A new paper published in the American Sociological Association’s journal, Sex & Sexualities, openly discusses the idea that “childhood sexual innocence is not a natural construct” and calls for “childhood sexual pleasure” to be centre to sociological debates.
The paper is deeply disturbing – and what is even more alarming is that it is not breaking new ground but building on a growing body of work published in peer reviewed journals. I recommend you read it in full here so that you can fully understand just how open these people are about their desire to upend the protective taboos that shield children from harm. It also needs to be understood that the ideology of this cohort – those who wish to dismantle our acceptance of childhood innocence – is increasingly influential in shaping what children will learn at school.
The paper is titled “Childhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins” and it is authored by Deevia Bhana, who holds a Research Chair at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Stefan Lucke, a postdoctoral researcher.
According to the analyst and evolutionary biologist Colin Wright the sociology journals are “normalizing the sexualization of children” – while he describes this paper as urging us “to see children as sexual beings”.
It shouldn’t take a sociologist to point out the obvious: it has long been taboo to see children as sexual beings both because that is a deeply creepy view to take of pre-pubescent human beings, and because undermining childhood innocence is a very dangerous objective given that children are always vulnerable in relation to adults. The power imbalance is simply enormous.
It is illegal to engage in any kind of sexual relations with children for very good reason, and considered child abuse to do so. The hypersexualisation of children and young teens is a source of significant concern because it is problematic and dangerous, and represents a form of violence against those who are not developmentally suited to behaviours that leave them in danger of exploitation and abuse.
It is hugely concerning, in my view, that arguments in favour of bringing “the idea of childhood sexual pleasure” in “from the margins” are increasingly appearing in peer-reviewed publications, relentlessly promoting an idea that children are – and complaining that “preadolescent children’s erotic capacities are routinely pathologized”.
Observe the language used in the paper: the authors are specifically talking about children, and openly suggesting that the rest of society – obviously not as enlightened as this cohort – are causing children to be “stereotyped as asexual and innocent”.
“Pleasure lies at the heart of sexuality,” we are told – and then informed that “research has long illustrated that pleasure and childhood sexuality are not inimical to each other”.
“Operating from the presumption of innate (sexual) innocence, many scholars and the public alike overlook children’s everyday pleasures, striving instead to banish childhood sexuality altogether”, they say, frowning at the lowbrow views of the straight-laced public who see children as innocent, when clearly that innocence – in their view – is just some sort of social construct.
“Asserting sexuality as key to the experience of childhood challenges narratives of sexual innocence,” the authors say. They “seek to disrupt dominant narratives that efface childhood sexual pleasure” and instead “re-envision children’s sexuality, traditionally consigned to the margins of research, to uncover its potential for radical possibility”.
There are many people already re-envisioning children’s sexuality, and seeking to uncover radical possibility in doing so. They are called paedophiles and child-pornographers and they belong in prison.
It is difficult to understand how these researchers cannot see the inherent danger in some of the statements they make.
“Asserting sexuality as key to the experience of childhood challenges narratives of sexual innocence and prevailing danger-only discourses while inviting a more affirmative, ethically attuned research agenda that includes the voices of children themselves. Regarding sexual pleasure, Regan postulates that we need to expand studies to address age, race, gender, and sexual orientation. Responding to this imperative, in this article we foreground childhood sexual pleasure as a vital yet persistently overlooked site of sociological inquiry.”
There appears to be a deliberate conflation between normal behaviour in children spurred by curiosity and sexual behaviour which society has rightly long-since decided should only take place between consenting adults. As has been done in previous papers, innocent playground games including kiss-chasing are seen as evidence of sexualised behaviours – with us adults accused of having expectations that “trivialize their acts as innocent play or ‘puppy love’, when – we are told – “the very normalization that shields these interactions from adult sanction simultaneously masks the gendered power relations they rehearse.”
Consider the following two paragraphs:
“In this regard, a focus on sexual pleasure and pre-adolescent childhood can be viewed as a vantage point through which structures of power become visible while illustrating new possibilities for sexual meanings and their change or development over time. As Tsing (1994:279) notes, margins are conceptual sites that give evidence to constraints and creative potentials as they rearticulate social categories that marginalize groups.”
“We aim to demonstrate that attending to pleasure is indispensable for understanding how childhood sexualities are lived, policed, and transformed. Childhood sexual pleasure is a terrain where domination is felt, contested, resisted, and sometimes overturned. Attending to that terrain enriches our understanding of how childhood sexualities are lived and offers new routes toward childhood sexual justice within policy and rights.”
That’s followed up with an approving recognition that “the theme of pleasure is gaining traction especially in Western and anglophone countries, drawing from feminist, queer, and decolonial theoretical framings (e.g. Berger Bolaza 2020)”.
Queer theory, which is not really about being gay or lesbian but about upending and destroying social norms (such as biological sex), is s driving force behind this thinking – and the authors note that “emerging research in the public health field has investigated the importance and causality of sexual pleasure for overall health and well-being” adding “but has fallen shy so far to theorize these effects for young children.”
They say: “Queer scholars built on power-knowledge understandings of sexuality to emphasize how pleasure can be a form of resistance to heterosexual dominance (Ahmed 2004; Butler 1990) and how the figure of the child is instrumental in such an analysis.”
As Colin Wright notes, they see childhood sexual innocence as a “colonial fiction” and want children to have vibrant sex lives. Could anyone, let alone academics and researcher in sociology, really be that naïve?
“Thus, letting children “do” sexual pleasure in their own way is vital for their sense of their own agency. Yet, only by tracing the circuits in which race, class, gender, and age secure or foreclose pleasure can we theorize children’s sexual worlds,” the authors state.
Within all the bafflegab is an extremely dangerous message – a continuation of an approach which seeks to ‘challenge, reinvent, and reinterpret’ childhood sexuality in a way that “entails instability and potential for change.”
As Wright observes: “This leads directly into education”, with the paper taking aim at sex education curricula for focusing on risks while “silencing discussions of desire”.
He says “it is difficult to overstate the danger of this line of scholarship. When academics reframe childhood as a site of “pleasure and erotic desires,” they are not just playing intellectual games. They are eroding the moral and cultural guardrails that protect children from predatory adults. Papers like this serve as permission structures that prepare the ground for activists, educators, and policymakers to normalize discussions of children’s supposed sexual agency and eventually to undermine the legal frameworks that recognize children as categorically unable to consent.
“By labeling innocence a “colonial fiction,” the authors smuggle in the claim that protecting children is not protection at all, but a form of oppression. This is an academic rationalization for abuse.”
I am in complete agreement with his assertion that “the fact that such arguments now appear in a flagship journal of the American Sociological Association should alarm everyone.” He says:
As we repeatedly see, what begins as abstract theorizing in niche corners of academia rarely stays there. It trickles down into education, policy, and culture. Every society worth defending recognizes that children cannot consent, and that preserving their innocence is a moral imperative. That this paper was published at all is a disgrace.
To be clear, the authors of this particular study are not Irish. But their reasoning echoes arguments already circulating in Irish universities and policy circles, where some researchers have directly challenged the concept of childhood innocence in the context of sex education.
In fact, as we have written previously on Gript, a guest speaker and workshop lead on DCU’s course for SPHE teachers argued that young children ‘do sexuality’, and repeatedly challenges “heteronormative” assumptions of “children’s presumed sexual innocence”.
Prof EJ Renold has written that her work seeks “to challenge the often heteronormative, highly gendered and ageist assumptions of young children’s presumed sexual innocence” in the media and in current “sex education policy and guidance.”
She has posited that there exists a “pervasive ideology of childhood innocence in the United Kingdom and throughout the Western world,” and that this ideology is “coupled” with a “conspiracy of silence surrounding children’s own sexual cultures.”
“Sexual innocence is, the professor quotes “something that adults wish upon children, not a natural feature of childhood itself.”
The professor has stated that her research and writing has been designed to “encourage what could be described as a ‘queering’ of childhood” – and argued that children aged 0-5 years express sexuality through sexual behaviours.
In addition, Dr Aoife Neary, an Associate Professor in sociology in the University of Limerick, who was co-opted by the NCCA to be a member of their Post-Primary Development Group for Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) Post-Primary Development appeared before a Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education in 2018 where she argued that changes to RSE must “Firstly .. take account of how fears around ‘childhood innocence’ act as a barrier in ways that don’t account for the capabilities of children or the wants of parents.
She has written that writes that “queer theory has long attended to how discourses of innocence constrain and restrict childhood”, quoting research that argues that the ‘rhetoric of innocence’ offers a refusal to ‘calculate the child’s future before it has the opportunity to explore desire’.
Also in the same sphere, Dr Leanne Coll, a lecturer in DCU who worked, with others, on the Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment module of the university’s SPHE course has written that she considers RSE as “a unique opening” to reconsider how childhood is viewed – and “to challenge the restrictive and harmful constructions of children as innocent, irrational and disembodied beings”.
The above comment came from a 2022 paper, titled Growing sideways: Re-articulating ontologies of childhood within/through relationships and sexuality education, on which Dr Coll was one of the authors, and which takes issue with “the myth of childhood innocence”.
If you are a parent and, like most people, you believe that childhood sexual innocence is something to protect, you should be aware that this dangerous and abhorrent desire to upend protective societal norms can effect policy, law, and what your children are learning at school. Do not ignore this loudly clanging alarm bell.