Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective - Ipce

Dianna (age 2 1 / 2 ): “Daddy, would you kiss my clitoris?”
Casually, Daddy says, “Sure.” Bends over
and gives her a light smack. Dianna: “No, do it
long like you do to Mommy.” The father reports
he thought briefly about it and decided there
was no harm in it. Dianna enjoyed it and later
asked for a repeat performance. (Constantine).
Ullerstam in his book, The Erotic Minorities, (1966, p. 46-47)
states that sexual games between parents and infants in Sweden are becoming
increasingly common in younger families. Infant and child sexuality
is becoming a topic of discussion in the Swedish press of late,
as well. (Personal observation by the author, Stockholm, Sweden, January
1973).
Infant-Infant Sexual Encounters
Infant-infant sexual encounters are fairly uncommon, partly because
of the infant’s lack of mobility, of course. However, the older
infant who is one or two years of age and old enough to crawl or walk
is capable of initiating encounters of various kinds. It was reported
of Louis XIII’s carefully observed permissive infancy, for instance,
that “‘he throws down little Marguerite, kisses her, throws himself on
her...’” (As reported in Hunt, 1970, p. 167). The Israeli kibbutz is
one setting which allows for intimate encounters. (Kaffman, 1972). The
kevutza is a bi-sexual children’s peer group that inhabits common living
and sleeping quarters--boys and girls who are one through five
years of age sleep in the same room, shower together, go to the toilet
together, and often run around nude together before getting dressed in
the morning or after being undressed in the evening. Intimate encounters
occur and include a number of different kinds of activity. In a
group of children with a mean age of two years, it was found that the
most frequent expression consisted in a simple embrace of one child by
another, followed in frequency by stroking or caressing, kissing, and
touching the genitals. (Spiro, 1958, p. 221). In some previously unpublished
data, Kinsey records instances of cuddling and kissing encounters
between infants two years of age or less.
Infant Encounters With Children and Adolescents
Infant encounters with children (3-7 years of age) do occur, but
generally speaking, they have not been systematically observed or if
observed they have not been recorded. Kinsey observed, in some of his
unpublished interviews, that embracing and kissing among young siblings
is much in evidence. It is reasonable to speculate that cases
such as the following, and other types of contact, are not uncommon in
unsupervised intimate play of infants and children within the family.
Survey data on the infant’s sexual encounters with preadolescents
and adolescents is also extremely sparse, though isolated cases are
frequently reported in the psychoanalytic literature. This should not
be taken to imply that such encounters do not occur among infants and
children not referred for treatment. For example, in a recent survey of
a large, self-selected United States sample of adults, approximately
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