ABSTRACT
At the beginning of this paper I suggested that we are in an historical moment of massive anxiety which organizes itself around problems of ‘the child’. The question I left unasked was ‘why now?’ However, a more accurate question might be ‘why again?’ In 1885 W.T.Stead published a four-part series of sensational articles in the Pall Mall Gazette under the title ‘The maiden tribute of modern Babylon’. The series was intended as an expose of white slavery and child prostitution in London, and it claimed to uncover the degree to which working-class girls were sacrificed —often by their mothers and other women of their neighbourhoods-to the sexual appetite of ‘the dissolute rich’. In Stead’s hyperbolic words:
This passage is of interest for its appeal to typically modern constructions of ‘the child’ as outside or prior to language and therefore presocial and without agency-in other words, as a figure of pathos. And yet, as Deborah Gorham and Judith Walkowitz have shown, in their anxiety to stabilize recognizably middle-class boundaries between childhood and adulthood in the face of an emerging category of adolescence, Stead and other late nineteenth-century purity reformers frequently misread the texts of these girls’ lives. The evidence suggests that the actual incidence of white slavery was small; most prostitutes ‘moved onto the streets in their late teens’ and most ‘had already had sexual relations of a noncommercial sort with a man of their social class’.45 Many chose prostitution as the best of an admittedly limited set of options. And yet, Stead’s series had significant juridical and social effects: two months after its publication, a new social purity organization-the National Vigilance Association-had formed ‘to devote itself to the protection of young girls’;46 that same year, the Criminal Law Amendment Act raised the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen. Working-class girls found themselves the objects of an increased technology of surveillance intended not only to protect them from wealthy male predators, but to inculcate in them habits of selfcontrol.47 I have argued in this paper that ‘the child’ is a mobile subjectposition; in mobilizing the figure of ‘the child’ in their agitation, and in emphasizing active male sexual licence in contrast to the passivity-the emptiness-of the child-victim, middle-class social purity reformers
ignored ‘their own complicity in a more generalized exploitation of girls and young women’,48 that is, their own very material investment in manageable girls to serve as domestic labour. However, they also effected lasting changes in working-class culture through, for example, changes in child-rearing practices. As Walkowitz notes:
That is, the mobilization of the figure of ‘the child’ in response to a perceived set of social problems, regardless of whether children as a specific group are at ‘real’ risk, has ‘real’ effects on our productions of ‘childhood’ and the child-subject, and ultimately on the lives of children.
