ABSTRACT
Starting with some characteristic assumptions about childhood embodied in leading international human rights instruments, this chapter examines a sampling of socio-scientific models which have influenced contemporary concepts of childhood. Children have been the subject of numerous instruments. A first Declaration of the Rights of the Child was promulgated within the League of Nations, and a host of instruments have followed. Essentialist models do not dismiss culture. Cultural influences are, however, inevitably relegated to derivative positions. The Freudian superego, while assimilating social processes into the architecture of the individual psyche, never enjoys the primacy of the unconscious. In 1956 Talcott Parsons defined socialisation as 'the internalisation of the culture of the society into which the child is born'. The drafting and interpretation of law and policy have revealed increased attention to models of interactive, constitutive, contextualised children. Sexual knowledge pollutes childhood innocence, shoving children into the realm of adults before they are able to cope.
