Children and Sexuality

GEORGE ROUSSEAU is a Co-Director of the Centre for the History of Childhood at Oxford University, UK. He was formerly a professor at UCLA and Regius Professor of English at King's College, Aberdeen.

'Anthropologists and other social scientists researching childhood will undoubtedly find in this volume extraordinary insights on the history of child-adults relations that will greatly enrich their own thinking.' - Jocelyn Boyden, University of Oxford, UK 'Starting with a controversial piece on ancient Athens and ending with a very fine nuanced account of contemporary Thailand, this absorbing collection then makes its way through Reformation Geneva and modern England, treating a startling subject with historical care, building in its own critical responses.' - Randolph Trumbach, author of Sex and the Gender Revolution 'Children and Sexuality is a courageous and timely book. The authors, who include historians, anthropologists and psychonalysts, dare to confront one of the most difficult social problems of our time and to view it from a historical and a comparative perspective.' - Peter Burke, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, UK 'This is a book for the thoughtful person with vision that is both broad and deep. Merely take one look at the chapter headings and you will not be able to put it down.' - John T. Truman, Columbia University, USA 'Children and Sexuality is a bracing reminder that the young were eroticized long before paedophiles discovered the Internet. A haunting, meticulous and provocative book that places the modern anxiety about lost innocence in historical context and raises thorny questions about adult-child relations in every era.' - Carl Honore, author of In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed and Under Pressure: How The Epidemic of Hyper-Parenting is Endangering Childhood

• Preface Introduction; G.Rousseau PART I: THE EARLY ANCIENT AND MODERN WORLD The Ancient World: Juvenile Crime, Aggression and Abuse in Fifth-century Athens: a Case Study; M.Vickers & D.Nash Briggs Responses; J.Crawley Quinn ; A.Moreno The Medieval World: Incest between Adults and Children in the Medieval World; E.Archibald Response; E.Dutton The Renaissance World: Under-Age Sexuality in Reformation Geneva; W.G.Naphy Responses; N.S.Davidson ; T.Betteridge The Eighteenth Century: Privilege, Power and Sexual Abuse in Georgian Oxford; G.Rousseau Response; T.Hitchcock PART II: VICTORIANS AND EDWARDIANS Victorian Aesthetes: 'You have made me tear the veil from those most secret feelings': Arcadian Adolescents and Same-sex Scandals in Mid-Victorian Oxford; G.Rousseau Response; K.D.Watson Victorian Platonists: Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater; S.Evangelista Response; R.Dellamora Victorian Women: Victorian Girlhood: Eroticizing the Maternal, Maternalizing the Erotic: Same-sex Relations between Girls, c. 1880-1920; A.Hennegan Response; J.McDonagh The Victorians and Photography: The Nineteenth-Century Photographic Likeness and the Body of the Child; L.Smith Response; L.Gasquet Edwardians and Empire: At Once A-sexual and Anal: Baden-Powell and the Boy Scouts; E.Boehmer Response; M.Harrison PART III: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL VIEW Child Sexual Abuse - an Anthropological Perspective; H.Montgomery