Right now, there are places in the world where a certain type of children are being bought and sold like common commodities. They are shipped from place to place, in secret, often internationally. They are exploited and used without any regard to their feelings or well being. They are provided for the sole purpose of servicing adults sexually. Their little bodies subject to any and all manner of unspeakable acts, used as if they are nothing more than toys.

Okay, full disclosure, these particular children are toys, but what right does that give anyone to sexualize and defile them? Sure, they may be made entirely out of plastic, or latex, or silicone, or whatever the hell they make sex dolls out of these days, but they are still children. Children who are being provided to satisfy the sick desires of the most evil, subhuman, filthy creatures on the face of the planet, pedophiles.

Fortunately this tragic and atrocious phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by the governments of some of the more compassionate and enlightened nations of the world. The artificial child sex trade is a scourge that people are waking up to everywhere, and people are demanding action. It is because of this awareness that countless artificial children will not be made to suffer the artificial trauma that might have been their lot in life. Because of this, they will no doubt be saved years of artificial therapy with artificial therapists to recover from their artificial pain, and the world will be a kinder place.

If you haven’t picked up on my sarcasm by now, stop reading immediately. This is not the blog for you.

I’m pretty sure anyone with half a functioning brain will agree that child sexual abuse is bad. Even many pedophiles understand and believe that children should never be interfered with sexually by adults and that age consent laws serve a legitimate purpose in protecting children from people who would take advantage of them. (Shout out to my fellow Virpeds.) However, the degree to which modern society has taken it’s zealousness to protect children from sexual harm has begun to lead us far beyond common sense solutions and off into the real of the hysterical and the insane. This hysteria includes but is not limited to arresting and prosecuting people for sex with inanimate objects, as well as possession of drawn and computed generated images.

There have been a number of cases recently of people around the world being arrested for such “crimes” when the items (child-like sex dolls) they purchased were discovered entering the country. Normally these people have resided in either Europe, Australia or North America. The country the dolls seem to all be coming from is Japan, where apparently they have slightly more tolerant, dare I say sane, attitudes towards behaviors such as sex with inanimate objects that may or may not look like children.

Sadly, whenever I’ve seen an article about what I’ll call the child doll sex trade, the comments at the bottom of those articles have typically been overwhelmingly in favor of prosecuting the purchasers of said dolls. Not to mention in favor of doing cruel and unusual things to to said purchasers. Who would have thought that making love to a lifeless piece of latex would be an act deserving of a slow and painful death?

As one might expect, a lot of the comments I saw associated with these articles didn’t even make any sense at all, and made comparisons between pedophilia and other phenomena that not only missed the mark, but sounded silly doing it. One such comparison I heard more than once was that of pedophiles to serial killers. The thought more or less being, “What’s next? Providing serial killers with dolls they can act out their fantasies on?”

Now, anyone who knows what they’re talking about, including experts who study pedophilia, will tell you that pedophilia and the things that motivate homicidal manics are not even in the same psychological ballpark. Not even close. It’s like comparing apples to giraffes. (Apples to oranges isn’t different enough.) Still, let’s work with the example anyway, shall we?

If someone were inclined to stalk and murder other human beings, and that person wanted to act out the fantasy with a non-human surrogate victim, what would prevent them from obtaining an ordinary department store mannequin, taking that mannequin home, and stabbing the shit out of it? To be honest, if someone were inclined towards such things, I’d prefer that they resorted to using the mannequin as an outlet as opposed to say, my sister or my mom, but that’s just me, I guess.

Continuing with this example of the homicidal person and his unfortunate department store mannequin, if this scenario were to play out in real life, and someone were to catch the “offender”, can anyone imagine anything being done about it from a legal standpoint? Can you imagine a 911 call?

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Yes, you have to help! I can’t believe what I’ve just seen! My neighbor….. my neighbor came home today with what appears to be a female mannequin.”

“Ummmm…… what? What’s your emergency?”

“No, no… you don’t understand! That’s not all! Just now, I was looking over there and, well, I didn’t mean to, I mean… I wasn’t trying to be nosy or anything, but for a moment, I could see through his living room window, and well, he had the mannequin and he was….. STABBING IT WITH A KNIFE!!!!!”

“My god! Ma’am, stay calm and lock your doors! I’m sending the SWAT team immediately!”

Does anyone really think that’s how such a call would play out? I’m going to say no. I’m going to say that the operator would probably laugh you off the phone. If they did send anyone, the cops at most would ask the mannequin slasher a couple of questions. Then, they’d roll their eyes and walk away thinking, “what a weirdo”, and that would be it. That’s even in a case where the mannequin being stabbed was a childlike one. Stab that same childlike mannequin with your dick though, and you could be in some serious legal hot water.

Is the absurdity of the criminalization of child sex dolls coming through any clearer now?

The criminalization of victimless acts which simulate child sex haven’t been limited to life-like dolls either. In many places around the world, people have been arrested and prosecuted for drawn and computer-generated images which portray children in a sexual light or engaging in sexual activity. No children have been harmed, and there is no evidence that the people viewing such media have or will harm children, but they have been made criminals anyway, for what amounts to essentially nothing at all.

Some may say the the people who are found to be in passion of such material are deserving of punishment simply because “it’s sick”. Ok, fair enough. Let’s accept that it’s “sick”. The fact of the matter is, lots of people do things in private that, while harmless to anyone else, most others would consider icky, or creepy, or sick, and they do not have to worry about the police knocking on their door, arresting them, putting them in jail, then adding them to a registry that marks them as social pariahs for the rest of their lives.

Also, much like the example with the mannequin, there are artificial things that could be worse and that would be unquestioningly protected by free speech and/or privacy rights. If someone drew or created computer generated images of a bunch of murdered and mutilated children, would they also be going to jail? I certainly don’t think so. Especially not if the creator were to claim the that images were supposed to represent something about the cruelty of a bleak and uncaring society or some such thing. Then, it’s just art. Controversial art perhaps, but art. However, put the illustrations of the mutilated children side by side with computer generated CP, and which would portray the greater atrocity? Why then, could someone be imprisoned for the latter images and not the former?

At the end of the day, the most compelling argument people in the camp who support the criminalization of all forms of artificial child sex have is that it encourages actual child abuse and that people who resort to any form of artificial child sex will eventually decide that’s not enough and go on to abuse real children. The problem is that there is not so much as a single shred of even anecdotal evidence to support that assumption. That’s all it is, an assumption. A baseless, knee-jerk supposition made mostly by people who have little to no understanding of the issue and certainly not of pedophilia itself.

Speaking as someone who is a pedophile himself and therefore has a pretty deep understanding of the issue, if anything, it’s the opposite. To me, common sense would dictate that it would be better for pedophiles to have as many harmless and victimless outlets as possible to discharge sexual energy. People who are sexually attracted to children are going be sexually attracted to children one way or the other, until the day they die. Providing or denying them sexual outlets is not going to change that, one way or the other.

If I were a teleiophile and a parent, I’d think I’d want pedophiles to have child sex dolls and artificial CP. The more the better. Hell, not only do I think I’d want to to be legal, but mandatory. I can see the government program now…. “If you’re a pedophile or are in any way sexually inclined towards children, come to you local department of health and pick up your free child sex doll! We can provide child sex dolls of all shapes and sizes! Take it home! Fuck it all you want! Just stay away from real children!”

To be honest though, the availability of such sexual outlets probably makes little difference either way. Pedophiles who have a mindset that inclines them towards actually abusing children are a already a danger to children. I really don’t think that fucking a doll is going to magically make them any more or less dangerous. Pedophiles who already have or already do abuse children probably aren’t going to be satisfied with a doll. Pedophiles who are committed to not acting out and not abusing children aren’t going to make love to a child doll, then snap and decide to betray everything they believe in and willfully harm a child they care about.

With all of that having been taken into account, this is really just another issue of personal freedoms and individual liberties. In a truly free society, any person who is inclined to should be able to purchase any sexual aids they chose, including lifelike dolls, of any shape and size, made to the likeness of any age group, for any reason. Would the availability of a childlike love doll keep me from abusing a child real life? No, because I wouldn’t and won’t abuse a child in real life anyway, with or without a doll to live out my fantasies with. The reason I should be allowed to purchase such a doll, without fear, is that it’s a victimless act, and it’s none of anyone else’s goddamn business what I do when I’m completely alone, in the privacy of my own bedroom.

Not that I’d buy one if I thought I could. I mean, how good could a lifeless piece of silicone or latex or whatever really be? Also, storage and cleaning would probably be a pain in the ass. Although I suppose I could probably find somewhere to keep it, but I’m not sure it would be worth the hassle. Not to mention they are pretty expensive, from what I’ve heard. Although everyone takes MasterCard these days, don’t they? What is my credit limit again? I’m not close to maxed out……

Ok, I’d totally buy one.

The post The Tragedy of Child Sex Dolls and Artificial CP appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

Original audio.

Candice:

Welcome to the prevention podcast, I’m your host, Candice Christiansen. Our goal, at the prevention podcast, is to talk about dicey, controversial issues related to preventing sexual abuse. Why? Because it needs to be said. Topics include the biology of pedophilia, risk, need and responsivity principles related to non-contact and contact sex offenders, researchers in the field of sex offender treatment, and more.

Join us bi-weekly, and let’s talk about it.

Welcome to the prevention podcast, I’m your host, Candice Christiansen. We have some amazing people we have come in contact with since we started the Prevention Podcast, and today, I have someone with me that I’m really excited to talk to. His name’s Jeremy Malcolm and he is the executive director of a new child protection organization called Prostasia Foundation, so welcome Jeremy.

Jeremy:

Thank you so much for having me!

Candice:

I’m so happy to have you on, and I’m happy we were able to connect a couple of months ago and to talk about your child protection organization, I think it is so in line with the prevention efforts we’re seeing globally, including our own, so I today really want to spend a lot of time finding out about your foundation and what you’re doing. And with that, tell us about Prostasia Foundation.

Jeremy:

Sure. Well, if it’s okay before I do that, I’ll just give a brief bit of background about myself to explain why I’m the person heading this thing, because I don’t have a background in child protection. My background is actually, I was an IT lawyer, originally from Australia, and I had both a law firm specializing in information technology issues, and I also had an IT consultancy where I was dealing with the technical side of the internet. And, this interest led me into doing a PhD in law on the topic of internet governance, which is the study of how we can have one internet and 195 different countries around the world trying to manage how the internet should work.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Now, what does this have to do with child protection?” Well, one of the issues that of course concerns many governments around the world and many civil society groups around the world is… “How can we stop the internet from being this misused in ways that harm children, whether that’s distribution of child sexual abuse images, or people who reach out to children on the internet in order to groom them?” Those are real problems, and actually the internet activism community that I’ve become a part of doesn’t really have the answers to these problems, unfortunately.

So, I’ve been working, since I’ve finished my PhD, on civil rights, digital rights, and the internet. This includes things like privacy and freedom of expression, all about constitutional rights we have. Now, these are very important, but in some ways, they actually seem to make child protection harder, rather than easier, because we can’t have things like snooping on people’s emails, and checking their web browser to make sure they’re not doing anything bad. Like, that would probably help us catch more child sexual abusers, but it would also infringe the rights of others who aren’t child sex offenders.

Additionally, laws and policies sometimes will target segments within our community who are stigmatized as being most likely to be involved in sexual offending. An example of that is, laws against sex workers. Now, you can have whatever opinions you like about sex work, whether it’s good or bad, but at the end of the day, targeting sex workers as a way of preventing child sexual abuse has a couple of problems with it.

One, it infringes the human rights of those that are not child sexual abusers, and the other is it’s really just not very effective. Most child sexual abuse doesn’t happen through sex work, it doesn’t happen through the kind of people who are being targeted, it happens actually in the home. It happens mostly through situational offending, which means people who aren’t even pedophiles for example, are most likely to be sexual offenders against children.

And also, children themselves can or young people themselves are largely responsible for child sexual abuse that happens, like whether that’s “consensual” (we can put in quotation marks), young teens who are in relationships with each other and sending sexual images to each other, that may be a consensual boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, and yet, because it involved basically what used to be called child pornography and is now called child sexual abuse material, they can be classified as child sex offenders, even though they’re really just in a relationship that’s relatively normal for that age group. So, I had to think about, well, what can we do to prevent child sexual abuse that is consistent with human rights, that is consistent with a free internet, and is sex-positive.

And what I mean by sex positive, for example, is not shaming young people who are doing things like exchanging images with each other, not criminalizing them, also, not blaming sex workers, not blaming the consensual kink community, not blaming pornography users. And again, you can have whatever opinions about pornography, you can think that it’s good or bad, but adult pornography is constitutionally protected, and for some people it is part of their sex life.

For some people, it’s all of their sex life, they have nothing else, but that has to be legal, adult, consensual sexual behavior. We are very strongly against anything that is non-consensual or anything that involves children. I was looking into what we can actually do to address this problem, while preserving human rights and sex positivity. I did a lot of research into this, because I was feeling like I didn’t have the tools that I needed within my day job, where I’m working on the internet and digital rights.

So, what I found out really surprised me. That was that firstly, child sexual abuse can be prevented, and that some of the people who are most likely to be able to prevent it are not who you’d expect. For example, we have three different kinds of prevention: Primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary prevention.

So, primary prevention means you don’t know who’s going to sexually offend against a child. There’s no way, there’s no sign on their forehead saying, “I’m a potential sexual offender,” or, “I just looked at some child pornography,” that just doesn’t happen. So, primary prevention is about targeting the entire community with messages that help them to avoid offending. Apart from messaging, there’s things that can be done, for example, internet platforms can put in place some filters so that known images of child sexual abuse are not being shared. That’s also a form of primary prevention, it prevents this content from being distributed online.

So, primary prevention is that first layer where you’re really targeting the whole community with efforts to avoid or prevent child sexual abuse. But then there’s also something called secondary prevention, which means if there are particular people who are vulnerable to being involved with child sexual offending, you can also target them. So, although it’s very difficult to know who’s going to offend and who isn’t, there are some people who come forward, because they need help in avoiding thoughts, sexual thoughts about children, and dealing with those.

Thankfully, you don’t really have to go searching for them, because they will come and seek help if they need it. So, minor-attracted persons are really a good example of that class of person who is not necessarily an offender, may never be an offender their entire life. But they still need to have community for support, and they do need to have people they can talk to without being reported, without being doxed, without being assumed guilty of something that hasn’t happened yet.

So, organizations like yours, like the Prevention Project, and like Prostasia Foundation are really endeavoring to put together pieces of the prevention puzzle. Including making it possible for minor-attracted persons to get the help that they need, in case they do have feelings that are leading them in a bad direction. So, that’s basically why I came together with some other people who were like-minded with me. We have child sexual abuse survivors, we have mental health professionals, we have people who have direct first-hand experience in the sex industry, we have civil rights experts and lawyers.

So, all of these people have a vision of an organization that can work with lawmakers, with internet platforms, with other civil society groups, and with researchers to build support for prevention. And, we don’t work directly with those, for example, directly with minor-attracted persons, or with former offenders. So, ex-offenders, those who have offended in the past, when we have prevention which is directed against them it’s called tertiary prevention. So, primary, secondary, and tertiary. We don’t work directly with any of those groups, but what we do do is make sure that there is research about ways in which they can be helped to avoid offending.

So, we also then use the results of that research to try to inform policymakers, which includes lawmakers, but also includes people at internet companies or have a dating website, who have any of these websites that could be positive for child protection or could be negative. We work to try and ensure they are positive for child protection, so some of the people who formed Prostasia Foundation formed a meeting with one of the major internet platforms when it seemed that minor-attracted persons were being banned from the platform.

So, we had a conversation with them about, “What are the standards that are being applied here? Can they be applied in a way that would help these people get the peer support they need to avoid offending? Without creating like a terrible situation where people are exposing children to harm?” So, it’s a difficult balance to strike, it’s a really controversial thing as well. That’s one of the other things that the startup of Prostasia Foundation is finding, there’s a lot of people who support what we’re doing, who think we’re doing it in the right way and for the right reasons, but there’s still that stigma there. That’s everyone who works on child sexual abuse. It affects the researchers, it affects journalists who write about the topic, because it’s such an emotional topic for a lot of people, they don’t even want to think about it.

That can unfortunately create a stigmatizing effect on those that work to prevent offending. It’s been a challenging startup period for us and it’s not over yet, we are crowdfunding to support some initial expenses that we have. Ultimately, we’re hoping to get support from institutional donors like charitable foundations, so we can have staff actually dedicated to this mission, working to ensure that the laws and policies that are in place to protect children are actually effective, and are not going to be infringing on the constitutional rights of others.

It’s a vitally important mission, getting there is still an uphill battle. We’re committed to doing it, but got a little ways to go yet.

Candice:

Well, I appreciate what you’re doing, and I think what I love, I love that it’s “outside the box,” we are well known for being “outside the box,” especially with our podcast. It took us a few years before out MAPs wellness program and our MAP support program became internationally known. So, I applaud you for what you’re doing, I think what you’re doing is great. And I think, you know, you talk about the primary prevention, I think that’s what we see so often, and what you’re saying and what we’re saying is, “Let’s address it from all angles. It’s not black and white. We need to look at all these different angles instead of just going with one lens and one way of thinking.”

So yeah, I love the work you’re doing and I think it’s really important, and my hope is that people listening, we’re now in 50 countries, so my hope is that people listening will get onboard and support what you’re doing so we can continue our efforts to have prevention. Because ultimately, like you said, we want to have prevention about sexual abuse, and we’ve got to do it in a way that’s accurate and efficient, and protects people’s rights, and just makes sense.

I think that’s oftentimes what I’ve seen is, laws are made and unfortunately, they’re not effective. But when there’s this media scare or the focus is inaccurate, and certain populations are focused on instead of the reality, the entire community goes wild and says, “We have to make these laws more stringent, we’ve gotta put our foot down on the internet,” when in fact it’s not as effective. So I just appreciate what you’re doing.

Jeremy:

Well, thank you very much, and you’re absolutely right. The laws against child sexual abuse are already as severe as they need to be, and they should be severe, I mean, don’t get me wrong, they should be. But, the difference between going to jail for fifty years or for a thousand years, that’s not going to dissuade someone who’s set on offending. I’ve heard they’re going to be dissuaded by the laws we have now, or you can make them ten times higher, that’s not going to make a difference.

What’s going to make a difference is giving people alternatives to offending, and for many people, that may mean professional support, that may mean peer support, that may mean, and this is where more research is needed, it may be that there are outlets that people who have a sexual attraction towards children can use to manage their attractions without harming anyone. This, for example, might include the use of dolls, which, this is a very controversial topic because it’s very unsettling to think of someone using a doll in a sexual way if that doll resembles a child.

Like, I myself find that a very disturbing thing to think about. However, it really comes down to the question of, “Is a doll going to take the place of the child, or is it going to lead on to sexual offending against real children?” So, this is something that we need to know the answer to. There are researchers out there who believe it may actually help as a substitute rather than being a gateway to sexual offending. So, what Prostasia is going to try and do is raise money for research like that. So we know, should we be banning these dolls? Should we be making them available or leaving them available? Because they are currently legal in the United States, they’re illegal in Canada and the United Kingdom and other places.

But really, before we make these things illegal, we should have the facts in front of us. That’s just one example. There are many examples of where we just don’t know what is going to be most effective at prevention and rather than just jumping ahead and make laws because we feel like we have to do something, we should just pause, take a break, make sure we have our facts straight, and then we can make laws and policies that are evidence-based and are more likely to be effective.

Because really, that’s what children deserve. Children, if we can save one child from abuse, then it’s worth taking the extra time, it’s worth investing the money, and it’s worth planning out what we’re going to do really, really carefully rather than just jumping in and acting on the basis of emotions.

Candice:

I agree, and I actually love what you said about the dolls, I know that’s one example, but I think it’s a really great example. I’ve thought through that quite a bit. I see articles come out, and again, it’s that laws have been created to ban them and so on and so forth, and I have often wondered, well, what is that based off of?

If we look at, for instance, pedophilia from a sexual age orientation standpoint, and I can speak personally because I have a program that treats people that say, “I’m anti-contact and I’m non-offending which means I never ever want to harm a child, and I live with this attraction every single day, what do I do with that? Everyone else that’s heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual… can have a relationship with an adult, but what do I do? What do I do with this attraction, which can be very lonely, very isolating, and cause people to be incredibly depressed?”

And I think, well, if it’s a sexual age orientation and we’re looking at harm reduction and we want to protect children, could it be a potentially harm-reducing intervention? I don’t know, and I have my own opinions about that. I think it’s worth looking into. Definitely. I think the research needs to be backed by that, so I appreciate you saying that.

Jeremy:

Yeah, exactly. It is sometimes hard for people like us who are not minor-attracted, non-pedophiles, to imagine how it must be to be in the mind of someone who has this attraction, but I think it helps if you just realize that every one of us has at sometime had a crush on a celebrity or something like that, or even just someone walking down the street, “Wow, that’s an attractive person.” Now, we know that doesn’t mean we have sexual access to that person.

We have to ask them for a drink, and as an adult, over the course of time, that might actually lead into a sexual relationship. But, as you said, if you’re a pedophile, that’s not an option for you. So, you’re left in a position where you have to be celibate your whole life, particularly if it’s an exclusive attraction. If you’re exclusively attracted to those that can’t consent. Imagine how it would be, to live your entire life that way with nothing to… no prospect of a sex life of your own, unless you can have one by yourself.

So, I think the case of allowing someone who is minor attracted to have a safe, harmless sex life by themselves, I think just as a matter of compassion, I think that’s something we have to think about allowing them, rather than… because what, really, is the alternative? You can’t lock people up who have never done anything and have not intentions of ever doing anything, and yet this is the kind of inflammatory language that we often read online when pedophilia is being discussed. “We should castrate them. We should throw them into jail, it doesn’t matter if a child’s been touched or not.”

Well, my perspective, sure it matters! It matters a lot! There’s a huge difference between a pedophile who’s attracted to children, who never touches children, and one who does. That’s a world of difference. So if we can only shift a few people away from offending that’s an enormous contribution, and that’s something we can really, effectively do because the resources that are allocated to prevention are not enough. There’s way more allocated to enforcement and that’s always going to be a losing battle, because most child sexual abuse takes place behind closed doors, within families, and it’s not usually someone who’s on the police’s radar.

So, enforcement is always going to mean someone has already been abused. If we can prevent just a few people from being abused, then that’s a far better outcome.

Candice:

I agree completely. I was thinking of Elizabeth Letourneau’s research when she does her presentation she talks about how so much money is spent after the fact or on law enforcement, so why don’t we step ahead of that and do some of this prevention work so we can stop one more victim, right? Stop them from being harmed, and again, I agree completely what we do at the prevention project, there’s also misinformation out there that, the person who could potentially abuse your child is this man who is a pedophile, lurking in the bushes, waiting to jump.

And the reality is… we know there’s research out there that says you can sexually offend and not be a pedophile, there are other reasons for that. So you’re right, the media just shares these stories and also gives misinformation. I see all the time in the media, “This man had sex with a 16-year-old, he’s a pedophile,” but that’s not even the age for a pedophile. So just this inaccurate, misinformation that the whole world just jumps on. Again, I really love that you are taking a stand as someone who was in the IT world and a lawyer, that is really admirable. On my end, I’m a clinician. I’m a trauma expert and a trauma survivor, but I love that you’re coming from the angle of IT and knowing the laws, and stepping in to say, “Let’s combat child sexual abuse from this angle,” which is really, again, admirable.

Jeremy:

Well, I thank you very much for your support, and if any of the listeners to this podcast would like to learn more about what Prostasia is trying to do, and maybe would even like to support us, we have a crowdfunding campaign going on. Prostasia.org will get you there, also prost.asia if that’s easier to type in.

We do hope to make this into an operating non-profit with a full-time staff and if we can do that, that would make it, I believe, the first organization of its kind in the sense that we… there are many child protection organizations and many that are focused on prevention, but those that are also focused on upholding civil rights and sex positivity and doing so in a way that involves advocacy to lawmakers and platforms, I think that’s fairly unique. So, that’s kind of what we’re trying to go for here. I really do appreciate the time that you’ve let me on your podcast to talk about it.

Candice:

Of course Jeremy, is there anything else that you want our listeners to know or that you’d like to share?

Jeremy:

I don’t think so, but just follow us on Twitter, it’s @ProstasiaInc on Twitter, and I would also be very happy to talk with anyone who has further questions, just drop me a direct message on Twitter or a note on our website and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

Candice:

Great! Well, Jeremy Malcolm, it’s been a pleasure! Thank you for coming on our podcast today!

Jeremy:

You’re very welcome! Thanks again!

Candice:

Those of you that are listening, thank you again for taking the time to listen to our podcast and we’ll see you in two weeks. Let’s talk about it.

Thank you for listening this week’s podcast. Please visit www.thepreventionproject.org to learn more about our podcast and our programs. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast at www.thepreventionpodcast.com or iTunes. See you next time!

The post TGPP Podcast: Jeremy Malcolm, Prostasia Foundation appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

Candice:

Welcome to the prevention podcast, I’m your host, Candice Christiansen. Our goal, at the prevention podcast, is to talk about dicey, controversial issues related to preventing sexual abuse. Why? Because it needs to be said. Topics include the biology of pedophilia, risk, need and responsivity principles related to non-contact and contact sex offenders, researchers in the field of sex offender treatment, and more.

Join us bi-weekly, and let’s talk about it.

Hello, this is Candice Christiansen, welcome to the Prevention Podcast. As I have been sharing, we are doing a series of podcasts talking about pedophilia, and we’re interviewing all kinds of interesting people, including anti-contact pedophiles, and today we have a wonderful guest, doctor Allyson Walker, welcome.

Allyson: Thank you!

Candice: I first want to say that Dr. Walker identifies as non-binary, and so today we will be referring to Dr. Walker as “they,” “them,” and “they’re.” Alright, well welcome to our podcast.

Allyson: Thank you so much!

Candice:

I’m so happy we met! It’s really great that you found us, and that we found you, and that you’re doing the amazing research that you’re doing. That’s one of the things that I want people that are listening to us to know, is that you are doing research on pedophiles. And so, really, if you are open, let’s start with that. What is your research about?

Allyson:

So, I did a study that I call the MAP resilience study, MAP stands for minor attracted person. A lot of the time, people will talk about pedophiles and MAP is a term that is used by people in the minor-attracted community to refer to themselves. It includes pedophiles, which are people who are attracted to prepubescent children, and then also to hebephiles, who are attracted to children in the early stages of puberty, and then sometimes ephebophiles, which are attracted to children in the late stages of puberty. So often, MAP is used by people in this population as a less stigmatizing term and also as an umbrella term that kind of includes everyone.

So, I did this study, the MAP resilience study, to find out… I come from a criminal justice background, my PhD is in criminal justice, and also a social work background. So, I wanted to find out what motivates MAPs to not commit offenses, how do they strategize not to commit offenses, and then also, how do they cope with their attractions, their sexuality, and deal with the stigma that they’ve got going on in their lives.

Candice: That’s great! I appreciate you explaining MAPs because we have talked about MAPs on this podcast, and I kept saying pedophile, which is funny because I do know about hebephiles and ephebophiles. And so, thank you for clarifying that, I think that’s really important. And it’s such an interesting topic of research. What interested you in this type of research?

Allyson:

So, before I had gone back to get my PhD, I was hearing about individuals who are attracted to minors saying, “I’m attracted to minors, I don’t want to offend, and I never have.” I had never really considered that, that this population even existed. So, I was working in criminal justice at the time, I started looking into the criminological literature about it, and there’s really nothing that talks about people that are attracted to minors that don’t commit sexual offenses, so I got really interested in this.

Especially, I don’t know if you’ve heard this research, but there’s a bunch of it saying they’ve done studies the general population and talking about pedophiles and asking them, “Do you think this population should be incarcerated, even if they haven’t committed an offense?” And a huge proportion say yes. A huge proportion say they would be better off dead. So, it’s really upsetting stuff, and I was interested in how are people dealing with this stigma and how do they deal with their sexuality in general, so I decided to study it.

Candice:

I appreciate you saying that it’s upsetting. One of the things that I post on Twitter quite a bit is that it is upsetting anti-contact, and I’ll literally put it in CAPS, “ANTI-CONTACT pedophiles” are told, like, “Die,” threatened, and there’s so much hate out there, and it’s acceptable in our society. And, this misunderstanding, “Oh, yeah, let’s just throw them all… lock them up and throw away the key.” And so, what I think I’m struggling with, and this is why I’m doing this podcast, they’re anti-contact. They don’t have a history of contact. But because the media has run wild with the term, “pedophile,” I think really misused it, and I think you see that too, right?

Allyson:

So many people think that “pedophile,” means “sex offender,” and that wasn’t a finding of my study necessarily because I already knew it doesn’t mean that. But so many people talked in my study even about that misconception, people have come out to their parents, people in my study said that, you know, this one person in particular told his dad, “I’m a pedophile,” and his dad said, “But being a pedophile is illegal.”

No, it’s not illegal, it specifically refers to that attraction, or sexuality if you will, of being attracted to minors, and does not in any way refer to their behavior at all. It’s really upsetting that so many people make that connection, and also like you were saying, about the online people saying, “Kill yourself! Die!” I’ve seen Tumblr pages belonging to MAPs. So, often people connect to other people using hashtags, and tags to spread positivity to each other. And so, there’s like a tag that’s “#map positivity” or “#nomap positivity” for “non-offending minor attracted person positivity.”

So, people on Tumblr who are against MAPs have been latching onto this tag and posting things like, “Kill yourself!” but with hearts and stuff so MAPs will look at it think, “Oh, this is going to be some positivity!” and they see, oh no, it’s someone telling me to kill myself again. One of the people in my study told me, “We get used to the phrase, ‘Kill yourself!’ we hear that a lot.”

Candice: Which is sad. But you and I are talking, and some of our listeners are going to be people who believe that. And so, I think what I’d like you to, even though you may have already said it, I feel like we need to say it again. What is a non-offending or anti-contact pedophile?

Allyson:

A non-offending pedophile or MAP is a person who has an attraction to minors, if we’re talking specifically about pedophiles, to prepubescent children, and they have not committed a sexual offense against a child. Anti-contact people are specifically people who are against sexual relationships or sexual contact of any kind between adults and youth, and those people exist. So, not all MAPs, not all pedophiles are interested in sexual contact. A lot of them believe it would cause harm to children, and so they just don’t have any interest in engaging in that and causing that kind of harm. Never have, and never will.

Candice:

So, some of our listeners might say, “So this is a choice. Being a pedophile’s a choice.” What do you say to that? And, what does your research say, perhaps?

Allyson:

So, a lot of research, I have not done this particular research, but a lot of research out there shows that, pedophilia is a sexual orientation, it can’t be changed. So, a lot of the people in my study had tried to change their orientation, tried to change their sexuality. What we find is, people who study this have found, it mirrors being gay. You keep being attracted to that age throughout your lifetime, so Michael Seto refers to it as a sexual age orientation rather than a gender orientation. So, some people are just attracted to a specific age.

Candice:

Well, I appreciate you saying that too, sexual age orientation, because I can… my guess is… a lot of individuals might listen to this LGBTQ and say, “WHOAH, whoa, whoa… we DO NOT want to be affiliated with someone that’s a pedophile.”

Allyson:

Yeah, and that’s understandable, especially given the assumption that pedophiles are automatically sex offenders, really it’s difficult for us to in our minds separate that. There’s also been a history of people in the LGBT community being accused of sexual contact with minors based on their sexual orientation. So there’s really a lot of parallels in how MAPs and the LGBT community have been treated, have been assumed to exist.

Unfortunately, those parallels have maybe made the LGBT community not want to associate with the MAP community, which makes sense. It’s also unfortunate.

Candice:

Yeah, it’s unfortunate. Let’s get into your research. Your research is amazing and I hope that the world gets to read it and see it and I hope you present it at ATSA (Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers), ATSA conference, I think it needs to be out there. So, who did you interview for your study, specifically?

Allyson:

So, I interviewed 42 minor-attracted individuals. They came from all over the world, so I had a lot from the US, some from Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa… they were from all over. These were all individuals who not only were minor-attracted, but also were committed to not offending and had not offended. They had not committed a sexual offense against a child: That was a requirement for participation in the study.

Candice:

Where did you find your participants? I was thinking that, like, how did they come to you?

Allyson:

So, I interviewed them from two different groups. One is Virped, which stands for Virtuous Pedophiles. They’re an amazing website. I don’t know the latest count, but when I was doing my study, which was a little over a year ago, there were 1,800 members of Virped, and not all of them post regularly but a lot of them do, and they’re a peer support group so they kind of help each other with the stigma that they’re facing and sometimes with strategizing not to offend. So, I got a lot of my participants through there, I advertised on there, or, people advertised for me on there I should say.

And then I also advertised on the B4UAct website. They’re a group located out of Baltimore, Maryland. They also provide peer support like Virped, but they have an in-person component as well. They try to advertise to mental health professionals, who might work with MAPs, and try to teach them about issues related to them so they can provide effective services.

Candice:

So you got a wide range and from all over it sounds like, which is great!

Allyson:

Yeah, I had also a wide age range as well, so a lot of people think that pedophiles/MAPs, that they’re… even people in my study told me they had this image of pedophiles as like, creepy old men. The people in my study ranged in age from 19 to their mid-60’s, and were a mix of men and women, I had 39 men and 3 women in my study.

Candice:

And I think one of the things I’ve talked about before is women… there are female pedophiles. It’s such an under-researched population, so I think it’s great that at least you had 3, right? I also, we interviewed somebody that was in their late teens recently, and so I think that’s… There is a clear misunderstanding that like, it is this old man, this dirty old man, hiding out in n alley waiting to snatch you up in the van. That type of a thing… I do wonder if some of our listeners might say, well, “If you’re a teenager, how do you know if you’re a pedophile?” What would you say to that?

Allyson:

Sure, I mean, I think for a lot of people, even in the MAP community, you hear people saying, “Well, you’re a teenager, this could change, your sexuality could change as you age.” But, for a lot of folks, they just know. Especially, teens tend to have attractions towards adults and other teens, so if you’re a teen and you’re having attractions toward people that are way younger than you, that can be a pretty solid sign that they’re minor-attracted.

Candice:

I think that’s a good delineation. What surprised you most about what you were told or about what the participants told you?

Allyson:

I came from a criminal justice background, as I said, and I was really trying to figure out, well, what is motivating people not to offend. So, I just generally assumed, when I asked people that question, they would say, “Well, I don’t want to go to jail.” And, for some people, that is what they told me… but the overwhelming majority just were kind of like, “Well, obviously I don’t want to hurt a child.”

Really, that did surprise me, these people are highly moral people, you know, they’re like anyone else, a lot of them told me, “I love children, I wouldn’t want to hurt them.” So, this is not just the sexual urge that people have, it’s also, people have romantic attractions to children, they have romantic feelings, they have emotional feelings, and they’re not interested in harming a child.

They love children, they’re attracted to them, but they don’t want to harm them. So, that was their answer and it shocked me.

Candice:

Yeah, and I appreciate you saying that too, because we have interviewed individuals who have said, “Well, I love a child, I love children, I would never do that.” So, I can see with some listeners saying, “Well, they love children!” And then judging it, like, “That’s disgusting,” or, “That means they’re going to hurt someone! If they’re around the child…!” What I hear you saying, which I appreciate, “No, because I love children…” They truly don’t want to harm a child, because it’s this moral choice and they don’t want to hurt anybody.

Allyson:

So, I was asking people, “How do you strategize not to do this?” And, for a lot of them, they were like, “It’s easy! I just don’t! I can’t just trip and fall into a child!” …is what one of them said. And it’s really interesting that we think of this group as having maybe impulse control issues, and like if they just saw one, they’d you know, prey on that child? That’s not the experience of the people I spoke to at all.

Candice:

Well, that’s a huge assumption too, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the assumption that pedophile equals child molester.

Allyson:

Right, absolutely, and it’s a ridiculous assumption if you think about it. But, media interpretations of pedophiles, of MAPs, it’s so pervasive. I had someone tell me that it was a trope, and that, “If you want to make your character a bad guy, make him a pedophile.” He said, “When have you ever seen, in the media, a pedophile being a good guy?” And I said, “Well, no, I never have…” And he said… “Well, that’s the point! You never do! It’s easy to villainize someone.” Because that’s just our expectations.

And the really upsetting thing to me was that when I talked to a lot of these folks, they told me that when they realized that they were attracted to children they assumed they were going to be monsters. That was literally the term that they used, “Am I a monster? What’s wrong with me? I assumed I was going to end up like those other people I’ve seen in the news, who hurt children.” And it took them a while sometimes to get to that place where they were like, “That’s not who I am, I’m not going to do this, I’m not a monster, I’m not going to do that.”

Candice:

Isn’t that interesting, that influence though? Right, the media’s influence? So even someone say, growing up and watching a movie where there’s a rape, but growing up and watching it so much and “Oh, this boy with blonde hair and blue eyes was a rapist. So, if I have blonde hair and blue eyes, I’m going to be a rapist… I’m going to be a rapist… I’m going to be a rapist…” Instead of, no. But it is sad that the media’s so powerful that for someone who has an attraction such as this, it really can impact them to think, “I am a monster.”

Allyson:

Absolutely, and there’s so little community… I mean, the community that exists is amazing, especially VirPed and B4UAct, but there’s so little advertising for these communities that so few people know that they exist. So, even when the people that I talk to that thought originally, “Am I a monster?” They got to this place where they were like, “No, it’s not going to be me,” but then they thought, “I’m the only one who’s good and minor-attracted,” or “I’m the only ‘good’ pedophile out there…”

It’s shocking the number of people that I heard tell me that, because they just did not realize that there were other people like them out there. When they told me that they found a community, that they did find out there were people like the, it was just this revelation of, “I’m not alone, I’m not the only one, there are others like me.”

Candice:

There are a lot of similar people who are pedophiles, and I think our society wants to say, again, it’s the older man in a dark corner alleyway that’s a child molester. Then, they automatically say, “Oh, they had sex with a 16-year-old, they’re a pedophile.” Again, it’s just this uneducated explanation, which does isolate people with pedophilia. There is, because there’s so much stigma, and there’s pedo hunters and so much hate, that it makes sense that people do feel alone. And it also, when I think of the work we do with prevention, and thinking of the folks that we’ve treated, it is really scary to reach out. Because, who are we, first, can we be trusted to offer that support, or, are we going to judge them as monsters, are we pedo hunters, you know, what might we do, are we going to expose them on the web and slander them, and so on and so forth…

Allyson:

That was something that I found in my research to, I talked to people a lot about how they coped with their sexuality, and a lot of people told me that they wanted some kind of mental health treatment, wanted to go see people like you, and they were just too afraid. They’d heard stories about people where mental health professionals were outing them to the police, outing them to family, just straight-up telling them, “I can’t help you,” leaving them without a referral, treating them with suspicion in general, or even trying to do some kind of conversion therapy where they would be asked to write down their attractions and then smell bath salts or ammonia or something.

So, just really horrible treatment from a lot of mental health professionals. It kept a lot of them from seeking out care at all. A lot of the people I spoke to did have those experiences, where they were turned away from care, they were treated with suspicion. Someone said to her counselor, “Would you be able to work with someone who is attracted to children?” And her counselor said, “No, I can’t work with someone who’s hurt a child.” And she said, “No, that’s not what I said…” and they were able to have that conversation and fortunately work it out, but there was that moment in the beginning where the person got up to leave, and the practitioner said, “Well, I can’t treat you if you’ve done something to a child.” She had to go back, and then it was on her to educate her counselor about that.

Candice:

Which would be nice if counselors were more educated, one of the things that we’re known for is, we get calls from clinicians and therapists nationwide who will say, “We’ve heard that you’ve got support for psychoeducational support,” or locally we’ve heard that you are willing to treat, and then we do a lot of educating as well. We’ll also get a lot of questions when we first started out, this was several years ago, people saying, “Well, how is it possible that you’re treating these individuals? Don’t you need to report them?” And it’s like… what exactly do we need to report them for?

Allyson:

That’s scary that so many people think that they need to be reported, and I did talk to someone who had never committed an offense, he did not say that he was going to commit an offense, but his counselor reported him to the police and told him about that in his second session with her, and he hasn’t been able to trust mental health professionals since. So, a lot of these people if they are concerned that they are going to act out about their orientation and they don’t feel like there’s anyone out there they can trust, that’s a huge problem that keeps us from preventing crime.

And also, a lot of these people don’t struggle with urges, with that kind of stuff, but they struggle with the stigma that is attached to their sexuality, they struggle with depression or anxiety, shame for sure, and again they just don’t feel like they can find any help out there.

Candice:

So, I appreciate us talking about that too because, you’ve talked about some of the damaging ways that mental health practitioners will show up for these individuals, and one of the things that we are huge proponents of is, let’s work on shame reduction, let’s work on lifestyle and choices, and ways to stay safe and have a healthy adult relationship and… manage your attractions in a way that keep you and society and children safe. That’s such a more productive way to look at supporting these individuals rather than, again, lumping them in a category as a child molester and a sex offender, so I’m so happy we’re talking about this. What challenges did you or your research participants face or come up against?

Allyson:

The big one I would say is that stigma piece, people saying, “Well, I can’t be out on the internet because people will tell me to die.” They had issues with coming out to their family, or not coming out to their family, because they really didn’t feel like they could trust them with that. A lot of them were in relationships with other adults, so another piece that we didn’t talk about is this difference between being exclusively and non-exclusively attracted to minors. So, a lot of the people in my study were exclusively attracted to minors or children, and some were attracted to minors preferentially, but then had attractions to adults as well.

They were often able to find adult partners that they could be in relationships with, and even though they were in those relationships, often very happy in those relationships, that’s a big secret to be keeping from someone. These attractions, this sexuality that you have. And you want to be open and honest in any relationship, so to feel like, not necessarily that this person that they’re with is not trustworthy in general, but everyone has this idea of what a pedophile or minor-attracted person is, so even a very trustworthy person in general could have suspicions toward people.

Some people did come out to their partners, and that was to a range of different reactions. Some of them were very supportive, which was awesome, some of them broke up with them immediately or reported them, even though they hadn’t committed a crime, so it was a big risk to them to tell their partners.

I think another huge challenge that these folks came in contact with was loneliness. Especially for the people who were exclusively attracted to minors, these people often grew up assuming, “I’m going to get married, I’m going to fall in love, I’m going to have kids, yada yada,” and… then they realized they were minor attracted and, again, exclusively, and they said, “That’s never going to happen with me, I’m never going to be with someone I’m romantically or sexually attracted to, at all.”

And that’s… a really tough thing to deal with, this realization that you don’t have any prospects romatically? Or sexually? I can’t imagine feeling that way. Just, that loneliness was a big part of their lives, and there’s really nothing that a lot of people can say to them about that. So important for them to get some kind of support. To know that they didn’t have that support, on top of those feelings of loneliness, that’s really hard to hear.

Candice:

I wanted to ask you if any of your colleagues or anyone in your cohort, when you were doing your research, if they had any judgment or opinions about, or even your professors, had any opinions… because this is definitely such a dicey topic…

Allyson:

Yeah, when you say professors, so, first day of a specific class, I won’t say which, we were asked to go around the room and say our research interests, and it got to me and I said, “I want to study individuals who are attracted to minors, who have never committed a sexual offense.” My professor looked at me and said, “YUCK!” and moved on to the next person. So, that was quite a way to start my program.

Candice:

What was that like for you?

Allyson:

I think I thought, “Well, I’m going to get a lot of this, I may as well get used to it.”

Candice:

Did you?

Allyson:

You know, I really haven’t encountered many of those kinds of reactions. I have had people tell me my research is triggering to them. I can see people being triggered by, triggers can happen with anything, so that’s understandable. But I think a lot of the idea of it being triggering is, again, this assumption that individuals who are minor attracted are going to commit an offense. So, even if I’m talking about people who have never committed an offense, they’re committed to non-offending throughout their lives, it’s still… that really says something when someone says, “I’m triggered by that.” It shows how deep those assumptions are.

I think the majority of the responses I get are interest. People really don’t know that this is a population that exists. I had a job talk where I started talking about my research, and people in the room started Googling while I was talking. They started, like, taking out their phones? And what I found out afterward is that they were doubting whether or not this was a population that existed. I think what they specifically were Googling was the word “pedophile” they were like, wait… and these are criminal justice people, they did not know that pedophile does not mean sex offender. They were checking up on me.

Candice:

I was on a listserv recently, and an individual reached out and said, “Hey, I’m in a different state, I’ve got an individual who has pedophilia and needs some support,” so I responded and said, we have these services, and gave my information, then a colleague reached out on the listserv and said, “Hey, just so you know, we treat pedophilia as well, we’re all sex offender providers,” and just went into this language of sex offender treatment. Again, it’s kind of frustrating, this automatic assumption that, “sex offender providers” and, “therefore we’re treating pedophiles,” and nowhere on the email did he say this was a contact-offending individual who was a pedophile.

Allyson:

A lot of the people that I spoke to who had sought out mental health care, they ended up in treatment with people who specialized in sex offender treatment. On the one hand, it kind of makes sense, it made sense to them, they were saying, “well, okay, these professionals know what a pedophiles is, they specialize in this, I should get help from them,” but then on the flip side, they often treated them, a lot of the times the phrase was, “like a ticking time bomb.” They said, “You’re probably going to commit an offense, we’re going to work with you not to,” and a lot of the time they weren’t there to try to get help with non-offending, they were just there to deal with loneliness, deal with stigma, all that stuff, and so this suspicion that providers had, who are there to hopefully start where the client is, treat them like a person… they just weren’t.

Candice:

Well, hopefully you’ll be doing some research with providers or research on providers to find out…

Allyson: That’s the goal. So, the next step for me is to do some research with mental health professionals and their opinions toward pedophiles and MAPs, and also looking at their knowledge of mandated reporting, since it was such an issue with a lot of folks in my study, and just to see how do people know who are providing services or who are going to be providing services. The laws, the policies in this field surrounding when you should and can report.

Candice:

That is so needed, I’ve not heard of any research out there that’s looked at mental health provider’s views. I think that is so needed. And then some education, and even training, and hopefully some continuing education for professionals, right?

Allyson:

I think B4UAct is trying to start that kind of dialogue. They have a monthly dialogue between MAPs and providers. But yeah, we need a lot more of it.

Candice:

Yeah, we do. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Is there anything else, Doctor Walker, that you want to share with our listeners? This has been such a privilege, so anything else that…

Allyson:

You know, I asked at the end of my interviews with MAPs, “What would you say to another person who’s struggling with this?” And, the majority of them said, “You are not a monster.” And, I really want to take that and leave you with that message of, these people are not monsters and if you are struggling with these attractions and you haven’t been able to tell others, just know that for yourself, and know that there are groups out there. There’s VirPed, there’s B4UAct, there are others who would love to talk to you.

Candice:

Great, thank you so much, thank you for being on our podcast. Thank you for listening to this week’s podcast. Please visit, www.thepreventionproject.org to learn more about our project and programs. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast at www.thepreventionpodcast.com or iTunes. See you next time!

The post TGPP Transcript: Dr. Allyson Walker appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

The scientific community, as with homosexuality, has not reached complete consensus because there are holdouts suggesting that it can be changed. In fact, I recently was informed by someone I very much trust and respect that a Canadian researcher had found evidence that sexuality can change. There was also a news article suggesting the same. Specifically, that it was theoretically possible to wipe out sexuality and start over by using drugs that suppress all sexuality, or by therapy. So, I am going to review one example of this research, because it is applicable not only to pedophiles, but the world at large. If indeed there is a way to change sexuality in that regard, it raises all sorts of issues in a wide variety of fields not related to child sexual abuse or pedophilia.

You may think this is dry and boring. But if you are the critical thinking type, then by all means, look through this, but bear in mind that “pedophilia” is used to refer to the sexual attraction to children and “pedophiles” are those with that attraction. Behavior is not discussed in this article.

Contacts, Contacts…

So I contacted a few people, including the source of that information, to get their take on it and identify who the researcher was. I reached out to Dr. James Cantor, who has done fairly recent fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging- they scan your brain in real-time while it works) research into pedophilic men. I also reached out to someone with the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. Both Dr. Cantor and the original source confirmed that the researcher’s name is J. Paul Fedoroff, the director of the Sexual Behaviors Clinic at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre.

Dr. Cantor’s Take

Dr. Cantor’s reply was to send me his take, and four PDF’s with the applicable research. I was expecting to read through quite a bit in order to review it, given the nature of the research. I was also expecting to need a dictionary handy.

Dr. Cantor’s reply, directly quoted here, is:

Hi, TNF.

I’m not aware of anyone successfully doing that kind of thing. The closest I can think of is a psychiatrist in Ottawa (Paul Fedoroff) who still believes in conversion therapy for pedophiles, but there is no evidence he is right, and there is a lot of evidence that he is wrong. Other researchers have re-analyzed Fedoroff’s findings and showed that he analyzed it incorrectly. I have heard him re-state his belief on a listserv recently, and I do not expect any amount of evidence is capable of convincing him he is mistaken.

Assuming Fedoroff is the source, here is his article claiming changing pedophiles and the many articles showing he was wrong. In my opinion, Fedoroff is selling false hope.

– James

The five studies are:

Changes in Sexual Arousal as Measured by Penile Plethysmography in Men with Pedophilic Sexual Interest, Müller et al, 2014 (original study)

A Failure to Demonstrate Changes in Sexual Interest in Pedophilic Men: Comment on Müller et al (2014), J. Michael Bailey, 2015

Purported Changes in Pedophilia as Statistical Artefacts: Comment on Müller et al. (2014), Cantor, James M, 2015

The Lability of Pedophilic Interests as Measured by Phallometry, Lalumière, Martin, 2015

Evidence That Arousal to Pedophilic Stimuli Can Change: Response
to Bailey, Cantor, and Lalumière, Fedoroff et al, 2015

Critical Thinking First, Guys

Being smart, I did not want to just take Dr. Cantor at his word, though I will admit to being biased by it. The stakes were too high, and the source of the original claim was not just a random person. It is someone who has helped me for over five years now, a therapist I very much respect (yes, I see a therapist about my attractions).

So trying to get to the bottom of what my therapist said, and what it all meant, I sat down and prepared myself to be bored out of my mind, and found that the initial study was only 9 pages and was, and I quote, “…based on work done by Karolina Müller in partial fulfillment of her master’s degree under the supervision of Drs. Peer Briken and John Paul Fedoroff.” That alone raises a flag for me, but okay, I kept reading. The study was also done in 2014, so if it had held water in the first place, I likely would have heard about it by now.

Also raising flags for me was the number of citations in Mr. Federoff’s other works: Many of his studies are not cited by other studies (citations). A brief review of Google Scholar only turns up a handful of pages of studies, and most of them have no citations or are irrelevant. The first thing I look at with studies is usually how many times it has been cited by other studies, and since the original study has been cited 32 times, this raised a minor flag.

Going Through The Study

I had to stop in the first page, because the authors leave a gaping hole right in their introduction: They point out that not all men who commit sex crimes have pedophilic disorder, but they ignore the reality that not all with pedophilic disorder have committed sex crimes. Maybe they thought their audience already knew that? But then they make a vague statement that sexual orientation is different from sexual interest… and fail to expand on how they mean that or why they believe that is true. In other words, they are setting up their paper and not defining the terms they are using, which is elementary.

Further, they mention that penile plethysmography testing (PPT) has been criticized… and they never mention what that criticism is, and go on to detail how they used PPT results for their study. For anyone who does not know, PPT is a test where the test-taker is exposed to pictures and audio stories that are meant to sexually arouse or are neutral and not meant to arouse. The pictures and audio that are meant to arouse involve both adults and children, and the physical erectile response is measured by a special ring that goes around the person’s penis (sorry, ladies). From other research and reports, I know offhand that PPT can be fooled: If someone is intentionally trying to think about something non-erotic, the results can be skewed. It is similar to polygraph in that manner.

That is a rather important criticism to overlook, because the study looks at the previous result charts of a few men, and then later result charts of those same men taking the same test.

Methodological Flaws… Without Reading The Commentaries

Before I even got to their methods and results section (the meat of any serious research study), I found one major methodological flaw: They admit to not knowing how exclusively the men were attracted to children, and they intentionally selected men whose results to children were greater during initial test results. In other words, they cherry-picked their test subject’s charts. That alone, for me, is enough to dismiss the study. However, most of their sample (79%) had committed a sexual offense against a child, which also raises questions about whether their study would replicate to non-offending pedophilic men, if it would replicate at all.

Also, given the recent research into fMRI monitoring of sexual arousal (an fMRI version of the same test being discussed in the study) and how said fMRI monitoring cannot be fooled as easily as PPT, one would expect something along the lines of, “It would be interesting to see these results replicated in an fMRI study vs. initial PPT results.” Yet nothing of the sort ever appears in the study. Those are just my impressions with my limited knowledge of these areas.

Regardless, Three Peers Reviewed This And Found It Lacking

Yes, they did, and their replies where they focus on statistics and methodology are difficult to summarize concisely. In short, the data in the original study did not add up and did not control for measurement error and other factors that can influence test results. Phrases such as, “unsound research design,” “false hope can be harmful,” and “imperfect specificity” are common in all three replies, which means that the three researchers who looked at the study found it lacking.

Like me, Bailey took issue with how Müller et al. described PPT as the “gold standard” for objectively measuring sexual interest and how they defined sexual orientation and sexual interest. Bailey noted that an erection is not completely indicative of sexual interest, because people can be aroused and not have an erection. There are also biases that can influence test results, like a desire to give a specific response and a high-stress situation like the one most men were under. Bailey also points out that Fedoroff is biased in that he has been an advocate that paraphilic (deviant sexual) interests can change for 27 years.

Cantor took a more blunt tack and pointed out that while the study claims to be evidence of change among pedophiles, their test protocol has “complete invalidity,” and that they also incorrectly interpreted the results of their study while not making the complete data they were working with available.

Lalumière took a slightly more expansive take on the study and looked at Fedoroff’s other claims and the lack of support for those claims, and also pointed out the same methodological issues that Bailey and Cantor did. He posits many theoretical questions that the original study does not address, and control methods that were not used. He suggests that, “A better study still would involve the repeated assessment of pedophilic men randomly assigned to a condition that could influence pedophilic responding (e.g., aversive conditioning) or to a control condition.”

It is distinctly important that a 9-page study returned another 10 pages about the same study, and all of the replies conclude that the original study was lacking in similar ways.

Fedoroff et al. Responds

In true scientific fashion, the authors of the original study replied to the concerns of the three aforementioned authors. However, the responses largely nitpicked minor details and did not provide anything in the way of new evidence (or data) supporting the conclusions of the original study. In fact, Fedoroff et al points out that a study cited by Bailey was unpublished, and then uses an unpublished study of his own to counter a similar point.

They also reiterate that sexual orientation is different from sexual arousal, saying, in part, that “a gay man is still gay even if he loses his sex drive or is unable to get an erection.” Being unable to get an erection but still being gay would dispute the very claims the original study is making: That because several men showed a 50% decreased erectile response to child stimuli and a 50% increase in response to adult stimuli, their sexual orientation had changed. They offer no explanation for why their claims should apply to the criticisms, but not their own study, since PPT measures erectile response, not an internal response in the brain.

In short, the response from Federoff et al nitpicks details that do not undermine the strength of my objections to his study, or the objections made by the three researchers who were replying to his study.

A Word About Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies On Pedophiles

We are still figuring out how fMRI can be used with pedophilic individuals, and there is still much we do not know. A recent study suggests that fMRI shows that pedophilia is neurodevelopmental in nature. However, Cantor’s research into the brains of pedophilic vs. nonpedophilic men show that there is a definite biological origin of pedophilia. Again, pedophilia is the sexual feeling, not the act of sexually abusing children. Cantor’s research suggests that in some senses that we are still discovering, a sexual attraction to children develops with biology and may be inborn in some ways. Can you change the physical structure of the brain to eliminate sexual attraction? Yes, that sounds ridiculous, and it is. If you want it straight from Dr. Cantor’s mouth… you can watch his hourlong explanation of the research.

A Word About Sexual Attraction To Adults Vs. Children

I suppose some would not like hearing this, but I have a primary sexual attraction towards children. The way I usually describe it is that about 80% of my attraction is towards children, broadly, and 90% of all of my attractions are towards males. I have attempted many times to turn those tables to have fantasies that involve adults, and every time I have attempted this, it is like fighting with a rubber ball: It bounces my fantasies back to children every time, and the longer I try to go without a fantasy involving a child, the harder it becomes to avoid said fantasy. It is a losing battle. I know from my own experience, and I suspect most pedophiles share this, that attempting to just have fantasies of adults does not work. Eventually, the response to adults is just not there, even if one is not exclusively attracted to children.

So where does that leave me? Well, I can take drugs to lessen the sex drive (the side effects are NOT worth it). I can argue with myself about how monstrous I am for thinking about children sexually (putting me in a rather nasty mental state of depression and suicidal thoughts, if I am being honest, which helps no one). I could also accept how I feel, what I fantasize about, and remember that fantasy is not the same as reality and that hurting a child is a choice. That is, I could actively choose to fight the idea of being sexual with a child while accepting that it is natural to have fantasies involving just that and accepting that I can never act on those fantasies.

Absent a way to change my sexual attraction, I do not see any other alternatives that lead to a healthy mental state. If you want to prove this to be wrong, then become a scientist and study this stuff. Do a better job than Federoff and come up with alternatives with real data to support them.

In Short…

In short, there is very limited evidence to support the study’s hypothesis that, “sexual orientation is indeed different from sexual interest.” There were no definitions offered for either term in any of the 24 pages of information I had at my disposal. The prevailing opinion about pedophilic sexual “interest” has been that it cannot change, and that it is harmful to try. To suggest otherwise without proof makes Dr. Federoff look like a quack.

That is what is historically the case with sexuality in general, and of course, the prevailing opinion about homosexual “interest” is that it cannot change, and that it is harmful to try. Frankly, the man in the National Post article sounded very much like the men who went to Exodus Ministries claiming they were no longer gay. Giving this sort of false hope to pedophiles is dangerous and wrong.

I did not read anything in any of the information I had that changes these conclusions, and in the presence of overwhelming evidence in support of those conclusions and the absence of evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to raise the false hope that pedophilia can change. I see a myriad of ethical issues if mankind ever comes up with a method of changing sexuality, be that via a drug, magnetic changes to the brain, or some other technology.

The post Can Pedophilia Be Changed? The Scientific Community Says… appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.