Constructing Sexuality, Constructing Vulnerability: The Degenerative Politics of Raising the Age of Consent in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores how public policy is shaped by and shapes constructed notions of childhood and childhood sexuality in the regulation of young people’s sexuality in Canada. I use the framework developed by Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider (Ingram and Schneider 1993; 2005; Schneider and Ingram 1997; 2005.; 2008) who argue that the state, through public policy, may solidify, perpetuate or change socially constructed groups, the identities of which have become so entrenched that they are thought of as ‘natural.’ Often, they argue, state actors through public policy not only reinforce the limits of political participation of target groups but also engage in a degenerative form of policy-making in which the manipulation of identities is used for political gain. In the case of dependents, while the rhetoric may express great concern for their welfare, they are not granted the freedom of responsibility and decision-making. The paper explores the children as a target population in the regulation of sexuality in several historic periods of the twentieth century including the recent debates and political process that resulted in the raising of the age of sexual consent to sixteen in Canada in 2008 and demonstrates that the constructed notion of childhood and childhood sexuality results in a targeted population of young people as dependents. As is often the case and demonstrated in this paper, there is no direct causal link between the proposed regulation of the targeted group and the ostensible purpose of the legislation which is to protect young people from sexual predators. Nevertheless, this constructed identity becomes of prime importance to political actors in persuading, influencing and bringing about concrete policy outcomes. At the same time the policy perpetuates ‘natural’ notions of childhood and childhood sexuality reinforcing dependent status on young people that enhances vulnerability, curtails responsibility and leaves them politically undermined. In the most recent period the manipulation of symbolic identities of children and youth for political purposes may fit the definition of a degenerative form of policy-making by the Conservative government.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".