Understanding the Experiences of Sexuality during Childhood in France: Methodological Concerns and Some Results.

In a context of growing moral panics around sex education over the last decades in Europe, it is essential to understand how sexuality occurs in childhood to defend and to construct effective public policies of sex education. Even though children are often considered innocent and asexual (Davies and Robinson, 2010), sexuality is experienced and learned as early as childhood.

Retrospective data seems the most obvious way for Sociology to approach this object (de Graaf et Rademakers, 2006; Martin, 2007). Yet, it raises many questions: how can we understand the meaning of the category of sexuality during childhood through the memories of adults without projecting adult-centered views?

Based on an ongoing study in the French contemporary context, this communication addresses first the ethical and methodological challenges that such an object of study poses for Sociology. It shows how the combination of ethnographic observation of sex education sessions and retrospective (both qualitative and quantitative) data can be heuristic. Then, it develops some of the forms and meanings that childhood sexual experiences take and how these experiences are shaped by gender, class, and race. It proposes to consider the "first sexual encounter" less as the moment of entry into sexuality than as marking the end of a process of learning about sexuality. This allows Sociology to explore the significance of various experiences for children that have so far been understudied: caresses and masturbatory exploration, exposure to pornography, the learning of sensations of bodily pleasure... The construction of gendered relationships to sexuality (and then, bodies) is thus particularly visible: while girls report more masturbatory exploration before the age of 10 compared to boys, this imbalance is completely reversed upon entering middle school.