The Importance of Being Innocent

Abstract

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.

Childhood innocence: essence, education, and performativity

“…45 Within innocence discourses, and their positioning and production of different types of subject, these processes become differentially marked morally and epistemologically. Whilst other forms of experience, knowledge, or desire can also breach the homogeneity and departs from the origin to which innocence corresponds, calculations regarding embodiment have an unusual privilege.…”

Childhood and Governance*

“…In the name of innocence, the child could be moulded into a docile and productive future citizen, whose “personal desires and preferences can be addressed by socially approved outlets (shopping, voting, four weeks annual recreation leave, Friday night happy hour and heterosexual coupling)” (Faulkner 2010: 88). Egan and Hawkes (2010: 52) document the mission of the sexual hygiene movement in the early twentieth century, for instance, “to ‘adjust’ the child's sexuality in order to ensure its healthy ‘relationship to [the] community’ and its commitment to ‘the responsibilities and obligations’ of adulthood”.…”

“…Responsibility for this supervision and cultivation was socially and legally placed, in the first instance, in the hands of the child's parents, with the supervising apparatus of state experts positioned as “the modern parent's modern parent” (Hulbert 2004: 36, cited in Egan & Hawkes 2010: 127). Faulkner writes that, in the course of modernity, “the child has become the chief handle of the family‐'tool' through which citizens (recast as ‘parents’) are governed” (Faulkner 2010: 72).…”

“…Two new texts, working at the juncture between history and social theory, have contributed significant further insights to understanding the trajectory and usage of innocence discourses. Joanne Faulkner's The Importance of Being Innocent (2010) and Danielle Egan and Gail Hawkes (2010) Theorizing the Sexual Child set out to examine how contemporary innocence discourses were formed and what their consequences have been. I will suggest that these texts make a significant contribution in their treatment of the way this theme has been deployed, from the nineteenth century to today, to operate and occlude power‐relations.…”

“Because we all love our country”: Refugee and Asylum‐Seeking Children, Australian Policy‐Makers, and the Building of National Sentiment

“…Focusing on the problematic of children, Faulkner argues, provides a "tidier" response. 35 Thus, refugee and asylum-seeking children sit within recent Australian political history as a group of people discursively deployed to demonstrate suffering, vulnerability, and the need for rescue in a way which adults are not. At times this affective work is undertaken by people attempting to advocate on their behalf, as will be explored below.…”