Child sexual cyberbullying in Argentina: discursive analysis of the grooming law debate

Abstract

Sexual violence on the Internet has become a topic that has been the object of various enunciations, especially with regard to the protection of children and adolescents. In this framework, grooming – sexual cyberbullying towards children and adolescents – as a social problem in Argentina is especially thematized around the parliamentary debate of Law 26,904 that inaugurates it as a new criminal type in 2013, modifying crimes against sexual integrity.

From a socio-semiotic methodology, taking the Foucauldian notion of ritual, the shorthand versions of the debate are analyzed, focusing from which subject positions they were proffered and how they built their legitimacy. One of the main findings shows how sexual violence against children and adolescents, historically theorized by disciplines such as psychology, pediatrics, among others, adopts new enunciators specialized in the subject that come from the field of computer security, which takes on a central relevance in the regulation of the conduct of children and adolescents.

This implies, on the one hand, displacements in the tradition of the fields of favorite enunciators on sexual violence -psi- and of the components of these violences that defined these violences, including in a new way the problems of the sophistication of digital knowledge and the speed that these media carry as a threat per se. On the other hand, continuities are produced, while the discourses against grooming during the parliamentary debate reproduce the negative axiology of childhood and sexuality that has permeated social discourse since the turn of the century.