The `Being-Risky' Child: Governing Childhood and Sexual Risk

Recent sociological work suggests that anxieties for, and about, children has helped create the impression that being a child is in itself problematic; or to put it another way, that risk and its management are now central to how we in the West construct childhood. Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to the `young sexual abuser'-a subjectivity, defined by age and sexual risk, which emerged in the late twentieth century. In this article, Foucauldian and sociological thinking are used to help unpack this subjectivity - one which is more commonly understood in terms of psychology `the first science of childhood' (Alanen 1994). In doing so, however, both Foucauldian and sociological theorising about childhood generally are also considered critically. In particular, the absence of a gendered analysis of childhood in some Foucauldian and sociological analyses is viewed as troublesome and it is argued that the question of time in relation to childhood subjectivities needs to be foregrounded. While there is no attempt here to deny the seriousness of sexually abusive behaviours by young people, it is suggested that our understandings of these young people are themselves problematic, based as they are on untidy questions about the nature of childhood and risk rather than on straightforward empirical categories.