“Dangerous Adolescence”: Sexuality and Disability of Institutionalized Children in a Chinese Orphanage

Abstract

This ethnographic study investigates how childcare workers view and react to behaviors of disabled institutionalized children which they consider sexual in a Chinese orphanage. Presuming them primarily as “asexual” subjects based on a biomedical understanding of disability and childhood, the childcare workers are anxious to find signs of sexual consciousness in some of these children. Labelled as either “dangerous” or “abnormal”, the sexually conscious candidates are subject to physical punishment and denied access to sex information. In spite of this, they continue to have sexual feelings and engage in sexual behaviors, and some may even develop specific strategies to fulfill their own needs. The interactions between childcare workers and disabled children exemplify the tensions between a disapproving environment for sexual expression and the sexual agency of disabled people in China. The findings may have wide policy implications for the state, as well as organizations of children’s rights and disability rights, to promote ideas and measures that enable disabled institutionalized children to develop into sexually expressive and fulfilled persons.