In recent years homophobic bullying has received increased attention from NGOs, academics and government sources and concern about the issue crosses traditional moral and political divisions. This article examines this 'progressive' development and identifies the 'conditions of possibility' that have enabled the issue to become a harm that can be spoken of. In doing so it questions whether the readiness to speak about the issue represents the opposite to prohibitions on speech (such as the notorious Section 28) or whether it is based on more subtle forms of governance. It argues that homophobic bullying is heard through three key discourses ('child abuse', 'the child victim' and 'the tragic gay') and that, while enabling an acknowledgement of certain harms, they simultaneously silence other needs and experiences. It then moves to explore the aspirational and 'liberatory' political investments that underlie these seemingly 'common-sense' descriptive discourses and concludes with a critique of the quasi-criminal responses that the dominant political agenda of homophobic bullying gives rise to. The article draws on, and endeavours to develop a conversation between, critical engagements with the contemporary politics of both childhood and sexuality.

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In the UK, home education, or home‐schooling, is an issue that has attracted little public, governmental or academic attention. Yet the number of children who are home educated is steadily increasing and the phenomenon has been referred to as a‘quiet revolution‘. This paper neither celebrates nor denigrates home educators; its aim, rather, is to identify and critically examine the two dominant discourses that define the way in which the issue is currently understood. First, the legal discourse of parental rights, which forms the basis of the legal framework and, secondly, a child psychology/common‐sense discourse of ‘socialisation’, within which school attendance is perceived as necessary for healthy child development. Drawing on historical sources, doctrinal human rights and child psychology and informed by post‐structural and feminist perspectives, this article suggests that both discourses function as alternative methods of governance and that the conflicting‘rights claims’of parents and children obscure public interests and fundamental questions about the purpose of education.

This essay provides a theoretical examination of the law regulating sex education and focuses in particular on the way in which it responds to teenage pregnancies. Adopt ing a post-structural approach, it seeks to demystify the 'common-sense' political consensus in Britain that the current rate of teenage pregnancies is a 'problem', by examining how they are problematized by the social constructions, and moral and economic values and calculations within dominant political discourses. It then demonstrates how these constructions translate into conflicting solutions, or pro grammes, of health education and moral education. In demonstrating how these pro grammes are deployed to govern child sexuality, this essay identifies a variety of techniques of government, such as how different meanings and attributes are given to words like 'children' and 'parents' and 'health' and 'biology'; how the knowledge and expertise of health professionals are legitimized within a particular location and how the curriculum structure itself performs a particular function. In examining the role of law throughout this process, this essay demonstrates how the law concerning sex education operates outside of a repressive juridical model and is able to connect the aspirations and aims of the state with more positive uses of power.

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