Making molehills into mountains: Adult responses to child sexuality and behaviour

Sexual behaviour among children can be perplexing for adults as they negotiate a spectrum of ideas relating to abuse and natural curiosity. In the search for understandings, adults can act in ways that close opportunities for children to explore and describe meanings for the behaviour. This article invites practitioners to check their assumptions in this kind of work, and to take a stance that opposes abusive actions – while taking up a position of enquiry to support the multiple stories that make up children’s lives

Ethical beginnings: Reflexive questioning in designing child sexuality research

Counselling young children referred for sexualised behaviour can challenge therapists’ ideas about childhood and sexuality. This area of practice is complex and sensitive, and calls upon collaboration with a range of significant adults in children's lives. Purpose: This paper examines a researcher's process of movement from counselling practice into qualitative research practice, and the use of reflexive questioning to explore ethical issues within the study. Design: Shaped by social constructionist ideas and discourse theory, ethical questions are outlined within the design stage of a doctoral research project on sexuality in children's lives in Aotearoa New Zealand. Limitations: This paper explores ethics in the design of a current study: there are no results or conclusions

Play, prey or “sexploration”? Understanding and responding to sexual actions by children at primary school

Schools and teachers are expected to respond appropriately when they encounter children acting sexually. This article describes the literature on child sexual development and behaviour and the responses of Waikato primary school principals to a questionnaire. Specific issues for New Zealand primary schools and teachers are investigated, with suggestions for child educators to develop relational and collaborative approaches to support children and families

Ethical review and reflexivity in research of children's sexuality

Research in the area of children's sexuality is largely based on observational and retrospective studies. Childhood studies literature increasingly calls upon the inclusion of children's voices, yet with sensitive topics ethical positions often close research possibilities in the territories of children's worlds. Children are perceived as a vulnerable group, especially when the investigation focuses on their sexual development and activity – and it is perceived that this research area is too sensitive and potentially harmful to children. Within the context of beginning a qualitative study on children's sexuality in New Zealand (including interviews with children), this paper reviews a number of studies of childhood research. These studies provide a glimpse at how research focusing on children has been conducted, and explores ethical issues arising in such research. The significance of researcher reflexivity is acknowledged for ethical research practice. The paper concludes that in research on children's sexuality a process of ethical review is limited, and that researcher competence in sensitive investigations is required. Among other difficulties for this researcher (with a professional background in child and family therapy) is the vulnerability of being a man choosing to research children

Meaning and social reality of sexuality in the lives of children in Aotearoa New Zealand

How sexuality in pre-pubescent childhood is spoken about varies enormously within societies: almost swinging like a pendulum between perspectives of healthy and normal exploration, to panic of children being victims of abuse and ideas of sexualisation by the media (Egan and Hawkes 2008; Jackson 1982, 1990; Postman 1994). Reflecting initially from my practice as a family counsellor, and more recently as a counsellor educator and researcher, this chapter explores multiple discourses in children’s lives on the meaning and social reality of sexuality. The aim is to question and deconstruct concepts that have shaped discourse of childhood and sexuality, and which is currently a binary position of children who are safe (i.e. asexual or un-sexual) or not (sexualised) (see, for example, Postman 1994). The intention behind this questioning of constructions is not to deny this dominant discourse, but to expose the presence of multiple discourses, and multiple meanings for children’s words and actions. Put simply: children’s sexual actions are frequently ascribed adult notions of sexuality, or taken to mean that maltreatment has occurred. My argument here from counselling practice and research is that sexual actions by children do not necessarily mean some harm has occurred, but that adults’ understandings and responses are informed by discourses that guide them to assume the worst. This can have effects for children’s identities, through disruption of their relationships within family, in addition to experiences of isolation and exclusion within school, neighbourhood and friendship contexts

RTCC requirements for mission G - Landing site determination using onboard observations, part 2 Final report

Computer programs for evaluation of telemetered rendezvous radar tracking data of orbiting command module and lunar module landing site determinatio

Making sense of children's sexuality: Understanding sexual development and activity in education contexts.

Most adults find that responding to sexual activity by children and between children is challenging. This is especially so for teachers in early childhood and primary education contexts. One common view is that children should not be sexual or, if they are, that there is something wrong. These concerns are strengthened by popular adult discourses of sexuality and accompanying ideas of sexual privacy. Among discourses of child development sit ideas of childhood innocence and natural curiosity. However, assumptions of abuse arise when children's sexual curiosity extends beyond what is considered appropriate or "normal". This article examines pre-adolescent child sexual development. It scans some of the ideas and practices that shape adults' understandings in the construction of children's sexual identities. These ideas and practices also shape children's knowledges. Adult responses to children's sexual actions often portray children as abused, abusive or deviant. Using a social constructionist lens, this paper offers educators an exploration of a range of understandings and alternative thinking about sexuality in the worlds of children-yet also critiques ideas of normative behaviour and development. The reader is invited to think about how children can be encouraged to share their subjective meanings and understandings

A power filter for the detection of burst sources of gravitational radiation in interferometric detectors

We present a filter for detecting gravitational wave signals from burst sources. This filter requires only minimal advance knowledge of the expected signal: i.e. the signal's frequency band and time duration. It consists of a threshold on the total power in the data stream in the specified signal band during the specified time. This filter is optimal (in the Neyman-Pearson sense) for signal searches where only this minimal information is available.Comment: 3 pages, RevTeX, GWDAW '99 proceedings contribution, submitted to Int. J. Modern Phys.

Considering counsellor education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Part 2: How might we practise?

The registration environment offers particular challenges for the identity of counselling in 21st-century Aotearoa New Zealand. Counsellor education cannot hold itself apart from such challenges as it enters what the authors suggest is a third phase in its development (see Part 1, the companion to this article, earlier in this volume). Counselling in New Zealand has spent many years investigating and debating statutory regulation, and professional associations have implemented various internal regulatory practices that have had implications for counsellor education. Counselling and counsellor education in other parts of the world, and related professions in New Zealand, have engaged more actively with registration in a variety of forms. This article describes these various regulatory activities with the intention of making visible some possible directions for counsellor education in New Zealand. While we cannot predict with any accuracy what these possible directions would each offer to counselling, our review of various forms of registration leads us to make a case for pluralism and partnership. Advocating for pluralism in counselling, Cooper and McLeod (2010) suggest that it involves both sensibility and practice. The authors of the current article explore a pluralistic sensibility, emphasising its potential to produce a professional landscape in which practices of pluralism and partnership may emerge