Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective - Ipce

with me as I was with him, but he was usually
willing. On this particular occasion, I imagine
because my parents weren’t there to supervise,
we had been playing with my brother’s penis
while in the bathtub. When we got out of the
tub, my brother said that his penis hurt, that
it was sore. He wanted me to put a bandage on
it. I did. He said that this made his penis feel
so much better. I really couldn’t imagine how a
bandage could help as his penis wasn’t bleeding.
He said we’d have to do this again, but we never
did. Actually, I received no sexual enjoyment
out of fondling his penis, but I did think it
was fun.
All of the above cases involving a young child in a sexual encounter
with a preadolescent or adolescent could be lumped under an emotionally-laden
label--child molestation. But when we take a close look
at the encounters we find that the content of the interaction is infinitely
varied from case to case. To say that a preadolescent or adolescent
is molesting a younger child is far too simple and categorical a
way to deal with many of the experiences involved.
Sexual Encounters With Parents In Early Childhood
The Child as Audience and Parents as Sex Actors and Sex Models
Before dealing with encounters involving child-parent interaction
around the subject of sex, it is well to consider what the child has
learned from observing his parents.
There are societies, and the United States is not one of them, in
which no effort or only limited effort is made to conceal parental sexual
encounters from children. Among the Melanesian Islanders where a
certain amount of parental privacy is considered desirable, if a child
becomes too curious and bold it is told to mind its own business and is
instructed not to look. (Brecher and Brecher, 1966, p. 188). But among
the Alorese, by the age of five children are informed on details of the
reproductive act. Members of the Pukapukan household sleep in the same
room and although parents may wait until the children are asleep, there
are opportunities for youngsters to observe adult sexual activity and
sexual matters are talked about. Lesu children are free to observe
adult coitus with the exception that they are not to watch their own
mothers having coitus. On Ponape children are given instruction in coitus
from the fourth or fifth year. Trukese children receive no formal
education but they learn by watching adults at night and by asking
their elders about sexual matters. (Ford and Beach, 1951, p. 188-189).
A high proportion of adults in the United States (the Kinsey sample)
rather precisely recalled the age at which they had first seen the
genitalia of the opposite sex. This, according to Kinsey, emphasizes
the importance which such experience has for the child in a culture
that has gone to such lengths to conceal the anatomic differences between
the sexes. In searching for some characteristic trait that would
distinguish the non-marital sexual behavior in primitive societies from
other societies, Maxwell (1967) looked to differences in the structure
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