Top Sociological Journal Says Young Kids Should Be Sexualized
The American Sociological Association (ASA) published a controversial 3,000-word commentary titled “Childhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins” in its journal *Sex & Sexualities*.Written by Deevia Bhana, a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the article argues for exploring and de-pathologizing “preadolescent children’s erotic capacities.” bhana criticizes prevailing views that frame childhood sexuality solely in terms of vulnerability and innocence, labeling these as colonial constructs rooted in Christian moral frameworks. She calls for recognizing childhood sexual pleasure as a form of resistance and meaning-making,particularly for marginalized groups,challenging customary age-of-consent boundaries and advocating for an inclusive sociology centered on pleasure rather than protection.
The commentary has sparked strong condemnation, as critics interpret it as an attempt to normalize or abolish legal protections against adult-child sexual relationships. The article is seen as undermining the universally accepted principle of childhood innocence and protection. Glenn T. Stanton, director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family, strongly denounces the ASA article, urging the association to retract it, apologize to parents, and reaffirm commitment to protecting children rather than promoting such ideas.
In September, the American Sociological Association (ASA) published a 3,000-word commentary on the need to explore and de-pathologize “preadolescent children’s erotic capacities.” You read that precisely right. The article, entitled “Childhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins,” was published Sept. 20 in the ASA’s journal Sex & Sexualities. Its lead author is Deevia Bhana, a professor in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
In the first line of the commentary’s abstract, Bhana laments the following as a bad thing: “Sexualities scholarship marginalizes childhood sexual pleasure, positioning children as vulnerable subjects.” In the second sentence she employs all the lefty jargon such an essay is built upon: “This article repositions childhood sexualities within a pleasure-centered, globally oriented, and power-aware frame informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives.” Those colonizers, informed by a Christian worldview, were all hung up on protecting children from sexual exploitation.
The article’s stated objective is to “interrogate dominant narratives of sexual innocence that suppress young people’s desires and show how children negotiate pleasure and meaning amid intersecting hierarchies of age, race, gender, and class.” Age. Of course, the primary objective here is to advance the pervy mission of abolishing age-of-sexual-consent protections. The author positions this as an act of human justice, because “nowhere is this politics of misrecognition, erasure, and marginalization more acute than in childhood, where preadolescent children’s erotic capacities are routinely pathologized.”
Do not miss that she is situating the problem with people like, well, nearly everyone who has a wholly natural objection to sexualizing children. Yet she continues to invert basic human moral gravity.
What is clear is that the notion of childhood sexual innocence is not a natural construct. It is a colonial fiction that has long erased the very thought of putting sexuality and childhood together.
She then asks her colleagues in the academy, “What does it mean for sociology and sexuality studies to take seriously the idea of childhood sexual pleasure and meaning from the margins?” She answers her own question thusly: “When sexual pleasure is viewed from the lives of those who are generationally minoritized, its contours shift: It appears as a practice of resistance and an arena where alternative futures are rehearsed.”
Given that nowhere in her commentary does she overtly establish any boundary against adult and child sexual liaisons, one must reasonably conclude she is calling for the abolition of such boundaries “by bringing the margins to the center” as she euphemistically terms it.
Indeed, this is how this game is played.
You thankfully cannot directly assert such things in polite company, especially in a mainstream academic journal. But you can certainly chip away at the edges by claiming that “rejecting adult-centric/adultist approaches to sexualities and attending to childhood pleasure is indispensable for an inclusive sociology and just sexual futures.”
The great G.K. Chesterton has a beautiful, but little known, section in What’s Wrong With the World where he establishes, in classic Chestertonian fashion, what we absolutely know to be universally pure. “I begin with a little girl’s hair,” Chesterton says, and adds, “That I know is a good thing at any rate.” He then establishes what must happen if that innocent purity is ever threatened by anyone: “If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down.” He correctly holds that if a civilization is civil, it must stubbornly judge everything in relation to how it serves the most tender qualities of the child.
This academic article, and any like it, must go down, as its clear objective is to violate children. Every person of goodwill should contact the American Sociological Association and ask them to withdraw the article, publish an apology to all parents, and recommit themselves to the pursuit of truth, not perversion.
Glenn T. Stanton is the director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family and the author of “The Myth of the Dying Church.”
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