Sexualisation and the Discursive Figure of the Child

Abstract

Purpose

This paper sets out to analyse both the dominant constructions of childhood and the prevailing sexual scripts embedded in international reports on the sexualisation of childhood debate.

Approach

Four international reports from the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States are analysed using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis whereby the sexual subjecthoods made available to children and images of childhood itself can be interrogated.

Findings

This paper finds that a broad-brush approach to sexualisation renders consumption and embodiment as ‘sexualised’ and problematic. Gender remains unproblematised and sexuality as an issue is palpable by its absence. The reports show a lack of attention to the voices of children and a denial of their moral agency. Innocence is constructed as a fundamental yet unstable feature of childhood which requires protection from the insidious external forces of 21st century sexual cultures. Childhood thus functions as a motif for the state of society as a whole.

Value

Identifying the dominant constructions of childhood, sexualisation, gender and sexuality, by analysing how these concepts are defined, understood and talked about within international responses to the issue of the sexualisation of childhood, light can be shed upon the sanctioned ways made available to ‘do’ sex, gender and sexuality and to ‘be’ a child, a boy, a girl, a ‘sexual’ or a ‘sexualised’ being. In addition, this enables evaluation of the ways in which images of the child are mobilised for policy and political agendas and how childhood functions as both a barometer for, and symbol of, the well-being of a society.

Citation

Clark, J. (2014), "Sexualisation and the Discursive Figure of the Child", Soul of Society: A Focus on the Lives of Children & Youth (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 18), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 173-197. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-466120140000018018