Unpacking Ideas of Sexuality in Childhood: What do primary teachers and parents say?

Abstract

Abstract Children who engage in perceived sexual actions face possible marginalization, isolation and exclusion in schools. The author's counselling practice included numerous examples where effects of adults' understanding have led to over reactive and punitive responses on children. This article complements a political ethic of social justice and supporting children's agency—that is, children as actors and childhood as being and becoming. Teachers and parents of primary school children were interviewed as part of a current doctoral project on discourses of childhood sexuality in Aotearoa, New Zealand. In focus groups and individual interviews, six teachers and seven parents of children in one primary school responded to vignettes on children's actions designed from counselling and anecdotal evidence of children's experiences in New Zealand primary schools. Participants' thoughts, ideas and reflections, including personal stories, were stimulated by the vignettes. Their understandings and perceptions of sexuality in childhood are explored, and discursive positionings for children in both the vignettes and participants' responses are examined. The crisis for children is when school policy constrains understandings and experiences of childhood due to adult-centric constructions of sexuality without regard to multiple positions shaped by culture, community values, personal histories and ideas of childhood and sexuality.