Beasts, victims or competent agents: The positioning of children in research literature on manipulation

Drawing on positioning theory, Warming, Galløe, Carlsen and Rasmussen explore how discourses of manipulation in everyday life debates and research literature contribute to what Cook has termed ‘the moral project of childhood’. The analysis shows that children are positioned in these discourses either as incompetent, powerless victims or as powerful, egoistic or psychopathological agents, and moreover that these discourses unreflexively build upon and reinstall pre-sociological Dionysian and Apollonian views on Childhood, and a taken-for-granted generational order in which adults hold (and should hold) power over children.