English
Français
Deutsch
Español
;
Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality;
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies;
10(2), 141 - 177
In the 1970s the child protection lobby and feminism together spearheaded a painstaking interrogation and politicization of the social problem of child sexual abuse.
...
By the 1980s a powerful discourse of child sexual abuse was working hard to expose the widespread problem of incest in the patriarchal family and was vigorously contesting legal definitions of abuse that ignored or downplayed nonpenetrative sexual acts.
...
The myth of stranger danger was found ....
...
In a significant reversal of the common twentieth-century tendency of victim
blaming, the innocent, powerless, blameless, and unconsenting “victim” and “survivor” of sexual abuse became key cultural terms.
...
The “rediscovery” of child sexual abuse — perhaps more accurately called
a “reinterpretation” — has been profoundly important for Western culture.
...
This essay suggests that, despite admirable efforts to empower children and protect them from the harmful consequences of sexual abuse, they have in one particularly notable way been disempowered and disarmed by the child sexual abuse movement.
...
I argue that the discourse of child sexual abuse has expanded at the expense of a discourse of child sexuality. Rigorous attempts to expose the reality and dynamics of child sexual abuse have been aided, if not in part made possible, by equally rigorous attempts to conceal, repress, or ignore the reality and dynamics of child sexuality.
... ... ... ... ... ...
Queer theory offers an important corrective to the culturally prevailing linear and sequential model of age stratification and sexual development. In its psychoanalytic form, queer theory has inherited from Freud the idea that sexuality involves not a chronological unfolding of distinct stages of sexual development but an interminable interplay between these stages.
...
In a contemporary context of escalating anxiety and panic surrounding pedophilia and child sexual abuse, it is increasingly difficult, and perhaps for this reason all the more imperative, for queer studies to problematize the cultural and relational construction of age, child sexuality, and subjectivity.
In the 1970s the child protection lobby and feminism together spearheaded a painstaking interrogation and politicization of the social problem of child sexual abuse.
...
By the 1980s a powerful discourse of child sexual abuse was working hard to expose the widespread problem of incest in the patriarchal family and was vigorously contesting legal definitions of abuse that ignored or downplayed nonpenetrative sexual acts.
...
The myth of stranger danger was found ....
...
In a significant reversal of the common twentieth-century tendency of victim
blaming, the innocent, powerless, blameless, and unconsenting “victim” and “survivor” of sexual abuse became key cultural terms.
...
The “rediscovery” of child sexual abuse — perhaps more accurately called
a “reinterpretation” — has been profoundly important for Western culture.
...
This essay suggests that, despite admirable efforts to empower children and protect them from the harmful consequences of sexual abuse, they have in one particularly notable way been disempowered and disarmed by the child sexual abuse movement.
...
I argue that the discourse of child sexual abuse has expanded at the expense of a discourse of child sexuality. Rigorous attempts to expose the reality and dynamics of child sexual abuse have been aided, if not in part made possible, by equally rigorous attempts to conceal, repress, or ignore the reality and dynamics of child sexuality.
... ... ... ... ... ...
Queer theory offers an important corrective to the culturally prevailing linear and sequential model of age stratification and sexual development. In its psychoanalytic form, queer theory has inherited from Freud the idea that sexuality involves not a chronological unfolding of distinct stages of sexual development but an interminable interplay between these stages.
...
In a contemporary context of escalating anxiety and panic surrounding pedophilia and child sexual abuse, it is increasingly difficult, and perhaps for this reason all the more imperative, for queer studies to problematize the cultural and relational construction of age, child sexuality, and subjectivity.
;
How Children Learn About Sex: A Cross-Species and Cross- Cultural Analysis;
Arch Sex Behav (2015) 44:1059–1069,
Feb 18 2015
Scattered and not widely disseminated evidence from primatology, anthropology, and history of childhood sexuality support the hypothesis that throughout much of human behavioral evolution that human children have learned about sex through observing parental sexuality and then imitating it in sexual rehearsal play with peers. Contemporary theories of psychosexual development have not considered the possibility that young children are predisposed to learn about sex through observational learning and sexual rehearsal play during early childhood, a primate-wide trait that is conserved in humans but suppressed in contemporary contexts.
Scattered and not widely disseminated evidence from primatology, anthropology, and history of childhood sexuality support the hypothesis that throughout much of human behavioral evolution that human children have learned about sex through observing parental sexuality and then imitating it in sexual rehearsal play with peers. Contemporary theories of psychosexual development have not considered the possibility that young children are predisposed to learn about sex through observational learning and sexual rehearsal play during early childhood, a primate-wide trait that is conserved in humans but suppressed in contemporary contexts.
;
Pedophilia from the Chinese perspective;
Archives of Sexual Behavior;
31, 491–492
In traditional Chinese medicine, there has never been a mental disease called pedophilia (or an equivalent term), or homosexuality, or most of the other so-called sexual variations for that matter. Depictions of “child-romance” in ancient or modern Chinese literature are not difficult to find. Children are usually described as natural sexual beings and erotic stimulation and sex-play are seen as beneficial to their healthy development.
[...]
Some writers very vehemently question the capacity of children to give valid consent to sexual activity with adults. Despite their arguments, to the Chinese [...] the focus of discussions on the child consent issue in pedophilic activities is blatantly irrelevant and hypocritical.
[...]
There are certain occasions when the adults do respect the children’s wishes and ask for their consent, but only when the choices are within the adult acceptable range. [...]
Indeed, when it comes to a child’s sexual activity, the debate begins ...
In traditional Chinese medicine, there has never been a mental disease called pedophilia (or an equivalent term), or homosexuality, or most of the other so-called sexual variations for that matter. Depictions of “child-romance” in ancient or modern Chinese literature are not difficult to find. Children are usually described as natural sexual beings and erotic stimulation and sex-play are seen as beneficial to their healthy development.
[...]
Some writers very vehemently question the capacity of children to give valid consent to sexual activity with adults. Despite their arguments, to the Chinese [...] the focus of discussions on the child consent issue in pedophilic activities is blatantly irrelevant and hypocritical.
[...]
There are certain occasions when the adults do respect the children’s wishes and ask for their consent, but only when the choices are within the adult acceptable range. [...]
Indeed, when it comes to a child’s sexual activity, the debate begins ...
;
Childhood Sexuality & Paedophilia;
Gay Left A Gay Socialist Journal, Number 8, Summer 1979;
2 pp
I have argued that it is vital to see this issue in its class context, to see its place in the contradictory structures of society as a whole and its relation to the power of the ruling class. Seen in this way, it is evident that the questions of child sexuality and paedophilia cannot be solved except by a massive social and political struggle. This is in the first place the struggle of young people themselves, whose rebellion has made child sexuality a political issue.
The oppression of children and young people, and in a secondary way that of paedophiles, is a cruel oppression, and the struggle against it cannot be 'managed' or postponed.
I have argued that it is vital to see this issue in its class context, to see its place in the contradictory structures of society as a whole and its relation to the power of the ruling class. Seen in this way, it is evident that the questions of child sexuality and paedophilia cannot be solved except by a massive social and political struggle. This is in the first place the struggle of young people themselves, whose rebellion has made child sexuality a political issue.
The oppression of children and young people, and in a secondary way that of paedophiles, is a cruel oppression, and the struggle against it cannot be 'managed' or postponed.
;
Harmful to Minors;
304 pp.
In the book, Levine lambastes US laws concerning child pornography, statutory rape, and abortion for minors using a variety of studies and interviews with teenagers and adults alike (see Acknowledgments). Levine also analyzes abstinence-only sex education, which Levine considers counter-productive and dangerous.
The book also examines the terms "harmful to minors" and "indecency," which Levine considers to be umbrella terms for censorship, ...
In the book, Levine lambastes US laws concerning child pornography, statutory rape, and abortion for minors using a variety of studies and interviews with teenagers and adults alike (see Acknowledgments). Levine also analyzes abstinence-only sex education, which Levine considers counter-productive and dangerous.
The book also examines the terms "harmful to minors" and "indecency," which Levine considers to be umbrella terms for censorship, ...
;
The Cult of Childhood and the Repression of Childhood Sexuality
the understanding of childhood sexuality in our culture is deplorable at this The attitude of both Christians and even secular people seems to be growing more reactionary and paranoid [...]. These reasons seem to call for an attempt at this time to begin dealing with some of these critical issues.
[... ... ...]
The change in attitudes towards children in the past several centuries has produced the belief that children are nonsexual. This results in the reluctance to educate children sexually in the belief that they shouldn't engage in sexual activity and that they cannot reasonably consent to such activity with their peers or with adults. [...]
The negative sexual attitudes developed in childhood inevitably produce negative sexual attitudes and functioning in adulthood.
Children of all ages are sexual beings, capable of certain types and levels of sexual activity and enjoyment.
the understanding of childhood sexuality in our culture is deplorable at this The attitude of both Christians and even secular people seems to be growing more reactionary and paranoid [...]. These reasons seem to call for an attempt at this time to begin dealing with some of these critical issues.
[... ... ...]
The change in attitudes towards children in the past several centuries has produced the belief that children are nonsexual. This results in the reluctance to educate children sexually in the belief that they shouldn't engage in sexual activity and that they cannot reasonably consent to such activity with their peers or with adults. [...]
The negative sexual attitudes developed in childhood inevitably produce negative sexual attitudes and functioning in adulthood.
Children of all ages are sexual beings, capable of certain types and levels of sexual activity and enjoyment.
;
Crimen sollicitations: Tabooing incest after the orgy ;
Thymos;
4(2), 168,
Oct 01 2010
Late modernity's binary intrigue of child sexuality/abuse is understood as a backlash phenomenon reactive to a general trans-Atlantic crisis concerning the interlocking of kinship, religion, gender, and sexuality. Tellingly dissociated from 1980s gay liberation and recent encounters between queer theory and kinship studies, the child abuse theme articulates modernity's guarded axiom of tabooed incest and its projected contemporary predicament "after the orgy"-after the proclaimed disarticulation of religion-motivated, kin-pivoted, reproductivist, and gender-rigid socialities. "Child sexual abuse" illustrates a general situation of decompensated nostalgia: an increasingly imminent loss of the child's vital otherness is counter-productively embattled by the late modern overproduction of its banal difference, its status as "minor. " Attempts to humanize, reform, or otherwise moderate incest's current "survivalist" and commemorative regime of subjectivation, whether by means of ethical, empirical, historical, critical, legal, or therapeutic gestures, typically trigger the latter's panicked empiricism. Accordingly, most "critical" interventions, from feminist sociology and anthropology to critical legal studies, have largely been collusive with the backlash: rather than appraising the radical precariousness of incest's ethogram of avoidance in the face of late modernity's dispossessing analytics and semiotics, they tend to feed its state of ontological vertigo and consequently hyperextended, manneristic forensics.
Late modernity's binary intrigue of child sexuality/abuse is understood as a backlash phenomenon reactive to a general trans-Atlantic crisis concerning the interlocking of kinship, religion, gender, and sexuality. Tellingly dissociated from 1980s gay liberation and recent encounters between queer theory and kinship studies, the child abuse theme articulates modernity's guarded axiom of tabooed incest and its projected contemporary predicament "after the orgy"-after the proclaimed disarticulation of religion-motivated, kin-pivoted, reproductivist, and gender-rigid socialities. "Child sexual abuse" illustrates a general situation of decompensated nostalgia: an increasingly imminent loss of the child's vital otherness is counter-productively embattled by the late modern overproduction of its banal difference, its status as "minor. " Attempts to humanize, reform, or otherwise moderate incest's current "survivalist" and commemorative regime of subjectivation, whether by means of ethical, empirical, historical, critical, legal, or therapeutic gestures, typically trigger the latter's panicked empiricism. Accordingly, most "critical" interventions, from feminist sociology and anthropology to critical legal studies, have largely been collusive with the backlash: rather than appraising the radical precariousness of incest's ethogram of avoidance in the face of late modernity's dispossessing analytics and semiotics, they tend to feed its state of ontological vertigo and consequently hyperextended, manneristic forensics.