The Crime, Justice & Society Seminar Series presents
The child as an object of sexual protection in criminal law: what the past can tell us about the present.
Rachel Ferguson (Glasgow Caledonian University)
About the event
In contemporary sexual offences, children below the age of 16 (and in some instances those below 18) are protected because they lack or have deficient sexual autonomy. This position reflects the role of sexual autonomy as the central organising principle for sexual offences in the 21st century. But the scope, nature, and interpretation of sexual autonomy remains subject to wide-ranging and growing debate in criminalisation scholarship. Children’s sexual autonomy is largely absent from these debates and sexual offences against children are typically understood as derivative of sexual offences against adults. In this presentation, I argue that an appreciation of the scope, function, and objectives of sexual offences against children as they have developed over time can further the critical assessment of sexual offences more generally. To do this, I introduce the changing construction of the child in the criminal law, from the first official recognition of sexual offences against children in the first decades of the 20th century until the present day, and illustrate that the protection of children in the criminal law developed in a manner that was distinguishable from sexual offences against adults until the final decades of the 20th century. I highlight that the mutable category of the child has changed in accordance with ideas about childhood, its relationship to adulthood, and the role of state institutions – including the criminal law. In doing so, I propose that the current protection of children in the criminal law operates to construct and protect the vulnerable sexual autonomy of children and re-inscribes the responsibility of adults to care and protect children. This understanding offers insight into the criminalisation of sexual offences, first by drawing attention to whether and why sexual offences against children appear to operate differently from adult sexual offences and, further, whether increasing similarities between the criminalisation of sexual offences against adults and children, most notably the policy aims to recognise and protect the vulnerable sexual autonomy of adults, can be critically explored through the construction of the child as an object of sexual protection in the present day.