The Innocence Fetish: The Commodification and Sexualisation of Children in the Media and Popular Culture

Abstract

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.

Tween girls' dressing: Shifts, implications, and future directions in Singapore

“…Together, these three inquiries are crucial to many discussions on age‐(in)appropriate dressing for tween girls. They formed an early authoritative source for many scholarly articles (see Barker & Duschinsky, ; Faulkner, ; Renold & Ringrose, ), as well as other formal inquiries into the sexualization of young girls (see the “Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge” Movement in America and the Commissioner for Children and Young People's inquiry into the sexualization of children in Western Australia, 2012). In the formal reports and discourses of sexualization, Western popular culture is often identified as one of the prominent sources through which girls learn to fashion themselves after adults.…”

Interrogating innocence: “Childhood” as exclusionary social practice

“…The perceived collapse of the child/adult binary brought on by the “corruption” of children with adult knowledge continues to drive moral panic about the safety and well-being of children in contemporary society. As Faulkner (2010) notes, “the dominant sentiment—frequently represented in news and current affairs media—has been that childhood innocence is imperiled” (p. 106). Writing from an Australian perspective, Faulkner was responding to a 2008 Senate Inquiry and subsequent position papers on the sexualization of children by the popular media, but similar concerns have been expressed in the US context by the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (2010) as well as writers like Olfman (2009), Levin and Kilbourne (2009), and Lamb and Brown (2006).…”

“…Yet scrutiny of these discourses indicates that they may in fact be regarded as a potentially exclusionary form of social practice, linked to little-acknowledged and problematic social effects” (p. 764). While such social effects have not gone entirely unquestioned, most critical work on the topic of childhood innocence, much of which has been produced by Australian scholars, has focused on the regulation of children’s sexual agency (Egan and Hawkes, 2009; Faulkner, 2010; Robinson, 2013). Here, I take up the notion of childhood innocence to examine how, in the US context, it regulates race relations by producing a particular “childhood” that perpetuates White supremacy.…”

Your parents will read this: Reading (as) parents in journalistic coverage of the Safe Schools Coalition Australia controversy

“…So what exactly is ‘innocence’? According to the Australian cultural theorist Joanne Faulkner (2010), ‘Innocence is … the adult fantasy of life without stress or disenchantment – in short, a life without desire’ (p. 112). Innocence also entails a life without sex, as well as knowledge about sex and sexuality.…”