Encounters with childhood [Tony Moore]

"Threats to childhood innocence have been the subject of a succession of moral panics: the commercial exploitation of children; physical and behavioural disorders; the early sexualisation of pre-adolescent ‘tweenies’; exposure to media violence and internet porn; child abuse and neglect; and most alarming of all, sexual predation by paedophiles. The other side is a middle-class obsession with perfecting the childhood experience, as ‘helicopter’ parents with fewer children regulate a regime of value-adding activities and tuition. Faulkner asks if adults in fact fetishise the innocence of children, to compensate for their own feelings of alienation and powerlessness." [mijn nadruk] (vii)

[Wat een onzin, het idee dat pedofielen het meest alarmerend zijn in de bedreiging van kinderlijke onschuld. ]

The contemporary ideal of pristine innocence is revealed to be verging on fantasy. What happens to the many children who fail to meet its exacting standards? In much of the world children must work to support their families, and routinely run the gauntlet of poverty, famine, natural disasters, war and tyrannical government.(viii)

(1) Chapter 1 - Why do we worry about children?

"We are aware of the risks posed to children today because these concerns are continually worked over in our newspapers and weekend magazines, on radio and television, and even in parliament. In an increasingly risk-averse and litigious world, ever more attention is paid to the dangers children face in the schoolyard, the local playground and the amusement park. Lately, even the grocery aisle is a source of anxiety – a gingerbread house that lures children to hyperactivity, obesity and an early grave. Children playing in the street outside the family home are prey to roving paedophiles, children watching television are vulnerable to cynical advertisers and suggestive music videos, and children surfing the internet are liable to stumble across pornography, virtual stalkers or bullies. Our modern world appears positively hostile to children, and parents feel acutely vulnerable in the face of the corrupting influences of contemporary culture." [mijn nadruk] (2)

[Dat is het beeld, maar klopt dat beeld ook? Dat moet dan de volgende vraag zijn. ]

"What is perhaps questionable about the focus on children’s vulnerability is our rigid understanding of childhood as unworldly, incapable and pure. Prevailing opinion is not only that children are at risk, but also that childhood itself is in crisis, that children are being denied their childhood, an increasingly secluded, sentimentalised, innocent experience to which they have a special right."(2)

[Perhaps?]

"Resentment of children is something to which most adults do not freely admit. Perversely, it usually comes into the open only in relation to children whose circumstances place them beyond the scope of innocence. A barely hidden resentment of teenagers and underprivileged children is directly proportional to the overvaluation of innocence. The importance of innocence permits ignorance of, for instance, the mortality rates of adolescents, which are today fourfold that of small children." [mijn nadruk] (3)

"No scandal is greater than the possible violation of a child’s innocence, and the more abstract this violation, the more vociferous is Australians’ outrage (take the Bill Henson controversy over the portrayal of naked children, which will be discussed in chapter 6). It is innocence that is at issue, and not only children’s, but an innocence that also represents a national way of life and a relationship to other nations."(3-4)

[Ze schildert de situatie in Australië, ze zegt niet dat ze het er mee eens is. Ze probeert uit te leggen waarom die nadruk op de onschuld van kinderen zo groot is in Australië door naar de ontstaansgeschiedenis van het land te kijken. En ze laat ook de hypocrisie zien van dat beeld. Onschuld gol;d blijkbaar niet voor de kinderen van aboriginals, en ook nie voor de kinderen van arme gezinnen.]

"More locally, we deem underprivileged children threats to childhood innocence more generally, as bad seeds from whom we need to quarantine our own, more fortunate children."

"If this cultural trend is left unchecked, and children come to be valued only by virtue of their innocence, we risk losing the capacity to value them in any other respect. It is critical that we begin to explore alternative avenues for understanding and experiencing children. It is hoped that this book will contribute to such a process."(6)

"To maintain children’s innocence, we invent internet filters, censorship regimes and abstinence-only sex education. We rush past billboards advertising longer sex hoping the children won’t ask awkward questions. We fear children are not ready developmentally to encounter ‘adult themes’. A contamination anxiety is at work here, and a purity fetish for childhood innocence. No everyday issue can be allowed to intrude upon this purity: children must neither know nor experience the kinds of thoughts and feelings the rest take for granted." [mijn nadruk] (9)

"In fact, this narrative structure – and the order of values it sup- ports – places children always on the verge of a fall. It allows them to be either angels or fallen angels, either innocence personified or in need of a good spanking. It ignores the broad range of behaviours, opinions and appearances that belong to children but which jar against the ideal of innocence. When adults value the innocence children represent over actual children, they come to downplay aberrant childhood experience so as to maintain this faith. They read behaviour that falls outside the strict parameters of innocence as morally ambiguous – even tending towards evil. This perverse effect of applying the ideal of innocence to children often passes unnoticed. Disadvantaged children, for instance, are regularly depicted as bestial little deviants and prescribed harsh discipline in the guise of tough love. By dressing our children as fairies or in Anne Geddes’ originals we momentarily forget how much they enjoy playing in mud, fighting, nose picking and masturbating." [mijn nadruk] (9)

"There must always be failures, children who fall short of such a demanding ideal. A commitment to upholding the innocence of childhood, then, may not best serve children’s interests."(10)

[Goed geformuleerd. Ze mag blijven. :-) ]

"Second, by coupling imagination with childhood we not only trivialise the imagination, but we also trivialise children. We are led to regard children’s experiences as less real, and as less important, than adults’ – even as we elevate them above the pettiness of everyday life. By hiving off imagination from reality – and then fusing it with an innocent, sentimentalised childhood – we reinforce the idea that children are too fragile for the harsh vicissitudes of daily life." [mijn nadruk] (14)

"This centrality of the image of innocent childhood is why attempts to simply deflate apocalyptic claims about the sexualisation of children, the ubiquity of paedophilia or childhood obesity make such little impact on levels of public anxiety (see chapter 2)."(14-15)

(19) Chapter 2 - Consuming the innocent - Innocence as a cultural and political product

"For their parents and the pageant industry these children can be lucrative earners. This presents cognitive dissonance. Innocence is not supposed to be useful; it is a value that most feel should transcend profit or personal gain."(19)

"The aggressor against children’s ‘natural’ innocence is often seen to be commercial interests and a commodity culture that cheapens and exploits children’s beauty. If we look closer, however, we find that an increasingly ambiguous childhood innocence is the hottest commodity on the market."(20)

"Whatever constitutes children just being children is an empty enough prescription that child pageants can claim to fill it."(21)

"Yet despite the din of voices expressing concern for children, once the sound is turned down what we see is a fascination with the sexual child. The child has become titillating to the point where the paedophile’s gaze is privileged over all others, as we search for signs of sexual precocity in every brochure advertising preteen fashion. Paedophiles represent a risk to children, to be sure, and recent revelations about the scope of child abuse in the church and other institutions are alarming. But to foreground paedophilia in discussions of children’s reception of media seems at best melodramatic, at worst to trivialise the experience of victims of actual child abuse." [mijn nadruk] (22)

[Dat lijkt mij toch ook.]

"For critics such as Hamilton, Rush and Devine, children are prone to inflame sexual feeling in adults unless restricted to specific contexts that frame them as innocent, contexts that are apparently disappearing, connected as they are with our own lost childhood – a bygone era before the world was corrupted by violence, sex and greed. In a climate in which a fully clothed child pictured slumped in a leather armchair is sexualised because she is in an adult setting, we must conclude that the readiness to view children as sexual is not only the affliction of paedophiles and pornographers." [mijn nadruk] (22-23)

[Een vorm van dingen belangrijk maken. Dat is niet zonder dubbele bodems, zoals Faulkner kritisch opmerkt.]

"We all hang out for our fix of childhood innocence."(28)

"Just as Gertie’s, or Bindi’s or even JonBenét’s innocent image is the product of hard graft and social mythology, the innocence of our own children is also manufactured."(28)

"Quite paradoxically, the site of much anxiety about threats to the innocence of children is also recognised as the foremost privilege of childhood: play."(29)

"Yet since the first institution of a cleavage between adult and juvenile modes of recreation, play in children’s lives has also been a principal object of worry and surveillance. Where children play, with what and whom, and the safety of play are often points of contention, for children and society as a whole. Presently, we worry that, for instance, children’s play is not active enough, that children are too absorbed in virtual worlds that do not sufficiently exercise the body or the mind and that these games promote violence and erode morals." [mijn nadruk] (31-32)

"Today we are so used to children being kept apart that their presence in public causes anxiety. Public space is adult space. Divided between adult leisure spaces such as cafés, bars and shopping centres, public space is now largely in private – commercial – owner- ship that is unwelcoming of children and youths. While teenagers are pushed to the margins – to car lots, parkland and alleyways between buildings – or to niche commercial spaces such as arcades, younger children must be under constant adult supervision. Even walking alone to school is now frowned upon; parents deliver their children, courierlike, door to door. These concerns for children’s safety sit alongside the fear of adolescent delinquency. The young person sighted in public is recognised only as at risk, or as the risk itself." [mijn nadruk] (33-34)

"The ideal of innocence provides the illusion that something exists beyond the compromise and disappointment of daily life – a beyond that bestows this life with a greater meaning and purpose. Yet, tragically, to the extent that we exalt the innocent, they will be dragged back into the commerce of everyday life by our desire for innocence. Profanation in this instance is a fait accompli because by making a fetish of childhood innocence, we invite exploitative commercialisation, even predation, of children. The fantasy of innocent childhood is unsustainable because our very desire for it also defiles it. And we now witness, through the commercialisation of the child, the unravelling of that enchanting fantasy. No wonder we feel anxious."(42)

"Childhood innocence depends upon the observance of a fundamental distinction between adulthood and childhood. There are behaviours, interests and appearances that seem naturally to belong to childhood, just as there are behaviours, interests and appearances that characterise adulthood. It would seem that the very fabric of our society depends on maintaining these modes of human life as distinct. But lately, discussion papers, a number of books and a deluge of media reports raise alarm that the difference between adulthood and childhood (and so the health of our society) is at risk. The basic argument is as follows.
• Premise 1: Children are exposed to a variety of adult material, access to which parents cannot control.
• Premise 2: Children are damaged by this exposure because they are developmentally incapable of processing sexual information.
• Conclusion: Government should regulate advertising, the whole range of products marketed to children and all forms of media they are likely to access.
• Suppressed conclusion: Panic!"(43)

[Maar de premisse ervóór is dus dat die scheiding tussen de wereld van het kind en de wereld van de volwassene er is — en die scheiding is er nooit geweest — en dat kinderen onschuldig zijn — en ze zijn nooit onschuldig geweest. Paniek inderdaad.]

"If we shift our focus we might see that the scandal is not so much the sexualisation of children as the infantilisation of adults who feel encumbered by others’ demands and the dangers of modern life (including sexuality)."(45)

"The upshot of the myth of childhood innocence – and the negative evaluation of political society that it entails – is that we desire to live as the child we fantasise. But such a life of ease is impossible, even for children."(46)

(50) Chapter 3 - The communal fantasy and its discontents - The child’s place in political community

"The concern of the present chapter is the influence of a history of Western political thought upon how we understand political community and identity, and in turn, on the kinds of policy decisions and value judgements made today with respect to children."(51)

"The modern idea of the child – as innocent, and for this reason valuable – was formalised and given momentum in the liberal thought of John Locke. This idea developed in the context of competition between notions of what it is to be human. The terrain of childhood, in this context, emerged as representative of humanity in its purest and starkest forms."(68)

"This understanding of innocence as a freshness of perspective and humanity’s new dawn is further romanticised by Rousseau, who deploys the child in his battle against a decadent society."(70)

[De bespreking van filosofen als Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls vind ik totaal overbodig. De auteur is zelf filosoof, misschien vandaar. Ik vind het niet erg nuttig.]

(78) Chapter 4 - Disciplining innocence - Knowledge, power and the contemporary child

"Childhood innocence is often equated with a state of unworldly naivety considered both precarious and enviable. Western culture values this blissful ignorance in our children so much that enormous economic, emotional and rhetorical resources are invested in maintaining it, in protecting children, that is, from the kinds of knowledge and experience that make the rest of us feel world weary. Through the carefully crafted ignorance fostered in children, an enchanted world is maintained that we can occasionally glimpse through their eyes. We manipulate their environment to produce belief in paranormal creatures (hiding chocolate eggs at Easter, sprinkling fairy dust at bedtime, leaving biscuit crumbs on Christmas morning and perhaps riskiest of all, exchanging lost teeth for hard cash under their sleeping heads). But we do so innocently and for their own good. After all, children have the rest of their lives to grow sour. What harm could a belief in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny do? Why disturb their paradise? One reason for caution about the creation of such an enchanted realm is that after paradise comes a fall. When children are polluted by what is regarded as the adult world, adults are quickly disenchanted with them. The fantasy world we build for children is in fact our paradise, not theirs. Once children are exposed to that forbidden fruit, worldly experience, they no longer function as the window onto innocence and simplicity we desire them to be. The paradise they reconstruct for us is bought with deception. Knowledge, in this case, is power, and adults, with their sole claim upon knowledge, share with God the proverbial sovereign power to banish and send into exile the despoiled innocents we create. This chapter picks up the nexus between power and knowledge as theorised by the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault." [mijn nadruk] (78-79)

[Ook Foucault wordt weer eens van stal gehaald. ]

"Our interest here is not so much how adults control children by withholding information. Rather, this chapter explores how disciplines, sciences and the social practices on which they depend create the ideal of the innocent, normal, child."(79)

"In seeking to understand why the child is lately such a focus of concern, we can learn much from the growth of knowledges about childhood. It is fair to say that parents learnt to worry about children from experts who, striving to develop explanations and solve the problems of society in general, turned to the study of children. Theories developed in the rarefied sphere of the laboratory are now taken for granted as practically applicable within the school, the childcare centre and the family home. Emphasis is usually placed upon our potential for failure as parents, teachers or childcare workers, and the damage wrought by improper care of the child (too clingy or too distant, overindulgent or negligent, too permissive or too strict). The child’s world had become such a delicate ecosystem that it is almost inevitable that our children will find their way either to a psychiatrist or to prison. The child is seen through a lens trained on solving social problems, and thereby becomes a social problem." [mijn nadruk] (92)

"The science of childhood emerged less from a sense of care for children than a need to produce social norms and to contain social anomaly. The progress of normative ideas about the assessment of children (according to age and stage of development) responded to a broader program of social management. There was a desire to control the life of the population, to nurture some parts of the social organism while isolating others through segregation, detention and even sterilisation." [mijn nadruk] (94)

(100) Chapter 5 - Fallen innocents - Adolescents, Aboriginal and stateless children

[Veel kinderen en jongeren passen natuurlijk niet in dat beeld van het onschuldige kind en veel ouders weten niet hoe daarmee om te gaan. De benadering is dan: disciplinering voor hun eigen bestwil. Wat in Australië gebeurd is met de kinderen van Aboriginals is ook altijd gepresenteerd als voor hun eigen bestwil. Nee, dus. ]

"Between 1869 (Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 [Cwlth]) and, officially, 1969 (Aborigines Act 1969 [Cwlth]), Aboriginal children of part-European descent were systematically removed from their families by government agencies. The reasons provided for this measure were framed in paternalistic terms because of perceived neglect indicated by poverty. The chief authorities enacting this policy were named protectors of Aborigines, although there was a demonstrated belief that Indigenous Australians were endangered peoples, cultural and physical throwbacks destined shortly, according to a slapdash Darwinism, to extinction. These protectors were assigned to oversee the gentle demise of full Aborigines (to ‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’26 ) and the assimilation of lighter skinned Aboriginal children into the non-Indigenous population. It was hoped that within two or three generations they might even forget who their ancestors were. No matter how benign these motives may seem to some, in view of the ideological context, evidence of efforts to improve the situation of Indigenous children is lacking. Under this regime, children were physically, sexually and emotionally abused, and frequently consigned to serve as slave labour to their white foster parents or employers (with payment held in inaccessible trusts). Any pretext that the policy served children’s interests rather than the imperative to supply cheap labour was compromised in 1915, when the Aboriginal Protection Act was amended so that the board no longer had to prove neglect before removing children from their family." [mijn nadruk] (113-114)

[Niet anders dan hoe de Amerikanen en Canadezen omgingen met inheemse Indianenstammen. Het is puur racisme, pure onderdrukking, en de smoes dat 'onschuldige kinderen' op die manier beschermd moesten worden voor hun eigen bestwil is walgelijk. ]

(119) Chapter 6 - When fantasies become nightmares - Purveyors and pornographers of innocence

"When the Bill Henson, 2008 exhibition was locked down by police, debate over his images of naked adolescents polarised between the competing concerns for the protection of children and the freedom of artistic expression."(119)

"It’s fair to say that this encounter between the artist, the childprotection activist, the Australian public and the New South Wales police force generated more heat than light. The debate burnt hotly and died out quickly, leaving those involved singed and shy of the public arena."(120)

"Outbursts of public sentiment such as those over Henson’s exhibition should be read in the context of these lateral issues connected to feelings about innocence. We could then ask whether the display of juvenile nudity compromises a child’s innocence necessarily. Or is this equation of nudity and sex a recent sensitivity?" [mijn nadruk] (121)

[Moeten we die vragen nog stellen? De antwoorden: Nee. Ja. In het vervolg gaat het over de foto Untitled#30 van Hensons expositie van 2008. Ik heb hem toegevoegd. Een prachtig en wat verlegen jong meisje. En dit is waarover de massa zich druk liep te maken, dit was waarover ze geschokt waren en 'kinderporno' riepen. Als mensen zo'n foto niet gewoon mooi kunnen vinden, zouden ze de woestijn ingestuurd moeten worden.]

"Promoting the conventional account of consent, childprotection advocates were unwilling to concede children might legitimately decide to model for Henson. They held that children – even young adolescents – simply cannot consent, as if this is a capacity mysteriously acquired upon attaining adulthood. This notion of consent refuses children agency absolutely, thereby underestimating their capacity to express unique points of view. Instead of taking seriously the possibility that Henson’s model had a legitimate voice, child advocates subjected the parents’ decision to scrutiny. At one time or another there were calls for Henson, the parents and the gallery owners to be prosecuted in the interests of protecting the child.
Yet there are good reasons to feel assured that the girl in question did consent. By Marr’s account this consent was robust, ascertained over numerous discussions between the artist and the model, the artist and the girl’s family, and the family and the model, in which the prospect of future regret was explored and acknowledged. The possibility of such consent was continually doubted throughout the media furore over the image." [mijn nadruk] (128)

"The ensuing expressions of outrage over the photograph were marked, conversely, by disrespect for the girl’s decision and a breathtaking lack of awareness of, or concern for, how she might feel about those extreme reactions to her image. Indeed, she was treated as an object. She was a political object, converged on by interests and agendas from both Left and Right. She was a sexual object, displayed in newspapers and screens with salacious black bars across her body."(129-130)

"Of the numerous opinion pieces published about children’s welfare in the midst of the Henson scandal, no one asked for children’s opinions. No one treated children as subjects of experience, only as silent, impassive objects. ‘What were the parents thinking?’ bounced repeatedly around the echo chamber of public opinion. But the question of what the model felt or thought about the fuss made over her body received scant attention." [mijn nadruk] (130)

"Why is sexualisation seen to be a new trend when children have been on sensual display in advertising from its earliest days? If childhood innocence is in crisis, why now? One answer to this question might be that the fear of the paedophile lurking in the background of discourse about the sexualisation of children is the guilty product of a rather ordinary desire for childhood innocence. As we saw in chapter 2, some child-protection advocates lobby for government to exert tighter control over the representation of children. An element of this control has been scrutiny of every image of children for its possible sexual allure, through adoption of the paedophile’s gaze. Academic and media commentator Catharine Lumby argues that this becomes an exercise in futility once we consider that paedophiles are excited by what most would consider entirely innocent, such as images of the barefoot von Trapp children from The Sound of Music. Innocence is the locus of desire for such individuals; looking for signs of a precocious adult sexuality in images of children will always miss the target. That we cannot locate the source of the paedophile’s arousal causes even greater anxiety about the control of representations of children, and the scope of what’s considered sexual – and even kiddie porn – is ever increasing." [mijn nadruk] (139)

"For what if our fear of the paedophile’s gaze indicates a fear of our own desire for children? In other words, the spectre of the paedophile in the background of these discussions of child sexualisation is produced by a fear that we may lose control of our desire."(139)