Schooling the 'vulnerable' child: Knowledge, innocence and the construction of childhood Seminar

This seminar explores the relationship between ‘childhood innocence’, and children’s highly regulated access to knowledge, particularly about sexuality – often considered ‘dangerous’ to children. This presentation highlights how censorship and moral panic, reinforced through discourses of childhood innocence impacts children’s early education around sexual knowledge and sexuality in formal education and family contexts. The regulation of children’s access to knowledge and knowledge production, essentially in the name of protecting ‘childhood innocence’, operates to define and regulate both ‘normative’ childhoods and adulthoods.