As controversy continues around the development and roll-out of a new SPHE curriculum for the Junior Certificate, Gript can reveal that two of the most high-profile academics seeking to shape sex-education in Ireland also endorse the idea of challenging the assumption of sexual innocence in children: writing about the “queering of childhood innocence”; the “problematic assumption that children are somehow free of sexual knowledge”; and the “problematic and paternalistic notions of ‘age appropriateness’” in regard to sex education in schools.
Both academics repeatedly refer to the work of EJ Renold – who, as Gript revealed, seeks to challenge the “assumptions of young children’s presumed sexual innocence” in the media and in current “sex education policy and guidance” – with one of the academics saying that Renold’s recommendations for RSE in Wales should “serve as an exemplary signpost” for Ireland.
Both academics have also either expressed criticism of the right of parents to remove their children from sex-education classes, or said that recommendations that parents be denied that right should be followed in Ireland.
Senior lecturer, Leanne Coll, is heavily involved in the SPHE Dublin City University course, which is funded by the Department of Education. The course has come under fire after a SPHE teacher attending the diploma modules said that students were presented with exercises which featured “fisting” and “rimming”; an animated video of a woman masturbating; and an activity which required writing a detailed sex scene with dialogue.
Another high-profile academic, Dr Aoife Neary, was a member of a panel convened by the National Curriculum body (NCCA) to review the SPHE curriculum for Irish schools. She was also invited to appear before an Oireachtas Committee on Education to give her on views on reforming sex education in schools.
Gript has previously reported that Renold, who is a professor with Cardiff University, was an “guest speaker and workshop lead” on the DCU course – but our investigation into this area has also revealed that at least two other other leading voices in reforming RSE/SPHE have reflected and/or championed Renold’s views challenging childhood 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.”
In a paper written for the NSPCC and Cardiff University, Renold argues that “‘sexualisation’ is frequently described as something that happens to children, rendering them passive victims and denying their role as active and critical meaning makers”.
She has written that presumptions of innocence in children were used to legitimate “whiteness”, “the family” and “heteronormativity” – and that thinking of childhood as being antithetical to sexuality was a “white, middle-class” concept.
She, and her co-editor on the book Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation, hoped that its contents “might inspire the next generation of childhood sexuality scholars to continue to ask questions that challenge and subvert what we think we know about children, childhood and sexuality” – and said that those in the area needed to be able to brave “braving the backlash when we endeavour to introduce notions of sexual pleasure, sexual rights or sexual citizenship”.
In another paper, she also repeatedly describes the interactions of children (aged 5-6) when at play at kiss-chasing or other games as “erotic” or “eroticized” when discussing what she refers to as “gendered/sexual power in young children’s (aged 5–6) negotiation of their own and others’ bodies in playground and classroom spaces”.
The themes of challenging the assumptions of childhood innocence and also challenging the idea of age-appropriate sex-education arise repeatedly in the work published by Leanne Coll and Aoife Neary who are amongst the most high-profile academics seeking to shape SPHE curriculum in Ireland.
DR AOIFE NEARY & THE “QUEERING OF CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE”
Dr Neary is an Associate Professor in sociology in the University of Limerick, and 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 Group
She 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.
“To be effective, comprehensive RSE must begin in early years — from as young as three — in partnership with parents,” she said.
Neary said that “the recent developments in RSE in Wales and the recommendations made by the expert panel outlined in Renold and McGeeney’s (2017) report should serve as an exemplary signpost for changes to RSE in Ireland” – and added that “many of their recommendations are echoed across my written submission”.
In the report linked by Neary in her opening statement in Leinster House, Renold and McGeeney, in arguing for changes to the Welsh RSE curriculum, insisted that children 0-5 express sexuality and that this is natural and healthy.
They say children’s “learning and experience of sexuality and relationships” begins “as soon as they enter the social world” – adding “frequently children and young people are viewed as ‘innocent’ or ‘pre-sexual’ beings, sparking unproven concerns within schools about the potential for SRE to ‘corrupt childhood innocence’ or ‘prematurely sexualise’ young people”.
“Yet expressing sexuality through sexual behaviours and relationships with others is a natural, healthy part of growing up. For example, for children aged between 0-5, behaviours such as holding or playing with own genitals, curiosity about other children’s genitals, interest in body parts and what they do and curiosity about sex and gender differences reflect ‘safe and healthy development’ (see Brook 2015)”, they wrote.
The report also insists that there should be a statutory requirement that children in Wales, aged 3-16, be taught RSE, and that parents should not be allowed to remove their children from the lessons.
Neary has published papers on topics around education including Marriage Equality Time: Entanglements of sexual progress and childhood innocence in Irish primary schools.
In the latter, she 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’.
In that paper she claims that “the persistence of notions of childhood innocence ensures that education about sexuality and gender diversity continues to be seen by school staff and parents as a much more explosive topic than bullying prevention”.
And she notes: “a truly queer approach to childhood studies” would also “involve a queering of childhood innocence itself” – claiming that “the age-appropriate timelines” articulated by some parents and teachers point “to the continuing underlying problematic assumption that children are somehow free of sexual knowledge until introduced to sexual knowledge by adults”.
The hope of Neary and her fellow researcher, Mary Lou Rasmussen, as expressed in their paper, is that “discussions about children, education and sexuality might be imagined otherwise”. They quote Prof Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on the ‘brutality of the ideal of the innocent child’ and “growing sideways”.
Bond Stockton’s book exploring children “growing sideways” was described as a “fascinating look at children’s masochism, their interactions with pedophiles and animals, their unfathomable, hazy motives (leading them at times into sex, seduction, delinquency, and murder), their interracial appetites, and their love of consumption and destruction through the alluring economy of candy”, according to a review on Duke University Press.
Neary references Bond Stockton’s idea of growing sideways again in another paper entitled, Trans children and the necessity to complicate gender in primary schools, in which she is critical of the “violence of gender norms” and discusses the need to reimagine “violently cisgendered standards of gender”.
In another paper (2023), Neary says that age-appropriateness is an arbitrary concept – and that “assumptions about childhood innocence” are “tightly regulating children’s access to knowledge about sexuality and gender”.
“In this way, we can see how ‘innocence’ ‘is something that adults wish upon children with the powerful concept of age-appropriateness having a distinct impact on the shape of sexuality education in primary schools,” she writes.
She says that insights from children are required to break through “the arbitrary politics of age” – and that otherwise, “adult assumptions and panic-driven moral judgements around concepts such as ‘childhood-innocence’ and ‘age-appropriateness’ will continue to hold back progress and fail in realising the basic human rights of all children to have their lives and families reflected and meaningfully included in sexuality education”.
In her submission to the Oireachtas Committee, Neary also argued that “given that many young people are already engaging in sexual activity”, she favoured exploring topics such as pleasure, reproductive rights, pornography in addition to consent and the use of social media/technology.
Neary says in her bio on the University of Limerick site that much of her work has been funded by the Irish Research Council, and that she leads and teaches teacher education modules.
DR LEANNE COLL: “PROBLEMATIC” NOTIONS OF AGE-APPROPRIATENESS
Dr Leanne Coll is a lecturer in DCU who worked, with others, on the Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment module of the SPHE course which teacher Mary Creedon has highlighted.
She 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”.
It discusses what Coll and her colleagues describe as “problematic and paternalistic notions of ‘age appropriateness’” which ‘hold back’ decisions regarding the curriculum for schools.
The paper explores how the “boundaries of childhood might queered” through engagement in RSE – and express concern that “despite insights and advances made by affirmative and radical educators-researchers” the dominance of ‘childhood innocence’ discourses” continues in debates “surrounding what RSE might be and become”.
Much like EJ Renold, who Dr Coll has spoken alongside, the paper also expresses the concern of Coll and her fellow authors regarding the “dominance of ‘childhood innocence’ discourses.”
The Growing sideways paper was produced, the authors said, due to their “collective concern that, despite insights and advances made by affirmative and radical educators-researchers, there exists a continued refusal of children’s rights and dominance of ‘childhood innocence’ discourses in many contemporary global debates surrounding what RSE might be and become”
The paper also states that “The myth of childhood innocence reflects the broad moral-political discomfort with, and hostility towards, children’s affective relations and their embodied gender and sexuality”.
It is critical of how “RSE in many contexts has been positioned as a vehicle to shield children’s innocence through risk-averse approaches” which fail to acknowledge young people’s “desires for radically different sexuality education experiences”.
And Coll and her colleagues argue that a ‘gap’ in sex education policy and practice is because of “a conservative and paternalistic discourse of childhood innocence” which they say regulates and constrains “children’s access to (sexual) knowledge and information”.
They are critical of “the comparative ease with which parents may withdraw primary-aged children in England”, saying it devalues RSE “as it applies to children under the age of 11” – “equating ‘age’ and ‘readiness’, and giving further weight to the importance of the ‘innocent’ (or ‘cocooned’) child.”
Dr Coll has a clear research focus on sexual education, primarily its reform and “queering.” Her work largely comes from the perspective of queer theory, a subset of critical theory. Queer pedagogical theories are, according to her 2018 work, Not yet queer, here and now for sexualities and schooling, “central to how she frames her thinking about teaching/(un)learning and how to interrogate concepts of normality embedded in the spaces, places, and everyday moments of schooling.”
In regard to education, “queering” means to upend or resist normative (commonly or widely held) conventions, practices, and understandings.
In a collaborative article, Rebel becomings: queer(y)ing school space with young people (2019), Coll and her co-authors write “it is impossible to ignore the increasing role that queer and feminist activism is having in schools.”
In the biographies of the authors of that article, she is described as an activist, educator and academic. A 2024 bio, says Dr Coll’s is concerned with the possibilities of co-productive and creative approaches to working with young people and educators to transform Relationships and Sexuality Education.
Dr Coll’s bio in Growing sideways states that she is focused on “potentials of co-productive, creative and action-oriented methodologies and transformative pedagogical approaches to sexualities, social justice and schooling.”
A pedagogical approach is generally defined as the methods educators use in the practice of teaching, from course design to content delivery. For SPHE teachers, as with all teachers, it would include content taught in the classroom.
Dr Coll and Dr Neary were asked to comment for this article. Neither have replied. The questions sent by Gript are replicated below:
To Dr Aoife Neary:
I would be grateful if you could answer the following questions:
1. Does ‘queering’ sex education involve seeing children as other than innocent? Can you explain further what you mean by ” a queering of childhood innocence itself”?
2. Do you think that parents would support the assertion that age-appropriate timelines contain a “problematic assumption” that children are “free of sexual knowledge”?
3. Do you oppose the right of parents to remove their children from SPHE/RSE/sex education lessons?
4. Do you believe that children aged 0-5 express sexuality?
5. Do you think that a “truly queer approach” should be adopted in regard to sex education for children in Ireland?
To Leanne Coll:
1. Does ‘queering’ sex education involve seeing children as other than innocent?
2. Do you think that parents would support the assertion that age does not equate to readiness?
3. You say that the “myth of childhood innocence” reflects a “hostility” towards children’s sexuality. Do you agree that safeguarding concerns – and a belief that age-appropriateness matters – is the primary motivator in retaining the assertion of childhood innocence?
4. Can you elaborate on what you mean by children’s embodied sexuality?
5. The paper referenced above also says the notion of “risk-safety” polices the boundaries of childhood in relation to recognising sexual agency (readiness) in children – and in relation to how best “balance children’s rights to protection and participation”. What do you mean by sexual agency in children? At what age do you think children’s sexual agency should be recognised? And what do you mean by children’s right to participation?
6. Is it your aim/the aim of the DCU SPHE course to “queer” the Irish sex-education curriculum?