Research: Activating Janssen

Activating Janssen: The Layman’s summary of “Growing Up Sexually”

Built upon thousands of references and years of painstaking research, Diederik Janssen’s Corpus “Growing Up Sexually” presents by far the most comprehensive collection of ethnographic data on the sexual development of children and youth throughout the world, to date:

Janssen, D. F., Growing Up Sexually. Volume I. World Reference Atlas. 0.2 ed. 2004. Berlin: Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology

There has been a pressing need to “summarize and activate” this work, allowing activists and laymen to use it for general awareness raising and educational purposes.

Main take-aways

Janssen (2004) has highlighted both the non-universality of westernized conceptions of childhood sexual development, and the frequency of adult-child sex play throughout many parts of the non-western world. These behaviors range from manual/oral stimulation of infants, through to initiatory sex play in multiple cultures, and appear to be viewed as normal – often freely engaged in by both adults and children. Viewed within a western context, these same sexual behaviors would be deemed criminal and psychopathic on the part of the adult, leading most probably to mandatory therapeutic interventions for both parties. Janssen’s work causes us to question the “intrinsic and universal” nature of modern, post-feminist conceptions of the child, and child sexual abuse by calmly presenting an anthology of ethnographic data.

On models of development

We can also pick up on differing models of childhood sexual development. Western, liberal democratic nations tend to double down on a “restrictive, pseudo-subjective” (our definition) model, where a denial of knowledge and free choice is presented as being in the best interests of the child. In other words, this is the “freedom” to say “no”, juxtaposed against the complete denial of a right to initiative, or affirmative consent. In the Islamic world, a “restrictive, objective” model is practiced, particularly on girls. Girls are protected and viewed as property, only becoming viable after menarche and marriage. Boys might occasionally engage in prostitution, or be masturbated by parents in early childhood, but this varies. In non-western cultures, we see primarily liberative philosophies, on a scale from “liberative, subjective” emancipatory ideals of child-child and inter-generational sex play, thru “liberative, adaptive” models that emphasize inter-generational sex behaviors congruent with a child’s level of development. In other non western cultures, children may be assigned roles, or initiated in part by the force of an adult – and we describe these as “part-objective” models of development – again, our own terminology. In many cultures there are taboos, however – tellingly, what those exact taboos are deviates wildly from culture to culture.