The Enigma of Innocence
Innocence, especially when thought of in relation to childhood, is a state that lies more in a mythical realm than in reality. Can anyone ever really be truly innocent? And why do we repeatedly assume this in children? Children can be cruel, cutting and crass, and yet we still often conflate innocence with inexperience, but are they really the same thing?
A quick journey through the history of childhood as a social phenomenon shows us that our expectations and notions of this period of life are ever-changing. Children were once perceived to be born evil and seen as young adults rather than as a separate category entirely. With the coming of the Romantic poets, they were then imbued with the ideal of childhood innocence, a sensibility interwoven with nature, creativity and a prelapsarian state. And then into the 20th century, along with the creation of the welfare state, there arose a recognition that children need protection and nurture, a precursor to how we think of children today.
Looking at the changing landscape of childhood and innocence, we see that notions of these ideas are more likely constructed by adults than cemented in any concrete reality of children’s inner lives. As well as altering social ideas around children, we continue to be implicated in our rememberings or re-rememberings of our own youth, our memories tinged by experience, socialisation and culture. In our maturity, childhood allows us to make sense of own state of adulthood. Youth, then, is perhaps not as linear as we may assume.
As Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes in his preface to Emile – ‘we know nothing of childhood… the wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.’
And what of adolescence? A state that perhaps gets longer and longer over time, a bridge between two periods, when we are not quite children and not quite adults – confined in a liminal state.
