Innocent is an adjective often used of children, but what precisely is being claimed? That children never hurt other sentient beings, or never offend intentionally, as the etymology would indicate, that, in other words, they are harmless? Anyone who’s ever spent a minute with a child knows otherwise. That wrongdoing leaves them without the shadow of guilt, then? One does not have to be acquainted with the Complete Works of Melanie Klein to know what nonsense that is. Are children innocuous? Hardly!

So is it being asserted that children can’t be held responsible for their actions, that, being children, they are never themselves personally involved in wrongdoing, but are, as it were, always bystanders, or victims of the nefarious activities of adults? But every civilized society sets a legal age of responsibility, sometimes as young as seven, and no parent needs telling that children as young as two know full well when they’re being naughty.

So what are we claiming when we declare that children are innocent?

Is childish innocence merely an aspect of the recent construct which is childhood itself – a construct unknown in The Middle Ages – or even later, during the Reformation, when little people were more likely to be regarded as the bearers of Original Sin? Wasn’t the notion of the innocent child the creation of William Blake, then taken up and developed by the Romantics? In other words, it exists in our minds only and not in any flesh-and-blood human being, no matter how small, or beautiful . . .

Or, when we call children innocent, do we really mean they are ignorant? Are we saying they know nothing, or have little experience of deception or sexuality? Well, Sigmund Freud disposed of the illusion that children are asexual beings – and as for deception, every schoolmaster knows how crafty children can be . . .

That they lack knowledge and experience of the world, then? These are myths which don't survive the reality of meeting one single child.

Nonetheless, it must be admitted that even child prostitutes may rightly be felt to be innocent in some curious way - quite unlike their adult counterparts - so in what does this innocence consist? The absence of depravity? Very difficult even to imagine a depraved child . . . Or is there some particular knowledge which a child doesn't have? But a good many children know more than a good many adults. Indeed, every child has learnt more by the age of three than he will ever learn again - the miracle of speech, for example. In fact, if we define intelligence as the ability to learn new things, to find solutions to problems encountered for the first time, who is more intelligent than a child?

But intelligence, of course, is not knowledge. It may be thought the only knowledge an adult possesses which is denied to a child is knowledge of the orgasm, but that isn't true either, for prepubescent children are perfectly capable of having orgasms, though, in the case of boys, without ejaculation.

No, if describing children as innocent means anything at all, and is not merely an epithet applied to angels without wings by romantic adults out of touch with real children, it can only mean this: that children know, but, unlike adults, are not corrupted by what they know i.e. not fragmented, not distorted, not perverted, not ruined. Children do not watch themselves in the mirror of self-awareness, nor does their knowledge infect them with the poisons of cynicism and hypocrisy . . . Children know - about sex, about death, about what the world is really like - they see it for what it is and they see it more clearly and more realistically than most adults - but they are not harmed by what they know. Children, in fact, are remarkably down-to-earth.

Adults, by contrast, are always taking refuge in fantasy . . . Adults are divided, split, torn apart by experience, filled with lust, guilt, frustration, fear . . . Children, on the whole, remain whole - and are, therefore, wholesome . . . The difference is not between innocence and its binary opposite, guilt; nor is it between knowledge and its binary opposite, ignorance - the difference between adults and children is a remarkable difference in degree of self-consciousness . . .

Children, boys especially, are not forever watching themselves in the mind's mirror - adults hardly ever put it down . . . This is why children have clear eyes - they look out of them - at the world - instead of using them to look in . . .

(from Minor Incidents, reprinted in Words for Love Perhaps, Out Now Press, 2015, pp. 52-53)