The Importance of Being Innocent addresses the current debate in Australia and internationally regarding the sexualisation of children, predation on them by pedophiles and the risks apparently posed to their 'innate innocence' by perceived problems and threats in contemporary society. Joanne Faulkner argues that, contrary to popular opinion, social issues have been sensationally expounded in moral panics about children who are often presented as alternatively obese, binge-drinking and drug-using, self-harming, neglected, abused, medicated and driven to anti-social behavior by TV and computers. This erudite and thought-provoking book instead suggests that modern western society has reacted to problems plaguing the adult world by fetishizing children as innocents, who must be protected from social realities. Taking a philosophical and sociological perspective, it outlines the various historical trends, emotional investments and social tensions that shape contemporary ideas about what childhood represents, and our responsibilities in regard to children.

Over the past century, a great deal of cultural energy has been invested in the ideal of childhood innocence, to the extent that innocence is frequently cited as our society's most valuable asset. More recently, however, the dominant sentiment — frequently represented in news and current affairs media — has been that childhood innocence is imperilled, and that the ‘less responsible’ aspects of our popular media are putting it at risk. This article argues that the reasoning that engenders innocence with cultural value invites, and even demands, its violation. Specifically, the very same influences through which the child has come to be valorised also lead to the desire for and consumption of innocence. Innocence has become a ‘fetish’, positioned as a lost freedom and plenitude inciting desire. This article draws upon psychoanalytic theory to place into its correct context the anxiety about childhood innocence. It argues that these ‘responsible’ lamentations about the sexualisation of children and the loss of childhood innocence contribute to (rather than avert) a fetishisation of innocence that both prepares the ground for childhood to become the ultimate commodity, and ignores the concrete circumstances, desires and capacities of children.

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This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential "innocence" of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, children's agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.

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