The more things change ... the Kinsey Institute on child sexuality.

Sexual Development in Childhood, edited by John Bancroft. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003, 484 pages. Cloth, $47.85.

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in the work of Alfred Kinsey. He and his team of researchers interviewed thousands of individuals to create statistical snapshots of American sexual practices in the 1940s and 1950s. His work was met both with great interest by the general public and criticism by politicians and other prominent figures who found his research scandalous.

Within the scientific community, Kinsey was criticized on the grounds that his methodology represented flawed science; he hadn't used appropriate sampling techniques, and therefore his description of the American population's sexual practices could not be considered accurate. Kinsey (and other sex researchers) subsequently met obstacles in securing funding for further scientific research on sexuality because of these reactions to his work. However, his contributions to scientific knowledge about sexual practices are significant, and his program of research continues at the Kinsey Institute for Sexual Research at the University of Indiana in Bloomington.

The book Sexual Development in Childhood is the final product of a workshop on child sexuality held at the Kinsey Institute. Some of the issues addressed in this book echo themes that were relevant to Kinsey's own work; namely the difficulty of researching sexuality in a political climate that is deeply suspicious of sexual inquiry, and the general methodological difficulties of conducting research on human sexual behavior. This volume is comprised of the papers presented at the workshop, response papers by discussants, as well as transcripts of the general discussions that followed each session. The participants were researchers from a variety of fields including psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

The papers and discussions are organized into a number of sections encompassing the historical context of suspicion towards scientific inquiry into child sexuality; methodological issues; new research on normal child sexual development; cross-cultural considerations; child sexual abuse effects; as well as discussions of life course theories and their relations to sexual mistreatment.

While the participants hailed from a number of disciplinary backgrounds, one view they shared was that conducting research on child sexuality is not easy in the United States. Because American culture does not associate sexuality with children, proposals to study sexual development are automatically considered controversial by funding agencies and foundations, as well university institutional review boards. Moreover, noted political attacks on studies like Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman (1998) have led to uneasiness among researchers whose work might challenge commonly held beliefs about children. Fittingly, the keynote speech and opening essay of the book was given by Philip Jenkins, who has chronicled the history of moral panics concerning sexual threats to children. He observes that public responses to child sexuality research depend heavily upon the political ideologies of the time.

According to the accounts in this book, current political ideologies have had a number of deleterious consequences on child sexuality research. Most notably, there is a stunning paucity of research on "normal" children. Children are constructed in American culture as sexually innocent. Therefore, research on the sexual development of normal children is considered particularly controversial and potentially damaging under the implicit assumption that such research would expose children to sexual knowledge from which parents would prefer to shield them. Ironically, what this means is that most research on children has involved victimized or "at risk" populations who are labeled sexually deviant, when there is in fact little baseline research on the sexuality of "normal" children. This, in turn, reinforces the idea that children who exhibit any kind of sexual behavior are deviant in some way.

Philip Jenkins noted that the clinical term "sexualized child" implies that it is problematic when any child expresses sexuality. Thus, a good number of the essays in this book lament the current state of child sexuality research and the obstacles facing all researchers who would like to establish this baseline data on children's sexual development. Accordingly, four of the papers in this book attempt to gather data on normal, or non-abused, child populations through surveying parents or asking adults and adolescents to reflect upon their sexual pasts.

A second, related theme that united many of these papers concerned methodological issues that face child sexuality researchers. Since children themselves are often off-limits as research participants, researchers often turn to parents to report on their children's sexual behaviors, or they rely upon adults to recall their own childhood sexual experiences. These approaches produce predictable difficulties: can (and will) parents accurately observe, recognize, and report their children's sexual behavior? Can adults or adolescents accurately recall their childhoods? The answers to these questions have plagued child sexuality researchers for quite some time, and there are no definitive answers that emerge in this volume other than that there is a great need for longitudinal studies on sexual development.

The bulk of papers presented at the workshop were authored by psychologists, psychiatrists and clinicians. Perhaps due to the goal of attaining data on what is statistically normal in children's sexual development, most of the results presented came from survey research. While these studies are useful and interesting, one of the weaknesses of the book is that, despite the varied interdisciplinary backgrounds of the workshop participants, there is little diversity in the methodological and theoretical approaches taken by those who presented papers (as opposed to the diversity of those who offered commentary afterward in the discussions).

This volume could have been stronger if it had also presented qualitative studies on child sexuality, because such studies provide rich context for understanding how children make sense of their sexual selves in a culture that simultaneously denies children accurate sexual knowledge while bombarding them with fantasy images of sex in the media. For example, one of the discussants was Deborah Tolman, whose book Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (2002) provides in-depth interviews of teen girls and analyzes their ambivalent feelings about sexual desire. While Tolman commented on others' papers, hers and similar work was not presented in the main papers comprising this volume.

I found myself wishing that more papers had been included that came from the social constructionist paradigm. This paradigm--frequently employed in fields like sociology, anthropology, and women and gender studies--recognizes the cultural specificity of what goes into categories like normal and abnormal, as well as the power relations implicit in labeling some types of sexual behavior as normal (which automatically implies that other behaviors are abnormal). To illustrate, a survey question in one of these studies asked parents whether their son engaged in feminine behavior "too much." There seemed to be little recognition on the part of the researchers that this question presumes that it is natural and normal for boys and girls to have distinctly different, mutually exclusive behaviors rather than entertaining the thought that this is culturally and historically specific gendered behavior. There were also a few examples of researchers relying upon theories of human sexual development that assume certain sexual behaviors and practices are biologically determined or that they somehow further the evolutionary development of the human species. This is fine as it reflects particular theoretical traditions within psychology and psychiatry, but I think this would have been a more theoretically rich volume if constructionist perspectives appeared in places other than the responses to papers.

That said, I found the transcripts of the general discussions that followed each session to be the most fascinating sections of the book. It seems rare to have researchers who employ such different theoretical paradigms in the same room together, let alone commenting upon one another's work. It made me wonder whether the participants' subsequent works were at all influenced by these discussions. As a result of the important work the Kinsey Institute does in bringing together interdisciplinary sexuality researchers at workshops like the one this volume is based upon, will theoretical and methodological traditions common to some disciplines be considered by others who work from a different set of assumptions in their respective disciplines?

Sexual Development in Childhood will provide interesting food for thought for anyone interested in child sexuality. It also stands as a testament to the political and methodological obstacles that have faced sexuality researchers since Kinsey's time and how they navigate these difficulties to continue this important line of research. Because of the workshop format of the book--where sexuality researchers are talking to one another--I believe that the audience for this volume is other sexuality researchers at the professional or graduate school level in psychology or psychiatry, or those who research the effects of child sexual abuse. I think that graduate students and professionals in child sexuality would get a good sense of potentially fruitful avenues of research and the theoretical and methodological pitfalls to avoid in those pursuits.

REFERENCES

Rind, B., Tromovitch, E, & Bauserman, R. (1998). A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 22-53.

Tolman, D. (2002). Dilemmas of desire: Teenage girls talk about sexuality. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Reviewed by Nancy L. Fischer, Ph.D., Department of Sociology, Augsburg College, 2211 Riverside Avenue, Minneapolis, MH, 55454; e-mail: [e-mail].