ABSTRACT
Currently in the USA, UK and Australia, the issue of childhood and sexuality is as controversial as it is fascinating. Popular and professional discourses on these two phenomena abound in the current furore about the ‘sexualisation’ of the child through visual representation, especially in advertising copy but also in artistic texts, – the content of which is assumed to be threatening and destructive of the essence of ‘childness’ – its innocence. A crucial, yet unaddressed social and political consequence of this popular manifestation is that the child operates in abstraction – as a categorical object instead of a subjective being and in so doing legitimates social and/or moral intervention by its further endangerment. The complexity of children’s cultural, historical or subjective variability is obscured and silenced and this is particularly the case in discussions of sexuality.1 Instead, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in contexts as diverse as US feminist psychology, the Australian political left and Girlguiding UK, discourses of the child remain, predominantly, discourses of protection.2 But ensuring protection paradoxically ensures also the containment of children within intensifying surveillance and restriction, further affirming the dependence and helplessness of the child. Although contemporary concerns about the sexuality of children tend to emphasise dangers in the life of the child as the result of cultural innovations (e.g. the internet), the problem of childhood sexuality has a long history. In this chapter, we will briefly address dominant ideas about childhood sexuality to demonstrate a key distinction between pathology and normality in nineteenth-century sexological writings in Europe. In particular, we focus on the work of the physician and sexologist Albert Moll who offered an especially provocative additional element in this process – an argument for the equal normalisation of active and agentic sexual children. We propose that his work theorised about, and presented empirical evidence for, the existence of a ‘sexual life of the child’ expressed in terms of childhood experience rather than adult judgment. As such, Moll’s work offers a starting point from which perhaps to think more dispassionately about children and their sexuality as well as to contribute critically to contemporary discussions of sexualisation. Specifically, we suggest that a critical acknowledgment of agency in childhood sexuality could offer a way out of the contemporary ideological impasse that insists on protection of the child, while at the same time focusing on its perilous sexual potential.
