American schoolteacher Jessica Lahey published 'A Dress-Code Enforcer's Struggle for the Soul of the Middle-School Girl' in the popular North American publication The Atlantic on Valentine's Day in 2013. In her call for proper comportment she states, [W]hen I worry about students, it tends to be the girls. They are the ones I lose sleep over. I am not just worried about inches of exposed anatomy: I am concerned for their souls, their being, and their sense of self…. I don't blame them completely — it does happen fast … sixth graders are mere children, while eighth graders are burgeoning adults; their minds and bodies change more rapidly than they realize. During these chaotic middle years, they evolve from carefree kids to body-obsessed teenagers almost overnight. One day they can't pay attention in class because they're thinking about ponies and their pet guinea pigs, and the next they're incapacitated by daydreams about the opposite sex. (Jessica Lahey, 2014, accessed 10 November 2014)

This volume presents a ground-breaking collection of interdisciplinary chapters from international scholars which complicate, and offers new ways to make sense of, children's sexual cultures across co

Acknowledgments vi Introduction: Sexualization as a Social Problem 1 1 What is Sexualization? 19 2 (Hetero)Sexualization, Pathological Femininity, and Hope for the Future 49 3 Sexualized Tastes, Middle-Class Fantasies, and Fears of Class Contagion 78 4 Unmanageable Bodies, Adult Disgust, and the Demand for Innocence 107 Conclusion: Refl exive Reticence, Affective Response, and the Social Construction of Sexual Problems 129 Notes 139 References 155 Index 182

A prolific discourse on the sexualisation of girls has developed in the Anglophone west. Since 2006, at least six governmental policy papers, four think tank reports, ten parenting manuals as well as over a thousand newspaper articles have been published on the topic. Deconstructing popular feminist narratives, one finds that beneath calls for protection there often resides a deeply ambivalent construction of the middle-class white girl. I argue that these narratives are beset by a melancholic subtext, one that is fuelled by care and a desire for the future as well as an undercurrent of suspicion, anger and resentment.

Acknowledgments vi Introduction: Sexualization as a Social Problem 1 1 What is Sexualization? 19 2 (Hetero)Sexualization, Pathological Femininity, and Hope for the Future 49 3 Sexualized Tastes, Middle-Class Fantasies, and Fears of Class Contagion 78 4 Unmanageable Bodies, Adult Disgust, and the Demand for Innocence 107 Conclusion: Refl exive Reticence, Affective Response, and the Social Construction of Sexual Problems 129 Notes 139 References 155 Index 182

Archival data offers rich source material for examining the complicated, and often paradoxical, deployment of the sexual child within protection literature crafted in the Anglophone West during the early 19th century. Drawing on a psychosocial framework, I analyze the affective and ideological subtext of social purity narratives in order to understand how and why it came to feel so natural for reformers and their primary audience – middle-class parents. I argue that the social construction of the sexual child within this discourse rests upon longstanding ideological preoccupations and middle class anxieties regarding class and race distinction. Attempts to secure the myth of middle-class purity through the disavowal of the middle-class child’s autoeroticism functioned as a foundational fantasy in calls for protection. In the end, the construction of the sexual child within this protection movement was largely a figment of middle-class anxiety and defense, but one which nevertheless had and continues to have powerful cultural resonance.

Popular discourses on the problem of sexualisation are beset by emotively charged rhetoric that all-too-often promotes a visceral and affective response as opposed to reasoned and nuanced examination. Drawing on materials from the Social Purity Movement (1860–1910) as well as contemporary anti-sexualisation literature, this article argues that a historical-situated perspective may help authors, activists and advocates offer a more reflexive perspective on ‘the problem of sexualisation’. We forward a historically informed discourse analysis to render visible the longstanding, and deeply problematic, assumptions of childhood, gender and class at work in current concerns on sexualisation.

The issue of the sexualization of girls has made its way into scholalry and popular literature. The author discusses various media myths of hyper-sexulaity in young girls and its potential problems.

This article reproduces and discusses a series of blog posts posted by academics in anticipation of the report on commercialisation, sexualisation and childhood, 'Letting Children Be Children' by Reg Bailey for the UK Department of Education in June 2011. The article discusses the difficulty of 'translating' scholarly work for the public in a context where 'impact' is increasingly important and the challenges that academics face in finding new ways of speaking about sex in public.

Analysing primary materials from the USA, England and Australia, this paper explores the discursive production of childhood sexuality within the social hygiene movement. Attempts to shape and tame 'the native capacities' of impoverished children into socially acceptable, monogamous heterosexuals functioned as a central tenet of sexual hygiene reform. Habituation provided the pedagogical entry point for hygiene's normalising project. The paper concludes that the body of the child functioned as the rationale through which the proliferation of the increasing management of both the individual and the population was rendered credible within sexual hygiene narratives.

In his role as the director of the Sex Education Program for the American Social Hygiene Association, Thomas Galloway illuminated the gravity of sex instruction for teachers and other professionals in his 1924 text Sex and Social Health. An education in hygiene, due to its ability to shape and train the sexual impulse, supplied a threefold promise: perfection in the individual, the family, and the race. Distancing himself from earlier sexual reform movements, Galloway argued that science would provide a rational prophylaxis against the "misuses" of sex that resulted in "bodily disease and death, personal unhappiness and torture of the mind" as well as "disintegration of individual character, and in social distrust and decay" (126).1 For Galloway, the aspirations of sexual hygiene could be realized through the body of the child trained in a frank and scientific "sex-social education," because such instruction would create an "understanding of society" in the child, "so that certain favored forms of conduct and qualities [would] be strengthened and made habitual" (127). More generally, social hygiene transformed the locus of concern surrounding the child and its sexuality from a predominately individualistic, moral, and familial endeavor (as was the case in the social purity movement) to a "progressive" and public normalizing project. The concept of "normal" being deployed by this discourse was a definitively narrow and constricted one, as the movement sought to create and reproduce acceptable gender characteristics and reproductive monogamy in the child. This transition in approach was fostered through the legitimacy of medical expertise, the advancement of childhood as a "community" problem in need of a scientific cure, and their reliance on and contribution to the scientific examination of sexuality that took place at the turn of the century.KeywordsVenereal DiseaseChildhood SexualitySexual ImpulseRespectable MotherhoodSexual InstinctThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The Idea that a child should not have sexual Interests and experiences is fast being supplanted by the knowledge that lie does have them: that they are an expression or perfectly normal, healthy energies, and that while it is necessary to gain control over them, they should not be forcibly suppressed" (Renz & Renz 1935: 92).