Kate Gleeson and Catharine Lumby (Eds.): The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexual Abuse and Agency

Excerpt

In this day in age there is so much control and regulation on the outside, but what kind of protection is there for young people on the inside? In a world where children have extensive knowledge about the “adult world” through the internet, what should children know or be entitled to know? What kinds of choices, decisions, and abilities are left to children to make for themselves? In The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexual Abuse and Agency, the editors Gleeson and Lumby (2019) give us a new voice and story throughout each chapter which challenges “mainstream and scholarly” ideas about child sexual abuse. Each author offers fresh studies and ideas about the enhancement of young people’s agency in life decisions and whether more or less regulation will allow these children the opportunity to bloom into adults who have developed the skill to speak up and have a voice of their own, free from adult coercion. Gleeson and Lumby bring together various research studies around the subject of child sexual abuse. These studies focus on sexting, online privacy, pornography, the cycle of abuse, the failure of children to speak out about abuse, and how society continues to turn a blind eye from the real issues and concerns because they are uncomfortable. Above all, the key theme in this book is offering advice and perspective to society as a whole and how we can support young children in their maturation, teach them how to speak out about sexual abuse, and allow them to develop their own voices and agency. Although this book has data from Western Australia, the overall themes can be applied directly to occurrences and life of young children in the United States and in many other parts of the world. …