Childhood Sexuality

Karen Corteen

Karen Corteen

Liverpool John Moores University, UK

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Abstract

Children and sexuality are in their own right particularly sensitive areas. Bringing the two together is to end a dominant and ideological taboo (Jackson, 1982). Childhood sexuality is a sensitive and controversial area and this is particularly the case when the issue of children's sexuality challenges heterosexual norms and highlights the rights of all children to make informed choices about their own bodies, sexual desires, practices, and identities (Levine, 2002; Corteen, 2006). Evidently, it deals with issues that are both personal and private as well as public and political. The issue of childhood sexuality when approached holistically is concerned with children's lives and experiences, their physical health, and their emotional well-being. Thus, it is more than a theoretical and analytical endeavor. Discussions around constructions of childhood sexualities, whether they are underpinned by a scientific developmental approach or a sociological approach, can result in the validation and sanctioning of sexual desires, practices and identities or the invalidation and condemnation of these important areas of an individual's life. The subject is socially, politically, ideologically, and academically awash with commonsensical ideologies regarding children, childhood, sexuality, and childhood sexuality.

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