Absent but present: a critical analysis of the representation of sexuality in recent youth policy in the UK

Abstract

Absent but present: a critical analysis of the representation of sexuality in recent youth policy in the UK, Journal of Youth Studies, 16:2, 191-205, Current youth policy in England and Wales utilises 'transition' as the major framework for understanding young people's movement from 'youth' to 'adulthood'. Underpinning this are developmental assumptions about who young people are and who they 'should' become, especially with regard to sexuality. 'Childhood' and 'youth' are conceptualised as asexual or pre-sexual categories and those young people who are deemed to have sexual knowledge are problematised. Transitions to adulthood are inescapably heteronormative: the movement to adulthood is not simply about becoming an adult, but about becoming a man or a woman conforming to compulsory heterosexuality. Current youth policy says little about young people's sexuality and when it does it frequently conflates sexual behaviour with sexual health. Drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and, in particular, his concepts of field, habitus and symbolic violence, it will be argued that despite the rhetoric of participation, engagement and inclusion in current youth policy it continues to perpetuate and naturalise the symbolic order between 'adults' and young people and continues to position youth sexuality as potentially dangerous.

Regulating Youth Sexuality, Agency and Citizenship: Developing a Coherent Criminal Justice Response to Youth Sexting

“…45 Childhood sexuality within this framework remains solely under the auspices of parents, the state and other adult protectors and prosecutors. 46 Consequently young people are presented with limited and limiting ways of expressing and scripting their sexuality, sexual feelings and sexual identity 47 and adults continue to exert power over children's sexuality. 48 This view underpins the strong emphasis currently being placed on regulating consensual teenage sexting.…”

For Adults Only? Young People and (Non)Participation in Sexual Decision Making

“…(Teather, 2012) These policy statements reinforce the assumption that children and young people lack the maturity and competence to be able to assess risk without adult supervision and guidance (Jackson & Scott, 2010). Indeed, it effectively positions all sexual behaviour that young people engage in as, by definition, risky (Moore & Prescott, 2013). If youth policy and practice in England and Wales is predicated on the Gillick test and the requirement that children and young people are sufficiently mature to understand information being given to them, as well as the consequences of the decisions they make, to render them incapable of assessing sexual risks leaves very limited scope for meaningful participation in sexual decision-making.…”

Exceptionalism and Sexularism in Finnish Sex Education

“…However, how social structures and inequalities affect young people's sexuality is rarely analysed critically in Finnish sexuality research. Instead, in the frame of youth sexual citizenship, research often tends to strengthen the norms of good citizenship, which withholds an understanding of girls, carefully monitors their sexuality and includes notions of 'delayed motherhood, full-time paid work, and participation in consumer capitalism' (Mann, 2013, p. 697; see also Moore & Prescott, 2013). Sexual standards are also highly gendered.…”