Children Sexuality and the Law

This seminar focuses on federal and state law designed to protect children from sexual exploitation, as well as federal constitutional law regulating young adults' expressive rights with regard to gender and sexual identity. The seminar provides a general introduction to some of the laws governing children's sexual autonomy as well as necessary protections from sexual abuse; however, the seminar's primary purpose is to teach students about how the law discursively constructs children as it attempts to protect them. Specifically, students will explore how laws designed to protect children from sexual exploitation also naturalize certain assumptions about children's perceptions, cognitive capacities, interests and vulnerabilities. Our discussions will explore how the law, while attempting to catalogue and regulate the potential threats children face, also instantiates certain ideas about children's potential sex-related injuries and how these injures can affect them over time. Finally, seminar discussions will explore whether there are any inconsistencies between the understanding of childhood, sexual injury, capacity, and autonomy in various areas of state child protection laws, federal constitutional law, and relevant federal statutes. In addition to considering how laws regulating children's sexuality affect children, the seminar will also examine how the same laws effectively constrain adults' behavior, as well as shape our understanding of the role of certain social institutions. Laws intended to more generally protect children from sexual exploitation also regulate children's relationships to their parents, affect our understanding of the role of schools, and even our understanding of the role libraries and the internet play in educating citizens. Seminar discussions will focus on how discursive constructs and social understandings about children contained in law both constrain and enable us in discussions of child sexuality. We will also consider how these constructs and understandings empower certain institutions by legitimating certain kinds of intervention. Students can choose to write three short response papers for two units or a final research paper for three units. After the term begins, students accepted into the course can transfer from section (01) into section (02), which meets the Research (R) requirement, with consent of the instructor. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Class Participation; Written Assignments or a Final Research Paper. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.