Handbook on Sexual Violence (75 page)

In order to better understand the nature of ‘childhood’ and the social space occupied by children the ‘new’ sociology of childhood challenges the primary socialisation thesis based on a rigid understanding of child development:

... developmental psychology and socialisation theory emphasised the ‘changing’ (i.e. unstable) state of ‘the child’ en route to the stable status of adult. The child was regarded as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’ ... this description of ‘the child’ as ‘passive’ bore little or no resemblance to the everyday lives and actions of children.

(James and James 2004: 27)

Although children are united by a set of common maturational experiences childhood is fragmented by the diversities of children’s everyday lives. Therefore there is not one ‘childhood’ but many ‘childhoods’. The two central propositions of the ‘new’ sociology are that childhood is a social construction and children have agency as social actors. Gender, class, ethnicity, culture and the societies lived in will affect a child’s early experiences yet children are not passive individuals but interact with their environment in ways that affect their lives.

This is not to deny that children are powerless in relation to economic resources and excluded from meaningful participation in social processes and institutions (Franklin 2002). Children, however, do have agency and competencies from birth. Optimal development requires opportunities for babies, young and older children to engage with adults in ways that respect and promote their competencies. For example, according to the Pikler/Gerber childcare practices (Petrie and Owen 2005) an adult should interrupt the play of a small child with the same respect given to a peer reading a newspaper. The bodily integrity of babies and toddlers should be respected and they should not be picked up without warning, especially from behind. There are small but significant ways through which adults can demonstrate respect for children’s competencies by creating choice. Gerber points out that parents who discourage thumb sucking but tolerate a dummy are actually exercising parental power. The thumb belongs to a child who can choose when to self- soothe, the dummy is in adult control and is given when the adult wants the

child to be quiet.

Respect for children is not a characteristic of complex affluent societies. It has been argued that children are perceived as ‘non-adults’ rather than young citizens (Qvortrup 2004). The term ‘child’ is often used as a universal, as in the title of this
chapter, ‘the child’. Are adults homogenised in the same way? Do we refer to ‘the adult’? Of course not, we differentiate between different adult cultures and conditions (James and James 2004). Terms associated with children are often used as terms of abuse for adults (Franklin 2002), such as when cognitive confusion in older people is called a ‘second childhood’, demeaning both children and older people. Adults are told to stop ‘being childish’ as a criticism of behaviour and low-status adults, such as female administrative staff, are sometimes called ‘girls’. How adults understand and engage with children shapes their experiences of being a child. How children respond to adults affects their behaviour in turn towards children. Adults wish to control the behaviour of children, children seek to follow their own desires and wishes consequently the ‘‘‘study of children’s lives . . . is essentially the study of child–adult relations’’ ’ (Mayall 2002, cited in James and James 2004, :

21) ‘ . . . Indeed all of these perspectives make ‘‘childhood’’, ‘children’’ and ‘the child’’ very slippery concepts indeed!’ (
ibid
.: 22).

Sex and the child

If concepts of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ are slippery then the addition of sex compounds the problem.

The innocence of childhood

Archard argues that the contemporary concept of childhood is asexual – a good childhood being equated with sexual innocence. ‘The sexual abuse of children is horrific precisely because it robs children of an innocence that is rightfully theirs’ (2004: 49). This can be seen in the recent review of research regarding the sexualisation of young people commissioned by the UK government (Papadopoulos 2010). The findings of the report are based on studies of children and young people undertaken by adults and key adult informants, with no involvement by children or young people themselves. It is argued that children are being sexualised prematurely and that this leads to relationship violence between peers and makes them vulnerable to sexual abuse by adults. All 36 recommendations focus on programmes aimed at children and young people designed to change their behaviour or control the images and messages they receive from the media. In fact concern about the adverse impact of technology on the sexual behaviour of young people is not new. In a talk entitled ‘Some Difficulties in Dealing with Girls’ given in 1916 by the Reverend Cree, Honorary Secretary of the Church Penitentiary Society, to a conference of Rescue Societies, it was reported as follows:

Now the difficulties which we experience with girls at the present time are not those difficulties which we experienced when I first took up this work some years ago. The home life is entirely different. The picture

palace has made a difference in even small towns and girls have no idea of discipline or obeying anybody... They have fallen into sin and are beginning to feel the earthly punishment of sin, they do not know what sin is at all.

(Barnardo’s Archive, D239/J4/6/1)

There have of course always been consequences for young people from unprotected or unwanted sex. One of the consequences of sex is pregnancy and this remains a contemporary concern as the UK, along with the USA, has the highest rates of teen pregnancy among comparable countries (OECD 2009). This correlates, however, with high rates of child poverty rather than the sexualisation of young people (UNICEF 2007, CPAG 2009).

Whilst there is adult anxiety about children and sex it is adult silence about

the sexuality of children that is most striking:

The concept of the ‘desired’ sexual life events in childhood and adolescence has received little attention from researchers... By contrast the topic of ‘unwanted’ sexual life events experienced by children and adolescents has been the subject of intense investigation.

(Browne 1995: 210)

Sexual development is the one developmental domain not considered in the UK child development checklists (Sheridan
et al
. 2001), current ‘child in need (sec. 17, Children Act (CA) 1989)’ assessment schedules (DoH, DfEE, HO 2000) or government guidance (DoH 2000) used by professionals charged with supporting and protecting children in the community. Health, education, emotional and behavioural development, identity, family and social relationships, social presentation and self-care skills are all considered to be dimensions of a child’s developmental needs (DoH, DfEE, HO 2000) but sex is only mentioned in passing in relation to sex education for older children. Guidance for professionals regarding sexual activity and children is presented in a pathological not developmental context. The current inter-agency child protection guidelines, for example, pay attention to extreme examples of sexual activity such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage and sexual exploitation (DCSF 2010). The agency or competencies of young people, who are, after all, experts in their own lives, are unrecognised. Yet without their insights and problem-solving capacities interventions are unlikely to be effective.

Young people are very aware of the negative images of sex with which they are presented and don’t find such a viewpoint helpful:

... in sex education and stuff... they talk about the worries more, but if they talked about the good side of it and not just the bad, we wouldn’t be sort of not scared but worried . . . we’ve just got all these negatives cos we’ve never done it – we don’t know positives.

(Year 8 young men, Bell
et al
. 2004: 32)

Young people want sex education that explores the emotional aspects of sex, such as how to begin and end sexual relationships and how to deal with the embarrassment of losing an erection rather than simply how to put a condom on a polystyrene penis (Bell
et al
. 2004). Sex education in Britain is usually aimed at secondary school students, unlike Sweden, for example, where sex education begins at eight years old. As Archard (2004) points out, powerful adults in contemporary affluent societies fear that giving children knowledge about sex will push them into sexual activity. Knowledge is power and gives children and young people choice. Without knowledge their agency is curtailed and their choices restricted.

Adults’ retrospective experience of childhood is in any case likely to differ enormously from the actuality of contemporary childhood. The lived lives of children and young people cannot be understood without their involvement and participation, yet young people frequently feel silenced and judged unfairly:

Teenagers are wrong. We’re criminals apparently. We don’t have an opinion because if we argue back with the police we’re under sixteen so we don’t have a right to say anything. We have to say it in a statement if the police have arrested us ... which just gets ignored anyway because we are under sixteen.

(School R, Year 11, Petrie
et al
. 2006: 27)

Considering sex, children and young people in isolation from all of the other environmental factors to which they are exposed reflects adult preoccupations rather than the actualities of children’s lives.

Child sexual abuse: a new phenomenon or an old story by another name?

Systematic attempts to rescue children from the sex industry were evident as early as the eighteenth century. Child Rescue Societies had been well aware of this trade in young girls for some time. For example, in the archive of the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children the common fate of foundlings is described as follows:

... if permitted to live, either turn them into the streets to beg or steal, or hire them out to loose persons.

(Thomas Bernard, London, 1799, cited in Pugh 2007: 28)

Almost a century later little had changed: May 1872, K.D., No.797

Parents living, brought to the Refuge by her mother for safety as her father . . . was for turning the girl out onto the streets . . . [father] has consented to K’s emigration.

(Barnardo’s Archive, D239 J2/1/1)

In 1885 W.T. Stead, Deputy Editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, famously exposed child prostitution by buying a 13-year-old girl from her mother.

Sexual activity, including penetration, between men and young women in their family was termed incest and was also well known to childcare charities in the early twentieth century:

The case was placed on the Auxiliary Boarding Out list in 1932 . . . There was a previous child F who was admitted at the age of one year and eleven months at which time L was only 3 mths old. The mother from an early age was brought up by a relative owing to the death of the maternal grandmother. When she was 12 years of age she returned to live with the maternal grandfather who was then 44 years of age and for the next five and a quarter years this man had incestuous relations with her. The girl’s father is the putative father of both children.

(Barnardo’s Archive, C2/5/6)

The sexual abuse of children in out-of-family care, a current concern, was evident in earlier periods too:

The above child stated that the foster-mother’s son exposed himself to her on three occasions. She was very frank in her statement and said she was terrified of him . . . S begged to be removed from Mrs P’s care. She said she was very fond of ‘grandma’ (as she calls foster-mother) but hates Uncle H. From the child’s statement I do not think actual intercourse took place, but I have arranged for the child to be medically examined immediately – WB, 30.8.1938.

The child was brought to me by Mrs B on the 31.8.1938 re interference by a man. The girl seemed quite sure the man only touched her vulva with his hand and as the girl greatly objected to an examination I considered it advisable not to make an examination – Dr F. (Barnardo’s Archive, C2/ 5/6)

The child was placed with another foster mother immediately. The trust the girl had in the Lady Visitor to tell, the willingness of the Visitor to believe, the respect the doctor had for the child’s body and the speed with which the situation was dealt with compare very well with more recent allegations of sexual abuse such as those involving Victoria Climbi´e
1
(Johnson and Petrie 2004).

Although incidents similar to those described above were known it was not an area of child welfare that attracted research or predictive and preventive theorising. Efforts were directed towards removing children from environ- ments that were considered morally as well as environmentally unhealthy. Children who had been involved in sexual activity were commonly considered to be morally damaged and without vigilant attention would slide once more into ‘a vicious and immoral life’ (Infant Care Committee 1916, Barnardo’s Archive D239/J4/6/1). From the 1970s onwards, however, a sea change occurred in the way in which sexual activity between adults and children was

understood, driven in part by the narratives of the survivors of child sexual abuse and feminist theorising (Woodiwiss 2009). Definitions of child sexual abuse were proposed that conceptualised the child as ‘victim’ rather than co- conspirator. One definition of child sexual abuse is ‘the involvement of dependent developmentally immature children and adolescents in sexual activities they do not fully comprehend, are unable to give informed consent, that violates the social taboos of family roles and which aim at the gratification of sexual demands and wishes of the abuser’ (Furniss 1991: 4). Broadly speaking this definition remains the same and underpins current health and welfare practices (Wilson
et al
. 2008). There are many social constructs within this definition, however, such as ‘dependent’, ‘development’, ‘immaturity’, ‘sexual activities’, ‘informed’, ‘consent,‘ ‘social taboos’, ‘family roles’, ‘gratification’ and so on that vary historically and culturally over time and from society to society.