Splintered Lives - Barnardo's

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chapter
6 Theoretical perspectives
Whilst several books and articles in the early 1980s (see for example Wolpert Burgess et
al, 1981; Wild and Wynne, 1986) have documented sexual exploitation as a form of
sexual abuse in childhood, in the early 1980s these were the exception not the rule. In a
child protection context it is instructive to remember that changes in paediatric practice,
elements of which were to become problematised during the 'Cleveland crisis',
developed through the investigation of several large sexual abuse rings in Leeds in the
early 1980s (Campbell, 1988 p103-11). Practitioners have been working with, and
researchers investigating sexual abuse outside the nuclear family, cases involving more
than one abuser and many children, with pornography and prostitution, but this has
seldom been reflected in theoretical frameworks, training and practice guidelines. The
exception to this general rule has been the work of some feminists who have sought to
connect the victimisation of women and children; to transfer knowledge and experience
from one sphere to another (MacLeod and Saraga, 1988; Kelly, 1988; Herman, 1994). But
even within feminist perspectives this has not been a central, shared approach.
Whilst much has been written on theoretical approaches to child sexual abuse, the
predominant focus has been on incest. More recently there has been increasing
recognition that this is an inadequate base for explanatory frameworks. Although most
children are abused by adults and peers they know, these are not always - or even in the
majority of cases - family or household members (Kelly, Regan and Burton, 1991).
Theoretical perspectives which take familial sexual abuse as their centre, cannot
encompass sexual exploitation, and moreover have been a hinderance to understanding
and exploring the occasions when familial sexual abuse and sexual exploitation occur
concurrently.
Including child sexual exploitation within child protection frameworks means that
theoretical perspectives from outside the field become relevant, and an extensive
literature exists on adult pornography and prostitution (see, for example, Barry, 1995;
Chester and Dickey, 1988; Delacoste and Alexander, 1988; Donnerstein et al 1987; Itzin,
1993; Osanka and Johann 1989; Roberts, 1993; Russell 1993). Within this literature are a
range of debates which draw on explanatory models; it is rare however, that these are
systematically applied to children's involvement.
In the case of pornography and prostitution, it is feminist perspectives which have
focused on exploitation and harm. The competing frameworks have predominantly
drawn on the concepts of arousal, imitation, catharsis and fantasy.
Sexual Arousal
The sexual arousal model emerged from research, predominantly controlled
experiments, on the immediate effects of viewing pornography. The studies reached the
unsurprising conclusion that sexual arousal was a common outcome, although the sex
of the viewer and the subject in the pornography were significant variables (Donnerstein et
al, 1987; Knudsen, 1988). More recent research has demonstrated that the form of
depictions have an effect on how arousing the pornography is - for example men are
more aroused by representations of coerced sex which suggest that the woman is
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