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Examines the social, legal and cultural challenges navigating the boundaries of 'normal'-'problematic'-'risky' sexual behaviours among peers.
List of contents
Part I. The Theoretical and Policy Context: 1. Conceptualising children as 'risk: an introduction; 2. Child sexual exploitation and abuse: a contemporary history of concerns; 3. The social and political construction of sexual offending concerning children; Part II. Children As 'Risk': Children and Young People Who Display Harmful Sexual or Exploitative Behaviour: 4. The emergence of harmful sexual behaviour; 5. Peer-to-peer grooming: a re-appraisal; 6. The nature and scope of peer-to-peer exploitation and abuse: towards a typology of 'harm'; 7. Legal and societal responses to 'risk'; Part III. Future Approaches: 8. Conclusion: re-imagining 'risk'.
About the author
Anne-Marie McAlinden is a Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Queen's University Belfast. She is an internationally recognised expert on sexual offending against children and the author/editor of over fifty publications, including two previous sole-authored monographs, the first of which, The Shaming of Sexual Offenders (2007), was awarded the British Journal of Criminology Book Prize 2008. She has been Principal Investigator on a number of ESRC funded projects including a recently completed three-year study on 'Sex Offender Desistance'; and currently 'Apologies, Abuses and Dealing with the Past', where one of the case studies is institutional child abuse.
Summary
This book critically examines socio-political constructions of risk related to sexual offending behaviour by and among children and young people and charts the rise of harmful sexual or exploitative behaviour among peers, drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks and primary research. Discussion of these behaviours is exhibited against a backdrop of the premature cultural sexualisation of contemporary childhood, which challenges traditional conceptions of childhood, victimhood and gendered sexual identities more broadly. It examines the complexities of peer-based sexual behaviours in a range of settings, including within organisational contexts such as schools and care homes, within families and peer-based relationships, as well as online contexts including sexting and cyberbullying. It draws out the myriad legal, practical and policy challenges of negotiating the boundaries between normal/experimental, risky/problematic and harmful sexual behaviour, and in particular the demarcation between coercion and consent, both for professionals as well as children and young people themselves.
