The problem with protection: Or, why we need to move towards recognition and the sexual agency of children

Abstract

Drawing on historical and contemporary reform narratives, we highlight the implications of and problems with the discourse of protection and its conceptualization of childhood sexuality. Within the reform materials discussed, the child's sexuality is constructed as the result of a dangerous and socially unacceptable outside stimulus, and as a result, any realization of subjective sexual expression is rendered abhorrent and in need of adult intervention. It is our contention that sexual agency is unthinkable and ultimately unattainable within this model. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler we forward her theory of recognition as a framework for rethinking the sexuality of children. We argue that foregrounding recognition will help us create a cultural context that fosters sexual agency and in so doing promotes the sexual citizenship of children.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors of Continuum and our peer reviewers for their incredibly helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. Jean Baptiste Lamarck believed that the evolutionary process was not driven by chance but rather functioned progressively, increasing the complexity of the species towards perfection. Lamarck argued that this process could be aided by outside intervention. Drawing on this idea, hygienists believed that sex instruction could create socially acceptable gender and heterosexual traits in the poor. Hygienists espoused that correct sex instruction would foster the habituation character traits in the individual that would appear as if inspired by nature. In this regard, for sex hygienists, sex instruction differs conceptually from what we mean in our contemporary culture when we use the term sex education.

2. For more on how this goal was operationalized in the sex education curriculum in Australia see Robinson and Davies (2008).

3. The Australia Institute is an academic think tank dedicated to illuminating the taken-for-granted assumptions and implications of corporate capitalism in Australia. In addition to its reports on children, the organization has published reports on the environment, politics and poverty.

4. Owing to the constraints of time and space, we are offering very truncated summaries of three very complex movements. For more on each see Egan and Hawkes (2007, , Darby (2005), Warne (1999) and Powels (1987).

5. The recent scandal over Bill Henson's photographic work in Australia also offers another contemporary example, but owing to space limitations we will not delve into it in this current article.

6. For a complex discussion on the right to information for youth please see Levesque (2008).