Parents’ encounters with ‘the sexualisation of childhood’: paying attention differently?

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents’ views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand ‘sexualisation’ qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to protect against and control, not least through the restrictive surveillance of girls’ development. But we use the concept of duration to analyse various, differing ways images childhood endure in parents’ experience. This leads us to argue parents’ relations to images of childhood complicate, rather than solely reproduce, discursive understandings of sexualisation as a unitary phenomenon threatening ‘normal’ child development. We contend that further mapping of the ways images of childhood endure in parents’ experience may help refuse their impossible positioning as guardians of child innocence, and generate more complex forms of attention to sexualisation, which challenge gendered and heteronormative societal assumptions about children’s development.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexualisation
• parents
• childhood
• duration
• temporality

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Dr Aoife Neary for her helpful comments on a previous draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Karl Kitching

Karl Kitching is Reader in Education Policy at the School of Education, University of Birmingham. His research and journal editorship focuses on the politics of education inequalities (race, religion, gender, sexuality), and children and young people’s school experiences of such inequalities. His most recent work includes the book Childhood, Religion and School Injustice (Cork University Press, 2020). Email: [email protected].

Elizabeth Kiely

Elizabeth Kiely is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy in the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork. Her teaching and research interests are in the fields of social policy, youth policy and practice, penal policy, research methods and women’s studies. E-mail: [email protected].

Debbie Ging

Debbie Ging is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communications at Dublin City University. Her research is concerned with articulations of gender in social media, in particular the Manosphere and online misogyny. Together with Prof. Eugenia Siapera, she has co-edited a special issue of Feminist Media Studies on Online Misogyny (2018) and an edited collection entitled Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Debbie has also co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of Bullying Prevention on Gender, Sexuality and Bullying with Dr. Aoife Neary in University of Limerick. She is a member of the National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource Centre and of the Institute for Future Media and Journalism (FuJo) in Dublin City University. Email: [email protected].

Máire Leane

Máire Leane is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy in the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork. Her research centres on analyses of how policy and legislation impact on people’s lives and she has a particular interest in the spheres of sexuality, gender and disability. E-mail: [email protected].