with a colleague, Anthony Semann. The third research focus explored the socio-cultural construction of childhood and its intersection with sexuality through identifying the historical, socio-cultural and political discourses that operate in relation to children and sexuality, and children's access to sexual knowledge and sexuality education, as well as exploring children's perspectives and knowledge of sexuality and relationships. This research was conducted with my colleague, Cristyn Davies (Robinson and Davies 2008b; Davies and Robinson 2010).

Currently, as I write this book, I am leading a research team (including Moira Carmody from the University of Western Sydney, Australia, and Sue Dyson from the Australian Research Centre of Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University, Australia) on an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant project which explores building ethical relationships in young children's lives. This project is being conducted in two Australian states, New South Wales and Victoria, and involves interviewing primary school teachers, parents of primary school children (5–11-year-olds), and the parents' primary-aged children. The first year of this three-year project was completed at the end of 2011. Many of the issues around childhood, sexuality and sexual knowledge that I have explored with young children in early childhood education in the past are taken up with teachers, parents and children in primary schooling contexts in this larger study. Additional foci in this study include examining sex education curricula in primary schools in New South Wales and Victoria, and investigating parents', children's and teachers' perceptions of ethical and respectful behaviours; how each group practices ethical behaviours; and what strategies parents and teachers use to build children's understandings of ethical behaviours and encourage children's engagement in ethical practices with others. Although the project is not yet complete, the research to date has reconfirmed the findings of my earlier research upon which this book is primarily based.

This book also touches on issues that have been the central focus of my earlier research around sexual harassment in schooling (Robinson 2000, 2005d, 2012a). In this empirical research, I investigated students' and teachers' experiences and perspectives of sexual harassment occurring in schooling contexts. What was eye-opening in this research was just how normalized sexual harassment was in young people's everyday lives, and how integral such practices were to many male students' and teachers' identities, especially to their performance of hegemonic masculinity. For many female teachers (and some male teachers who did not fit dominant representations of masculinity), sexual harassment from male students and peers was also a common experience. What was particularly significant in these cases was how sexual harassment is used as a technology of power to discipline subjects into conforming to hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality, as well as to institutional practices of power. This research, which was conducted in the late 1980s and during the 1990s, pre-empts many of the concerns that were recently raised in the UK report titled The Sexualization of Young People (Review) by Linda Papadopoulos (2011). The practices identified in this report are not new. Young children learn to engage in hegemonic practices very early in life, but much of this behaviour is so normalized in the construction of hetero-gendered relationships that it is rendered invisible through the discourse of childhood innocence, often being referred to euphemistically as ‘child's play’ or ‘children being children’.

In addition to this body of research, the development of the ideas and arguments I outline has also been informed by my experience over many years in the area of child protection. As an academic I have taught child protection issues at university to teacher trainees, and I have also been invited to conduct workshops for early childhood educators working in the field. My expertise in this area was primarily informed by my experience as a community crisis worker, working with homeless young women in a refuge for more than five years. As a crisis worker, I undertook training in the area of sexual assault and child sexual abuse, run by the Adelaide Rape Crisis Centre in South Australia. Many of the young women who stayed in the refuge had been sexually abused as children, and the consequences of this abuse had played out in their lives in highly destructive ways. It was during this time that I became acutely aware of the vulnerabilities of young women to sexual abuse, especially in their family homes, and the contradictions inherent in ‘stranger danger’ campaigns. These campaigns take the focus off the fact that in a large proportion of sexual abuse cases, the perpetrator is someone the child knows — often a family member. Many of these young women continued to experience exploitation as gendered and sexual subjects throughout their early adult lives. What was equally concerning was their lack of knowledge about their bodies, of sexuality, and their lack of skills and confidence around negotiating intimate relationships in their lives. I also became critically aware of how these young women were often viewed by the community at large. They carried a stigma that stemmed from a perceived loss of innocence, which was often exploited again by others. These young women continued to experience the impact of prevailing discourses of childhood innocence. What I found particularly telling was that many of the young women declared that more knowledge of sexual matters at a younger age, and more options to talk openly about these issues as children and young people, would have made a considerable difference to their early lives.

Theoretical frameworks relevant to this book

My discussions around childhood, childhood and sexuality, and knowledge are framed within a post-developmentalist perspective, and are informed by feminist poststructuralism, queer and postcolonial theories. Through feminist poststructuralism, we are reminded that knowledge is constituted through discourse, is only ever partial, and is political — shifting and changing according to relations of power (Robinson and Jones Díaz 2006). Michel Foucault's notion of discourse is foundational to this perspective. Foucault (1974, 1978, 1980) argued that meaning is not a given, but is socially constructed across different institutional sites and practices. What becomes important to understanding knowledge are the multiple positions and viewpoints from which subjects speak, and the power relations these positions allow and presume. There are multiple discourses or ‘truths’ that construct the objects of which they speak, vying for a position of power in the production of meaning. Poststructuralism is concerned with language, signs, images, codes and signifying systems, which organize the psyche, society and everyday social life, and are linked to broader social, political and economic institutions that make up the social body (Robinson and Jones Díaz 2006; Foucault 1980; Sawicki 1991). Viewing childhood within this framework — as discursively constructed — allows for critical multiple readings of what it means to be a child, and opens up different and new understandings of the historically-shifting socio-cultural, political and economic functions that childhood performs in society.

The construction of subjectivity, or of the self, is constituted in the discourses made available to the subject and is always a relational process, involving the negotiation of power (Ball 1990; Burr 1995; Foucault 1974; Robinson and Jones Díaz 2006). Subjectivity is complex, shifting and contradictory, and in this process of negotiation, individuals assess — often unconsciously — the investments of being located in one discourse rather than the others that are available to them (Hollway 1984). Central to the subject within a feminist poststructuralist perspective, regardless of whether the subject is a child, adolescent or adult, is agency: that is, the ability to act with intent and awareness. The child, like the adult, is instrumental in the construction of their own subjectivity and that of others around them, rather than being a passive and powerless victim of socialization as is often assumed (Davies 1994). Stuart Hall (2004: 127) points out that ‘we are subject to discourse, not simply subjects through discourse, with the ability to turn around, contemplate, and rework our subjectivity at will’. Children are capable of critical reflection around the choices that they take up; I have seen them work through this process based on the knowledge they hold and the way that they view the world. In debates around the ‘disappearance of childhood’ (Postman 1982), anxieties arise when the production of subjectivity brings attention to its own construction — in this case, the production of gender and sexual subjectivities. The fluid, unstable and changing nature of subjectivity is brought to the fore, highlighting its inherent openness to new possibilities and definitions (Butler 1990).

Postcolonial theory is also useful in appreciating the ways in which understandings of childhood have been colonized through Western hegemonic modernist discourses. It provides important insights into the socio-cultural construction of discourses of childhood and the adult/child dualism that underpins Western relationships between adults and children. Additionally, it provides a critical framework for demonstrating how the life experiences, voices and knowledge associated with non-heterosexual subjects — constituted as the Other in the heterosexual/homosexual binary — have been disqualified and subjugated through colonizing practices. The term Other relates to groups that have been marginalized, silenced, denigrated or violated; defined in opposition to, and seen as other than, the privileged and powerful groups that are identified as representing the idealized, mythical norm in society (Robinson and Jones Díaz 2006). Hegemonic discourses of the child and childhood innocence have been mobilized to support the othering process experienced by non-heterosexual subjects. Power — and how it is used to define and control the lives and silence the voices of the Other — is central to postcolonial perspectives.

Queer theory, stemming from poststructuralist theoretical frameworks, is important in reinforcing understandings of childhood as fluid and unstable, and in reminding us of the socially-constructed nature of the relationship between childhood and sexuality — and equally, between adults and the child (Robinson 2005c; Bruhm and Hurley 2004). Queer theory views all aspects of subjectivity as performance and challenges normalizing practices, especially in terms of sexuality and heteronormative constructions of gender. Within this perspective, the dualistic relationships of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual are destabilized through acknowledging a plurality of sexualities and a multiplicity of genders. This perspective is important for understanding the fluidity of gender and the ways in which young children — as epitomized in the performances of gender represented in ‘princess boys’ — can take up non-conforming performances of gender which most often lead to parental, community and societal concerns and fears (Kilodavis 2010). The concept of queer encompasses those who feel marginalized by hegemonic discourses of heterosexuality (Morris 2000), and queer perspectives operate to question the privilege afforded to heterosexuality as the ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ sexuality by which all other sexualities are othered and subjugated. These theories inform my discussion of contemporary childhood.

The rest of this introductory chapter provides an overview of the critical issues relevant to the discussions throughout the book.

The politics and contradictions of children's sexual subjectivities

In Western societies, contemporary childhood has become the most intensely governed period of personal existence. It is a period of extreme surveillance in which the child has become the target of social, political, educational and legal regulations that constitute children as the powerless and dependent Other in relation to adults in society (Rose 1999). Parents have also been subjected to a similar regime of governance in relation to the child. This surveillance has been primarily constituted in the name of protection — largely of the innocence of childhood — but it has also been instrumental in constituting, regulating and maintaining adult/child and broader socio-cultural relations of power in society. The discourse of protection, often framed as being in the best interests of the child, is perpetuated not just through social practices, but also through government policies and legislation that impact on the way that children are viewed and treated in the family, in schools, and in society more broadly. This process of governance acts as a powerful social control, establishing commanding ‘regimes of truth’ that act to classify, discipline, normalize and produce what it means to be a child, and, in addition, what it means to be an adult, a good parent, and a good normative adult citizen-subject (Foucault 1977, 1978). Although it is important to have effective social and legal regulations in place to protect children from harm and exploitation, the ways in which this process of governing the child frequently loses sight of children's realities and best interests is explored. What is considered as being in the best interests of the child is often in conflict with those of adults and of the state, and with what is generally considered the natural order of things in society.

Nowhere has the governance of childhood and adults — and the use of ‘the child’ as a technology of power — been more obvious than in the area of sexuality. This governance, especially in relation to children's sexual subjectivity and the construction of children's knowledge of sexuality, is central to the focus of discussion in this book. Over time, children's sexual subjectivities have been constituted through a range of competing and contradictory discourses in Western societies. These discourses (‘children are asexual and innocent’; ‘children's sexuality is dangerous to society and needs to be regulated’; ‘children's sexuality is normal and critical for the development of a creative and vibrant society’; ‘sexuality is dangerous to the moral development of the child’; and ‘children are vulnerable to abuses and exploitation by adult sexuality and need to be protected’) have all impacted the ways in which children have been and continue to be viewed and treated as sexual subjects. An additional discourse around children's sexual subjectivity that is critical to processes of regulation is that children are naturally heterosexual. The ‘queer’ child, ‘whose play confirms neither the comfortable stories of child (a)sexual-ity nor the supposedly blissful promises of adult heteronormativity’ (Bruhm and Hurley 2004: ix), often manifests in social panic. The discussions in this book are primarily concerned with the politics of children's sexual subjectivities and the power relationships that operate around these competing discourses. Also of concern are the contradictions that prevail around childhood and sexuality — contradictions that are often rendered invisible through processes of normalization, and operate not just to regulate the child and the adult but also the dominant relations of power in society.

Since the 1980s, adults' fears and anxieties around potential threats to the child and to the nature of childhood itself have intensified. This is reflected in the media and in an increase in government and community organizations and events that focus on protecting the child. For example, in Australia, organizations such as The Child Protection Society and the National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (NAPCAN) actively campaign to increase awareness of children's vulnerabilities and need for protection. These fears and anxieties have been linked to a range of factors. First, there has been an increased awareness of the extensiveness of child sexual abuse in the home since the 1980s, largely as a result of feminist agitation in this area. However, community and media focus on child abuse has been primarily on ‘stranger danger’, or the paedophile, as the central threat to the safety and wellbeing of children. Second, adult fears and anxieties have intensified due to children's increased access to information and communication technologies, such as the Internet and mobile phones. This uneasiness is linked to concerns about children having unlimited and easy access to ‘inappropriate’ adult information; to parental concerns about children's increased vulnerabilities to paedophiles through the Internet; and to the perception that children are easily exploitable targets of unscrupulous advertisers. Anxieties and fears have also intensified as a result of what has commonly become termed the ‘sexualization’ and ‘adultification’ of representations of children (Postman 1982; Rush and La Nauze 2006; Levin 2009; Olfman 2009), especially girls, in popular culture, media and advertising. All of these issues are central to current social and political debates in countries such as Australia, the USA and the UK, and are perceived by many to be placing Western children ‘at risk’ and destroying what is popularly understood as childhood. Many parents also feel that they are being left behind in terms of technological advancements and new media, which have become so much part of the everyday lives of their tech-savvy children. Concerns about the ‘disappearance of childhood’ through its increasing commodification and the breakdown of traditional characteristics that have distinguished childhood from adulthood, such as children's access to adult ‘secrets’ or knowledge (e.g. sexuality) and to adult language (e.g. ‘dirty’ words), have resulted in the widespread perception that childhood is in crisis (Postman 1982; Winn 1984; Rush and La Nauze 2006; Levin and Kilbourne 2008). Catch-cries of ‘Let children be children’ ring loud in these debates, as do calls for increased regulation of media and popular culture, reflecting parents increasing concerns about how best to ‘protect’ their children in a changing world where they themselves often feel they are losing control.

This book offers a contribution to these international debates, critiquing among other issu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The contradictory nature of children's contemporary lives
• 2 Difficult knowledge and subjugated knowledge: adult/child relations and the regulation of citizenship
• 3 Childhood innocence, moral panic and censorship: constructing the vulnerable child
• 4 Schooling the vulnerable child: power/knowledge and the regulation of the adult normative citizen-subject
• 5 Children's sexual subjectivities
• 6 Parents, children's sexual subjectivity and the transmission of sexual knowledge across generations
• 7 Critical conversations: building a culture of sexual ethics early in life
• References
• Index