Children as ‘Risk'
Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Children and Young People
Cambridge Studies in Law and Society Series

This book critically examines socio-political constructions of risk related to sexual offending behaviour by and among children and young people and charts the rise of harmful sexual or exploitative behaviour among peers, drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks and primary research. Discussion of these behaviours is exhibited against a backdrop of the premature cultural sexualisation of contemporary childhood, which challenges traditional conceptions of childhood, victimhood and gendered sexual identities more broadly. It examines the complexities of peer-based sexual behaviours in a range of settings, including within organisational contexts such as schools and care homes, within families and peer-based relationships, as well as online contexts including sexting and cyberbullying. It draws out the myriad legal, practical and policy challenges of negotiating the boundaries between normal/experimental, risky/problematic and harmful sexual behaviour, and in particular the demarcation between coercion and consent, both for professionals as well as children and young people themselves.

Part I. The Theoretical and Policy Context: 1. Conceptualising children as 'risk: an introduction; 2. Child sexual exploitation and abuse: a contemporary history of concerns; 3. The social and political construction of sexual offending concerning children; Part II. Children As 'Risk': Children and Young People Who Display Harmful Sexual or Exploitative Behaviour: 4. The emergence of harmful sexual behaviour; 5. Peer-to-peer grooming: a re-appraisal; 6. The nature and scope of peer-to-peer exploitation and abuse: towards a typology of 'harm'; 7. Legal and societal responses to 'risk'; Part III. Future Approaches: 8. Conclusion: re-imagining 'risk'.

Anne-Marie McAlinden is a Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Queen's University Belfast. She is an internationally recognised expert on sexual offending against children and the author/editor of over fifty publications, including two previous sole-authored monographs, the first of which, The Shaming of Sexual Offenders (2007), was awarded the British Journal of Criminology Book Prize 2008. She has been Principal Investigator on a number of ESRC funded projects including a recently completed three-year study on 'Sex Offender Desistance'; and currently 'Apologies, Abuses and Dealing with the Past', where one of the case studies is institutional child abuse.