ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of Michel Foucault and the ways in which this might help us to analyses the governance of child sexual abuse. It examines some of the central features of Foucault's orientation to the task of social criticism by sketching his understanding of his work in terms of a number of histories of problematisations, reflecting on his genealogical 'method' of investigation, clarifying the use made of the terms 'power', 'knowledge' and 'ethics', and formally specifying the concepts political rationalities and technologies of governance. Genealogy is concerned to reflect critically on apparently constitutive limits to thought and action in order to clarify which of these apparently constitutive limits are only regulative. Here Foucault signifies a concern to examine the conditions for the constitution of regimes of truth and their delimitation by rules of right; looking at the notions of biopolitics and governmentality concern with public and private, and law and science, their interrelations and modes of truth constitution.
