Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood

Over the last few years there has been a revival of public concern about child sexual abuse. A heterogenous child protection movement has evolved, promoting preventative work in schools and initiating projects such as the children's help line, ChildLine. There has been a major public information campaign, articles about child sex abuse have appeared in most women's magazines and there have been several TV documentaries. Central to all these branches of the campaign is the challenging of various miconceptions about child sex abuse: misconceptions about the nature and frequency of the abuse, the type of perpetrator and the role of the family (Adams and Fay, 1981; Justice and Justice, 1979). The movement seeks to replace old 'myths' with new 'facts'. The myth/fact scenario, however, serves to obscure the political dimensions of the 'new' approaches to child sexual abuse. Facts do not 'speak for themselves' and there are many questions to be raised about the images of manhood, womanhood, motherhood and family life that are emerging out of the campaigns. Some of these questions have been discussed elsewhere (Kitzinger, 1988), but here I want to focus on the images of childhood promoted in the public education programmes and the reporting of child sexual abuse in the media.