The early normalization of violence against girls: What does kindergarten have to do with it?

• In Event: Advancing Gender and Racial Justice in Early Childhood Education: Persistent Challenges and Promises

Abstract

Purpose and objectives: The purpose of this presentation is to illuminate girls’ experiences of sexual and gender-based violence in the context of kindergarten education. The presentation has 2 objectives: 1) to unpack what sexual and gender-based violence against girls looks like in kindergarten settings; 2) to examine the potential of mandatory sexuality education in kindergarten for countering the early normalization of violence against girls.

Theoretical framework: This presentation applies a critical feminist theoretical framework, drawing on feminist standpoint and feminist post-structuralism. Feminist standpoint (Alanen, 2009; Smith, 2006) is mobilized to examine kindergarten education—which continues to be a patriarchal and male-dominated context (Burman, 2017)—from the experiences and vantage point of girls. Feminist post-structuralism is used to problematize traditional conceptualizations of gender as a natural binary to illuminate how young children actively construct gender, often in ways that maintain gender inequalities (Blaise, 2014). Both feminist perspectives are drawn on to bring into question the hegemony of developmentalism in early childhood education and how ages-and-stages logic may make invisible the early normalization of sexual and gender-based violence against girls.

Methods and data sources: This presentation draws on the author’s doctoral study which implemented an institutional ethnography (Smith, 2006) in two kindergarten classrooms in Ontario, Canada over a school year. Two methods for data collection were implemented: participant observation (Buch & Staller, 2007) and interviews with children using visual methods (Farmer & Cepin, 2017). Observations focused on the daily activities and routines, the spatial and material arrangements of the classrooms, the interactions between students and between teachers and students. Observations were documented through field notes, gender mappings, videos, and photographs. Interviews with children included their drawings and photographs, which were audio recorded and transcribed before analysis.

Results: The analytical process entailed explicating the daily social-material organization, interactions, and practices of both settings and linking data generated across the different methods (Deveau, 2009). Specifically, three findings will be discussed. First, the daily prioritization of blocks and building activities in these kindergarten classrooms created a learning context that privileged boys. Second, the male-centered spatial-material arrangements facilitated patterns of spatial-material domination by boys against girls (e.g., boys preventing girls from using certain materials). Third, the implicit centering of boys in kindergarten education contributed to the legitimization of non-consensual touching by boys against girls in and out of play spaces.

Scholarly significance of the study: The results from this study call for a re-thinking of kindergarten education as a neutral and innocent context for young learners. By uncovering the lived realities of girls in kindergarten, how early childhood education contexts may function as spaces that uphold patriarchy and the early normalization of sexual and gender-based violence against girls is made visible. Specifically, doing so calls for policy and curricula shifts, namely towards mandatory sexuality education with young learners as one way to work towards countering the subordination of girls in early childhood education.

Author

• Jessica Prioletta, Bishop's University