Title: Childhood Sexuality and Education: The Case of Section 28
Abstract: This article explores the debate in both parliament and the British media over the UK government's attempts to repeal Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act. It places Section 28 in the context of a broader history of sex education in British schools, and more general anxieties about the future of the child and the nuclear family over the last few decades. Fears about the end of childhood `innocence' also overlapped with a notion of adolescence as a crucially formative period, an increasingly unstable notion because of the conflicting pressures of education policy and the targeting of young people as consumers. In the Section 28 debate, this belief in childhood and adolescence as protected spaces has allowed homophobic arguments to be articulated when other ways of framing them - through metaphors of disease and promiscuity - have lost some authority.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 41
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