Abstracts

Sabine Andresen, and Sophie Künstler. Vulnerability and Sexual Violence in Childhood. Challenges facing Research into Childhood. („Vulnerabilität und sexuelle Gewalt in der Kindheit. Herausforderungen der Kindheitsforschung“). Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 2015; 4: 318–334

Adopting a social sciences perspective on childhood research, this contribution begins by posing the question of whether describing children as active protagonists brings with it the danger of masking the vulnerability of these children. The authors thus plead that a dialectic examination of the autonomy and dependency of children be conducted within childhood research. To this purpose they first present the development and key assumptions of the "new" research into childhood. They subsequently ask the question as to whether sexual violence has become marginalized as an important subject in childhood research. They plead for a childhood-theoretical further development of childhood research and use their own ethnographic study RiFA in order to sketch out the potential of social science research for identifying and analyzing indicators for vulnerability in childhood. These could then be implemented in the future, for example for the development of protection concepts for pedagogical practice.

Key words: indicators for vulnerability; poverty; sexual violence; social sciences childhood research; vulnerability