Childhood Sexuality and AIDS Education

The Price of Innocence

Deevia Bhana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317526803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica nell'ambito della salute e sessualità

Primary schoolchildren are frequently shielded from education on sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases in an effort to protect their innocence. In countries like South Africa, where AIDS is particularly widespread, it is especially important to address prevention with younger boys and girls as active social agents with the capacity to engage with AIDS as gendered and sexual beings. This volume addresses the question of children's understanding of AIDS, not simply in terms of their dependence but as active participants in the interpretation of their social worlds.

The volume draws on an interview and ethnographic based study of young children in two socially diverse South African primary schools, as well as interviews conducted with teachers and mothers of young children. It shows how adults sustain the production of childhood sexual innocence, and the importance of scaling up programs in AIDS intervention, gender and sexuality. It makes significant contributions to the global debate around childhood sexualities, gender and AIDS education.

1 The Price of Innocence in the Time of AIDS

Johan:^1	I know how they get AIDS…you know like, um (laughter) when you get babies, like you have to like do sort of things…
Steven:	Sex stuff…
Scelo:	I will only have one girlfriend when I’m older maybe then I would know how to use a condom because now I can’t…
Vuyo:	If you want to stop AIDS,^2 don’t have sex anymore because if you do, you will die early.

In this book I draw attention to the social constructions of gender and sexuality in children’s AIDS-related knowledge. I ask, “How do girls and boys, in grade two, aged between seven- and eight-years old, in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal (the epicentre of the global AIDS pandemic), give meaning to the disease?” “Under what social circumstances are these meanings contested and negotiated?” and “How do adults (teachers and mothers) approach children’s AIDS-related knowledge?” To explore these questions in an ethnographic and interview mode, I worked with children in two vastly different race and class settings, one rich and largely white and the other poor and exclusively African.³ Both contexts are located in the eastern South African seaboard city of Durban, reflecting affluence and adversity, poverty and plenty, and are striking reminders of the effects of history and apartheid. I asked teachers and mothers of children in Grade 2 how they approached children’s AIDS-related knowledge. Impelled by AIDS, as the sex-related disease (Weeks 2000), adults told me, “It’s difficult for us as Africans to talk about sex to our children,” revealing as they did, the paradox of childhood (sexual) innocence and importance of sexuality in AIDS education and prevention (Miedema et al. 2015). AIDS not only exposes but also produces the fracture lines of childhood innocence. “Children should not be introduced to this sort of thing at such an early age”, adults would tell me—“sex was beyond their age”.

To date, few studies place African children, as young as seven and eight, at the centre of investigation, in their own right, for what they can tell us about gender and the constructions of sexuality (Bhana 2007). Nor has there been any attempt to address prevention with younger boys and girls that considers children as active social agents with the capacity to engage with AIDS as gendered and sexual beings (Bhana et al. 2006). As Jackson and Scott (2010: 119) note a “childhood free from the shadow of sexuality is thought necessary both to keep children safe and to secure their future sexual health.” Children have been short-changed by discourses of childhood innocence. As adults we hide sexuality and silence it (Jackson & Scott 2010). We presume childhood (sexual) innocence, we do not pay much attention to children’s pains and pleasures, and we wish childhood sexuality away (Epstein & Johnson 1998). When children express sexuality, we laugh it off as playful, innocent and frivolous (Thorne 1993; MacNaughton 2000; Blaise 2005; Bhana 2013). Childhood innocence is a motif embedded within relations of power and functions as a powerful mechanism of normalization and exclusion producing an exclusive focus on the vulnerable child needing adult protection from sex and sexuality (Kincaid 1998; Egan & Hawkes 2009; Taylor 2010; Clark 2014). In the context of the pressing risk to HIV, we still assume that children are too young to understand sexual knowledge (Silin 1995). Young children remain “too quiet for us to hear, too small for us to see…that they fall beneath our threshold of attention” (Tobin 1997: 13). Childhood innocence and the need for child protection justify silence and adult inaction around effective sexuality and AIDS education. The price of innocence, I argue, is the continued inattention and neglect to children’s own conceptualisations and experiences of the disease.

By setting in motion the paradox between adult narratives of childhood innocence and children’s meanings of AIDS, I aim to oppose everyday common-sense assumptions that question the aptness of putting children and sexuality together (Tobin 1997). Central to my study are seven- and eight-year-old boys and girls, both rich and poor, both black and white, and the complex operation of power. I argue that children interpret, shape and negotiate meanings of the disease as they expand, explore and elaborate on their gendered/(hetero)sexual selves. This process of transgressing, shaping and negotiating the gendered and sexual meanings of the disease is highly complex because boys and girls conceal and reveal sexuality regulating each other as they are regulated by normalised adult versions of childhood innocence. Children do this in ways that express excitement, pleasure and power within a heteronormative context as they defy, negotiate and accommodate dominant ideas of childhood innocence (Renold 2005; Jackson & Scott 2010; Robinson 2013). I emphasise how the epidemic and its sexual route of transmission paradoxically invoke childhood innocence and its instability. At the heart of the paradox, is power. In the chapters that follow and in contrast to adult discourses, I explore girls’ and boys’ powers, pleasures and anxieties as they uphold/break down childhood innocence, disrupting its hegemony and creating instabilities as they make sense of gender and sexuality in the social construction of AIDS.

In sharpening my analysis, and from the vantage point of poverty and plenty, I focus on the intimate connections between gender, sexuality, race, and class in the social construction of the disease. The selection of two school settings in diverse social contexts in South Africa has been strategic. Children’s narratives of AIDS as it relates to the wider social ordering of sexuality, in particular how race, class and gender coalesce around meanings of the disease are key themes in this book. As Farmer (2006: xi) argues, “AIDS is embedded in social and economic structures long in place and that violence, poverty and inequality are the fault lines along which HIV spreads”. An understanding of children’s AIDS-related sexual knowledge requires a fine-grained analysis of the social, material and discursive forces through which such meanings are made and a critical appreciation of children’s agency in promoting and negotiating them. Thus, I pay attention both to the social inequalities through which boys and girls negotiate sexual meanings of the disease and to the active ways in which childhood innocence is promoted and defied. I draw attention to continuities and contrasts among the little social, sexual and cultural worlds of girls and boys and to their pleasures and powers as I show how race, class and gender figure as they shape children’s conceptualization of the disease. My hope is that by closely examining what children, in their own right, have to say about the disease, researchers may begin to unravel the knot that has developed in defence of childhood (sexual) innocence and against children’s right to sexual knowledge.

In 2003 when I began the qualitative research for this study, approximately 4.2 million people were living with HIV in South Africa. In 2014 the number of people living with HIV has increase to 6.4 million in 2014 with great gender/racial disparities in the rates of infection (Statistics South Africa 2014) and 1.7 million people infected with HIV live in KwaZulu-Natal. In 2014 it was estimated that 15% of Africans are infected compared to 0.3% of whites (Shisana et al. 2014). Almost a third of new HIV infections occur amongst young African women between the ages of 15- to 24-year-olds who are more than five to six times more likely to be infected than men of the same age (Karim et al. 2014). Much faith has been placed in educational initiatives to provide young people with relevant knowledge and life skills to help them avoid the disease with specific emphasis on gender inequalities and unequal power relation that continue to drive women and girls’ disproportionate vulnerability to the disease (Save the Children 2007; UNESCO 2009; Wood & Rolleri 2014; Miedema et al. 2015). As Bhana and Singh (2012: 218) argue, “addressing gender inequalities and changing sexual behaviour remain the lynchpin of HIV prevention”.

In the world of AIDS, there are increasing efforts to address sexuality in the educational response to the disease:

Today, in a world with AIDS…parents and families play a vital role in shaping the way we understand our sexual and social identities. Parents need to be able to address the physical and behavioural aspects of human sexuality with their children, and children need to be informed and equipped with the knowledge and skills to make responsible decisions about sexuality, relationships, HIV…We have a choice to make: leave children to find their own way through the clouds of partial information, misinformation and outright exploitation that they will find from media, the Internet, peers and the unscrupulous, or instead face up to the challenge of providing clear, well informed, and scientifically-grounded sexuality education based in the universal values of respect and human rights…If we are to make an impact on children and young people before they become sexually active, comprehensive sexuality education must become part of the formal school curriculum, delivered by well-trained and supported teachers. Teachers remain trusted sources of knowledge and skills…and they are a highly valued resource in the education sector response to AIDS. In the response to AIDS, policy-makers have a special responsibility to lead, to take bold steps and to be prepared to challenge received wisdom when the world throws up new challenges. Nowhere is this more so than in the need to examine our beliefs about sexuality, relationships and what is appropriate to discuss with children and young people in a world affected by AIDS.

(UNESCO 2009: iii)

“We have a choice to make”—leave boys and girls in the early years of life to find their own means and resources to work the puzzle of AIDS/sex/gender/sexuality or “face up to the challenge”. By focusing on seven- and eight-year-old children, as they give meaning to AIDS, I take issue with the conceptualization of children as passive and the inattention to gender and childhood sexuality, especially when it concerns children in the early years of life. One of the central aims of this book is to situate sexuality at the centre of how we conceptualise and theorise children’s agency in and approach to knowledge of AIDS. By paying attention to children in two socially diverse school settings, I show how race, class, gender and sexuality cut through children’s meanings of disease, constricting and setting limits to agency. Through theoretical cross-draughts which brings together different theoretical cross-currents (Therborn 2013), I seek to break from adult scripts of childhood innocence and draw attention to the active ways in which gender and sexuality are produced under striking social conditions of inequalities that cut through children’s meanings of AIDS. Overall, a focus on boys, girls and childhood sexuality might contribute to and reconfigure international debates on childhood innocence, agency and AIDS education (Silin 1995; Robinson 2013)—one that conceives of sexuality as central to children’s meanings of AIDS but that remains faithful to the effect of material, cultural, symbolic and discursive forces which constrain meaning and agency. In particular, in this book, I summon us as adults to rethink our special responsibility to children in the time of AIDS and to shed our taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood innocence so that we will open our understanding to the creative ways in which children, under strikingly unequal social conditions, work on AIDS, gender, sexuality and relations of power.

In the following section of this chapter, I explore a range of theoretical concepts and perspectives (childhood studies, post-structural feminist theories and theories of structural violence) that collectively contribute to an understanding of children’s worlds (as well as the perspectives of adults). Next, I introduce the two sites and focus on researching children, gender and sexuality in the context of AIDS and the implications of conducting research in two vastly different social contexts. Finally, I close with an overview and key summaries of the chapters in this book.

Theorising Childhood Sexuality: Discourse, Power, Agency and Vulnerability

What we see is largely shaped by the frame of the glasses through which we look at the world.

—Therborn (2013: 37)

Childhood is a social category and how adults construct it depends on and is influenced by our frame of glasses (James et al. 1998). Instead of seeing childhood as a category of innocence and children as passive and dupes of power, social constructionist perspectives argue that children engage in and work on their everyday circumstances in fluid ways (Kane 2013). Childhood innocence is thus one of many lenses through which we may view children’s social worlds. The value of a social constructionist perspective is that it changes the dominating lens from essentialist and biologically determined conceptions of identity to an understanding of children as socially located (Mayall 2002; Blaise 2005; Egan 2013). In developing a theoretical framing for this study I rely on a multidimensional understanding of power. Instead of a fixed meaning of power, power that is fluid and changing allows for variations in making sense of children’s complex contextual positioning as gendered and sexual beings. To do this I draw from the sociology of childhood, feminist post-structuralist, queer theorists and structural violence to emphasise gender and sexuality in the construction of agency and the materiality of agency and its social rootedness (Farmer 2004). My attempt at building a “theoretical cross draught” (Therborn 2013) is rooted in and deeply sensitive to, but not determined by, the social structures as it permeates gender and sexuality, race, age and class that coalesce in children’s articulation of AIDS. The themes of social inequalities and agency pervade this book and are in constant tension with each other.

Throughout this section my aim is not to carve into the already established theoretical literature and debates around childhood, childhood sexuality, agency, and structure because they already exist. The most recent work by Robinson (2013), Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood, provides comprehensive reviews of theory in relation to childhood innocence, sexuality and agency. There are others, too, including Kane’s (2013) Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood, Egan’s (2013) Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of the Sexualization of Girls, Parson’s (2012) Growing Up With HIV in Zimbabwe and Jackson and Scott’s (2010)Theorising Sexuality, that provide comprehensive reviews of theory. Rather, my intention here is to engage with some of the key theoretical issues and concepts as they have meaning and utility in the operation of power. In the next part of this section, I review some of the main theoretical issues that underlie this study, because they are built up in each of the analysis chapters. The following issues of relevance are discussed here: sexuality and childhood innocence, children as active agents, heterosexuality and the social constitution of sexuality. The section concludes with the tensions between children as gendered and sexual agents and the wider issues of structural violence, which reduce and limit agency.

Sexuality is central to this project and is considered in ways that put post-structuralist feminist theory, queer perspectives and structural violence to work. Sexuality, following Weeks (2000: 163), “pervades the air we breathe”. It is fully social and involves sexual desires and practices beyond a simple biological definition of sex (Parker 2009). Sexuality is fluid and contradictory and varies across social contexts. Sexuality is an elastic concept. It stretches through different ideas and feelings. In relation to childhood, instead of plasticity, sexuality is far more rigid. Sexual desires, pleasure and practices are reserved mainly or exclusively for adults, and children are assumed to be uncontaminated by the air we breathe. How do we explain this ‘truth’ of childhood sexuality? Who can speak the truth about childhood sexuality? Sexuality, as Weeks (2000) suggests, is produced by norms, discourses and regulatory practices and is structured in relations of power. Particularly useful here are the ways in which sexuality functions within a socially organised framework, operating within a regulatory fashion and defining the limits of who can speak the ‘truth’ about sexuality. A dominant discourse of childhood innocence creates certain ‘truths’ marked by profound adult–child relations of inequalities and construction of sexuality as inimical to childhood. Once a discourse becomes powerful it is difficult to think and act outside it. Within a particular discourse, only certain things can be said and done. Childhood innocence has become dominant, normalised and the right way of understanding children (Davies 1993). What is right and normal is socially constituted and produced in discourse. Rarely do adults align childhood and sexuality. This is because dominant adult discourses attach power to childhood in...