On Innocence Lost: How Children Are Made Dangerous

Abstract

This article explores continuities of despotism within liberal governance. It introduces recent government investments in the need to protect children from institutional and organisational abuse in the context of which loss of innocence is conceptualised as a moment in a biography, following exposure to violence. The article contrasts those investments with contemporaneous claims by the state that as other-than-innocent, certain children in its care are legitimately exempted from moral-ethical norms embedded elsewhere in the logic of governing childhood proper. The article turns to historical understandings of the welfare of children in the state of Victoria, Australia, to explore the conditions and the means by which children in state care came to be figured as other-than-innocent exceptions, rightly exposed to forms of authoritarian violence. Loss of innocence is explored as an enduring achievement of government in the context of aspirations to do with population, territory and national security.