The 2010 UK Home Office ‘Sexualisation of Young People’ Review: a discursive policy analysis

This paper offers a discursive policy analysis of the 2010 UK Home Office Sexualisation of Young People Review, authored by Linda Papadopoulos (2010a). It will scrutinise the narrative presented by the text of the danger posed by cultural representations to healthy development, and trace the way that the text links this danger to catastrophic outcomes: child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. Examining this narrative, the article will propose that the UK Review deploys spatial metaphors to naturalise a gendered account of childhood, sexuality and danger, evoking the creeping influence of a corrupting culture on a girl's most private self. The article will also demonstrate that this spatial narrative underpins the epistemological structure of the text – its separation of the primary from the secondary, the real from the artificial.