Children’s Encounters with Sexual Content: Different Readings of Cross-Country Empirical Evidence

Abstract

Tsaliki offers an alternative reading of children’s voices when it comes to their experiences with sexual content. Instead of following the normative conceptualization of such experiences as ‘risky’, she shows how a particular epistemology (in this case, the EU Kids Online approach that contextualizes sexual content as ‘problematic’ for children) impacts upon the way in which we make sense of children and what is ‘appropriate’ (or ‘problematic’) for them. She follows this by a meta-analysis and recoding of children’s voices from Greece, the UK, Spain, Italy and Australia regarding their perceptions of sexual content in an attempt to provide a different contextualization of the relationship of children with media representations of sex.