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Is more child participation always better for child rights advocacy? That is the question I examine, in this chapter, as I analyse advocacy for child rights in India that led to the adoption of the landmark Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (the ‘POCSO Act’). Through ethnographic fieldwork with non-government organisations (NGOs) and a narrative analysis of interviews and awareness material, I tell the story of how a combination of adult-led but child-participatory advocacy brought about a new, de-tabooised way of talking about child sexual abuse. By applying the theoretical lens of ‘critical child rights studies’, I suggest how we can conceptualise a critical perspective on child participation in child rights advocacy. First, adults’ multiple and, at times, conflicting roles in children’s lives – as advocates, protectors, and abusers – needs to be recognised. Second, children should participate in advocacy activities where they can have meaningful influence and be part of the conversation. This may not necessarily occur in adult spaces, where their participation remains token. Finally, I argue that child participation should never turn into a responsibilisation of children.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ethical and leadership challenges arising from revelations of child sexual abuse in the 1970s and 1980s at an Australian Satyananda Yoga ashram. This paper responds to the Royal Commission’s exposition of child abuse at an Australian yoga ashram and was the first such investigation involving a faith-based organisation outside the churches.

This paper provides a critical cultural analysis of the findings of the Australian Government Royal Commission into child abuse in relation to Satyananda Yoga. Particular practices and values associated with Satyananda Yoga may have served to foster and mask widespread abuse.

This paper should generate discourse within the yoga community at both the grassroots level and within the upper hierarchy. It outlines the importance of critical awareness among teachers and students. It is hoped that the paper will help to catalyse a reparation process for survivors of child sexual abuse. It is also suggested that yoga academies re-evaluate practices and values that have been used to justify abuse.

Satyananda Yoga’s ethical and leadership challenges warrant broader research than was undertaken for this paper. The still unresolved matter of reparations for survivors of abuse needs urgent consideration.

Purpose – This study examined the often minimized relationship between child sexual abuse and the body and asked: How, and by what means, is the body experienced by children after sexual abuse? The purpose of this work is to present children's interpretations of embodiment in their own words.

Methodology – Data include 10 years of semi-structured videotaped forensic interviews of children and youth seen for reported cases of sexual abuse. Utilizing an analytic-inductive method, children's verbal reports of sexual abuse were examined from a symbolic interactionist perspective in terms of re/productions of the body.

Findings – Discourse analyses revealed how children evaluated the body and negotiated related emotions. Youth ascribed meaning to the body as both materiality and social interaction. The body was experienced as object and somatic presence, as a marked or stigmatized body, and as a means of control and resistance. Through their own words, youth revealed how violence draws attention to embodiment, power, and subjectivity.

Value – Despite increased public and policy attention, limited research has explored how children describe their experiences of sexual abuse. This study addresses this serious gap in the literature by approaching the sexually abused body as a critical site of social meaning and social order. Of significant import, this work brings children's voices to the forefront; it shows how youth actively negotiate embodiment and expands work with child participants. It will be of value to practitioners working with children and to scholars in the fields of sexual victimization, sociology of the body and children/childhood.

Purpose – This chapter explores claims of social problem workers in criminal justice and mental health with regard to how to manage males who are identified as or self-identify as both victims and perpetrators (V/Ps) of sexual abuse. We also examine the claims of V/Ps with regard to how they manage their dual status.

Methodology – This chapter is based on an action research project on intervention services for V/Ps in Ontario, Canada. Our data include literature reviews, interviews with intervention professionals, V/P narratives, and a transcription of a stake-holder's workshop.

Findings – Intervention workers whose mandate is offender risk management state they give little attention to victimization-related issues of V/Ps, whereas workers in victims’ services often state that adult V/Ps are not covered under their mandate. This suggests that the status of offender is the master status for adult V/Ps. Our V/P narratives recount efforts at self-management and some V/Ps and intervention professionals have expressed interest in the possibility of developing programs specially designed for V/Ps.

Practical Implications – An examination of issues related to the dual status of sexual abuse V/Ps suggests that V/Ps may require special services that cannot be provided by existing programs for perpetrators and victims.

Originality/Value of Paper – Studies of social problem work might benefit from considering not only professionals’ viewpoints but also those of their clients. This chapter explores new intervention models (GLM and RJ) that incorporate ethical concerns based on a rights perspective (“moral repair”) and the experiential concerns of V/Ps.

In May 2012, nine men from the Rochdale area of Manchester were found guilty of sexually exploiting a number of underage girls. Reporting on the trial, the media focussed on the fact that eight of the nine men were of Pakistani origin, while the girls were all white. It also framed similar cases in Preston, Rotherham, Derby, Shropshire, Oxford, Telford and Middlesbrough as ethnically motivated, thus creating a moral panic centred on South Asian grooming gangs preying on white girls. Despite the lack of evidence that the abuse perpetrated by some Asian men is distinct from male violence against women generally, the media focus on the grooming gang cases has constructed a narrative in which South Asian men pose a unique sexual threat to white girls. This process of ‘othering’ South Asian men in terms of abusive behaviour masks the fact that in the United Kingdom, the majority of sexual and physical abuse is perpetrated by white men; it simultaneously marginalises the sexual and domestic violence experienced by black and minority ethnic women. Indeed, the sexual abuse of South Asian women and girls is invisibilised within this binary discourse, despite growing concerns and evidence that the men who groomed the young girls in the aforementioned cases had also perpetrated domestic and sexual violence in their homes against their wives/partners. Through discourse analysis of newspaper coverage of these cases for the period 2012‒2018, this paper examines the British media's portrayal of South Asian men – particularly Pakistani men – in relation to child-grooming offences and explores the conditions under which ‘South Asian men’ have been constructed as ‘folk devils’. It also highlights the comparatively limited newspaper coverage of the abuse experiences and perspectives of Asian women and girls from the same communities to emphasise that violence against women and girls remains an ongoing problem across the nation.

In this chapter, an exploratory analysis of the problematic sexual behaviours committed by elderly men against female minors is presented. Drawing from life-course theoretical perspectives on later life offending, this study examined the criminal history, sexual attraction towards the underage, perceived vulnerability of the juvenile, relationship with the girl-child prior to the abuse, and violence and sexually abusive tactics of the older offenders. Qualitative data were collected from 19 child sexual offenders in Lagos state prisons that were 60 years and above at the time they committed the offence, and a thematic analysis of the narratives was carried out. Findings indicate elderly offenders were attracted to female juveniles due to their perceived ‘innocence’, ‘commitment to relationship’, ‘sincerity’ and ‘youthfulness’, which suggest considerable level of rationality in their selection of victims. Offenders were found to use physical force and violence to subdue their victims, while threats, gifts and appeal were used to prevent victims from reporting. These findings have important practical and policy implications if the scourge of child sexual abuse is to be addressed in the country.

In this chapter we reinvigorate socialization as a theoretical framework for studying gender and sexuality, and we do so by focusing attention on the sexual socialization of young children. We provide an overview of the literature on the sexual socialization of young children. We discuss why researchers should be interested in childhood sexuality, and the role of parents, peers and schools, and the media in sexual socialization. We also address three overarching issues: methodology, the hegemony of heterosexuality, and child sexual abuse. Throughout, we suggest and organize some of the empirical questions that form a research agenda for those interested in this topic.

Purpose – The crime of child sex offending or child sexual abuse is a serious social problem. Since the 1990s, it has been popularly conceptualised as a ‘paedophile threat’ and has become one of the most high-profile crimes of our times. This chapter examines the social construction of paedophiles in UK newspapers and its impact on official regulation of child sex offenders.

Methodology/approach – Discourse analysis is used to establish how newspaper language produces common discourses around child sex offenders. Documentary research of government legislation and law enforcement helps analyse the ways in which official regulation is informed by media discourses.

Findings – Newspaper discourses around child sex offenders construct the paedophile as a distinct and dangerous category of person. This media figure informs government legislation and law enforcement in several ways. For example, discourses around paedophiles necessitate and legitimate punitive legal trends regarding child sex offenders and facilitate the conceptualisation of specific laws.

The conceptual shift towards understanding child sexual abuse through the figure of the paedophile has several detrimental consequences. This chapter offers a critique of contemporary media and governmental/legal discourses, pointing to misrepresentation, sensationalism, demonisation and insufficient child protection.

Value – This research indicates that discourses and conceptual shifts around child sex offenders are driven by the media but have come to be accepted and perpetuated by the government and the law. This dynamic not only illustrates the power of the media to set agendas but raises questions regarding the adequacy of official governance informed by media discourses.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of internet users attempting to report and prevent online child sexual exploitation (CSE) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the absence of adequate intervention by internet service providers, social media platforms, and government. The chapter discusses the history of online CSE, focusing on regulatory stances over time in which online risks to children have been cast as natural and inevitable by the hegemony of a “cyberlibertarian” ideology. We illustrate the success of this ideology, as well as its profound contradictions and ethical failures, by presenting key examples in which internet users have taken decisive action to prevent online CSE and promote the removal of CSAM. Rejecting simplistic characterizations of “vigilante justice,” we argue instead that the fact that often young internet users report feeling forced to act against online CSE and CSAM undercuts libertarian claims that internet regulation is impossible, unworkable, and unwanted. Recent shifts toward a more progressive ethos of online harm minimization are promising; however, this ethos risks offering a new legitimizing ideology for online business models that will continue to put children at risk of abuse and exploitation. In conclusion, we suggest ways forward toward an internet built in the interests of children, rather than profit.

Purpose – Child abuse is widely accepted as having a negative effect on children's academic achievement. It is less clear why this relationship exists. Current explanations of the abuse-academic achievement connection rely on psychological theories that overlook the impact the abuse has on children's developmentally relevant social circumstances.

Methodology/approach – Using data from the National Survey of Adolescents (NSA), a nationally representative sample of youth between the ages of 12 and 17 years old, a social capital perspective is implemented to show how abuse impacts academic achievement.

Findings – Children victimized by physical or sexual abuse are more likely to join deviant peer groups, which in turn leads to increased levels of delinquent behavior by the individual. Both the “negative” social capital of the peer group and the deviant individual behaviors explain away much of the disparity in performance between abused and non-abused children and contribute to the overall understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the effects of abuse.

Originality/value of chapter – These findings provide evidence of the impact abuse can have on children's well-being and outlines social mechanisms that connect abuse victimization to children's outcomes.