Ella walks across her school's rugby pitch along with three other young people (Sophie, Jacob and Michael) and three researchers (Emma, Ian and Catt). We are all participating in a study using mobile phones as data collection – this is part of the fieldwork. With her phone's camera turned towards her, Ella pouts her lips and takes a selfie. Emma notices and asks, ‘Do you do the same face every time?’ ‘Yeah,’ is Ella's response. Later, as the group continues walking, Ella picks a flower from the grass underfoot and holds it in shot whilst pouting to the camera. Though there are some interesting encounters happening here, between Ella and her phone, what forms the basis for this chapter is the way adult reactions to those encounters are framed in relation to age; more precisely in relation to discourses of sexuality attached to age. Ella is thirteen years old, and with her being a ‘young person’, the prevailing discourses of adult sexualities read this event differently compared to if she had been five years old – a ‘child’.

According to Louise Jackson, modern sexual subjectivities are underpinned by the labels of youth, adolescence and childhood, which are positioned as ‘formative stages in the growth of sexual and self-awareness as well as periods of susceptibility to sexual danger’ (2006: 250). Childhood is seen as a time of innocence, a historical construct, which James Kincaid (1998) primarily locates in the discourses of sexuality in the Victorian era. For Kincaid, even though the modern child is evacuated of sexuality by the child's innocence, they are still dominated by sexuality, a ‘negative sexuality … but sexuality all the same’ (1998: 55). Young people occupy an uneasy middle ground between childhood innocence and adult responsibility, such that their expressions of sexuality are often labelled as signs of ‘deviancy, precocity and “mental deficiency”’ (Jackson 2006: 251). Therefore, though there are different reactions to Ella the child and Ella the young person taking a selfie, both Ellas are trapped by the dichotomy of responsibility and innocence, of adult sexuality and child-like asexuality.