Who are you kidding?

Abstract

This chapter draws on media coverage, leaflets, education videos, books, academic articles and survivors personal testimonies to explore how childhood is constructed and reconstructed within the contemporary pro-child debates. It also explores how these constructions affect the understandings of child sexual abuse as a problem and our visions of a solution. The chapter discusses the discourses of childhood innocence, passivity and innate vulnerability. It introduces and questions one of the main alternative set of discourses the discourse of empowerment in which children are viewed as socialized into victimhood and capable of escaping it. Instead of presenting the child as an active participant in the relationship the bulk of the recent pro-child publicity shows the child as a helpless victim of adult sexual demands. Therefore, the idea that children have the ability to stop abuse, or that vulnerable children can have this vulnerability erased by judicially applied ego-enhancing education, is also a way of selling sexual abuse prevention programmes.