Good Secrets, Bad Secrets: The Discursive Complexity of Confession in Children’s Picture Books About Sexual Child Abuse

• In Event: Producing the Young Citizen in Texts of Families, Neighborhoods, and Nations

Abstract

(Objectives and perspectives)
Well over 50 picture books have been published for children on the topic of sexual child abuse (Lampert & Walsh, 2010), many with the aim of teaching their very young readers how to tell the difference between good and bad secrets. This paper looks at three recent picture books for how they distinguish between secrets and surprises, good and bad touches, and most significantly on their focus on disclosure as an end point.
(Methods and materials)
The three texts include Kleven’s 1998 The Right Touch, Pearl’s 2010 Samuel Learns to Yell and Tell, and Ledwon & Mets’ 2006 Mia’s Secret. These books, like many children’s texts, fall into the category of instructive texts that have a long history of didacticism and pedagogical intent. Additionally, there seems little question amongst literary theorists that all children’s books play a socialising role, whether that is their direct intent or not. (Hunt, 2001)
In its discursive analysis of these three sample texts, this paper asks: how are child readers positioned to understand goodness and badness as related to sexual child abuse? What agency do these books suggest children have, if any? And to what may we attribute these current ideas about secrets and about disclosure, reiterated in these texts as appropriate for small children? In its analysis of the unique form of picture books which combine both print and visual text, this paper draws on the field of children’s literary criticism (Nodelman, 2008; Stephens, 1992), and utilises strategies for reading the images of picture book illustration (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996). In addition, it is informed by current perspectives on child abuse prevention concepts. (Finklehor,)

Author

• Jo Lampert, Queensland University of Technology