Title: The frightening subject: child sexuality – a qualitative interview study about a few preschool teachers approach to child sexuality. Author: Linda Olsson Mentor: Victoria Kawesa Term: autumn of 2015 The purpose of this study is to investigate how child sexuality is imagined and understood according to the experiences and knowledge of four different preschool teachers. My main focus lied within finding out how preschool teachers approach the subject by asking them to share their experiences of children’s sexual behaviors. This is a qualitative study and the method used to collect the material was interviews. Four preschool teachers were asked to participate in my study. The theoretical approach in this independent work is social constructivism, and an intersectional perspective is used to analyze the results. The interviews are analyzed from a discourse analysis point of view, which means that my conclusions are based on my interpretations of how the informants in the study talk about and react to the subject. My main conclusions are that the different preschool teachers in my study treats the subject in different ways, and the approach towards children’s sexual expressions is handled in many various ways. All of the participating informants agreed that more education about child sexuality is needed. Another conclusion that my study confirms is that the subject is hard to talk about, among teachers, between teachers and parents and among children and grown ups. Keywords: Children’s sexual behaviors, preschool, social constructivism, child masturbation, approach to sexual behaviors Nyckelord: Barns sexuella uttryck, förskola, socialkonstruktivism, barnonani, förhållningssätt till sexuella uttryck

The purpose of this study is to show the discourses that we can see in the texts from RFSU (2015) and “Rädda Barnen” (2013) about children's sexuality, we connect this empiricism to the preschool curriculum. Furthermore, we highlight the gaps that we can see are the different discourses in the texts and how present or absent physical factuality is. We also want to examine what it could mean for our didactic work with body factuality. Generally, there are a lot of texts about the importance of playfulness and many expressions that leave room for interpretation to the reader. We believe that concepts like playful, positive, equality, security, develop a responsible sexuality, private body parts, intimately, and so forth leaves subjective to interpretation of each individual preschool teacher. Children are described exploring their sexuality through play, were the body are in focus, but are often described limited as children's sexuality. Children's bodily feelings and sexuality described indistinct and confused resulting in that the body is made invisible. The discourses make themselves prominent in our discourse analysis is sexuality discourse, disquieting and fear discourse, discourse of norms, materialistic corporal discourse and the invisible discourse.