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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Young people with substance misuse issues are at risk of harm from significant negative health and life events. Contemporary research notes both an historical failure to recognise the unique needs of adolescents, and the ongoing need for dedicated adolescent treatment programs and outcome measures. It is concerning that there is so little literature assessing the quality, availability, and effectiveness of adolescent-focussed treatment programs, and no adolescent-specific measurement tools centred on a young person's progress in residential treatment. This paper reports on the process of developing a qualitative approach to mapping progress in treatment over time. The research seeks to develop an approach that captures, at three points in time and from multiple viewpoints, the progress of young people in four residential rehabilitation services located in New South Wales and Western Australia, across several dimensions of the personal and social aspects of life. Our aim is to develop an approach that is accessible to the alcohol and other drug (AOD) workforce, and that informs the development of a psychometrically robust quantitative measure of progress that is meaningful and useful both to practitioners and to the young people themselves.3

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This article examines Sarah Kofman's interpretation of Nietzsche in light of the claim that interpretation was for her both an articulation of her identity and a mode of deconstructing the very notion of identity. Faulkner argues that Kofman's work on Nietzsche can be understood as autobiographical, in that it served to mediate a relation to her self. Faulkner examines this relation with reference to Klein's model of the child's connection to its mother. By examining Kofman's later writings on Nietzsche alongside her autobiography, this article contends that Kofman's defense of anti-Semitism in Nietache serves to fend off her own ambivalence about beingJewish.When approaching Sarah Kofman's work on Friedrich Nietzsche, one is struck by the very personal quality of the relation she forms with her subject through writing. In fact, it might be said that from her book-length studies of Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud to her short discourses about her childhood and her dreams, her writings are as personal as they are philosophical.' The personal interpenetrates the philosophical, and vice versa, because for her the two could not properly be separated. Kofman recognized that, like all philosophers, she did philosophy for her own reasons-that her writings were motivated by a vital interest, and psychological need.2 When approaching the work of another, she evokes material from the philosopher's life so as to gently illuminate the inconsistencies and commitments of the philosophy. The capricious coexistence of the philosophical and life narratives is precisely her object, such that philosophical interpretation merges with autobiography. Instead of detracting from the philosophical importance of her work, 1 argue that it enhances it,