Testimonial Archives - Pedophiles About Pedophilia https://aboutpedophilia.com/category/testimonial/ Stories about pedophilia, written by pedophiles. Fri, 12 Aug 2022 15:27:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.1 https://i0.wp.com/aboutpedophilia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/cropped-michelangelo-71282_960_720-1.jpg?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Testimonial Archives - Pedophiles About Pedophilia https://aboutpedophilia.com/category/testimonial/ 32 32 177602368 Becoming Comfortable With My Attractions https://aboutpedophilia.com/2020/09/24/becoming-comfortable-with-my-attractions/ https://aboutpedophilia.com/2020/09/24/becoming-comfortable-with-my-attractions/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2020 17:25:25 +0000 https://aboutpedophilia.com/?p=1769 PrivateYankee, a VirPed member, used to be scared about what he might do to kids so was reluctant to be around them. Over time, he learned to accept himself and be comfortable with being in the company of kids.

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A MAP’s Journey from Anguish to Acceptance

I discovered my attractions when I was 13. Before then I had very, very mild crushes/dreams about boys but they were so insignificant that they barely registered in my day to day life. But a couple of months after my 13th birthday, I started to go through puberty and discover that I had a sexual attraction to younger boys. I began to notice boys in public, boys at school, boys in movies and TV shows etc. One of my first boy celeb crushes was Nathan Gamble in The Hole (2009). I first watched that movie when I was 14 and was completely smitten for Nathan.

Anyway, more to the point: for about 3 years it became increasingly apparent that the younger boys at my school (as young as 11) were the ones who were most attractive to me. I even started to notice that boys at school who were attractive when I was 13 were no longer attractive when I was 15. That was a pretty big indicator and I knew that something was different about me (not having any interest in women when teenage boys my age went on about them was another big indicator) but…..this may be hard to explain but the whole “pedophilia” thing just didn’t fully click. I was aware that pedophiles existed and I was aware I was attracted to younger kids but I never fully appreciated the full consequences. I was even doing google/YouTube searches on “interesting” (legal) material whenever I got the chance, but I still wasn’t worried about myself.

Until one day when I was 16 and browsing through YouTube. I came across a video that talked about Todd Nickerson’s Salon article. I immediately searched for the article, read it, searched up what VirPed was and watched the full video (which took a negative approach to the subject). I read the comments and read as many other comments on social media on the Salon article as possible. A huge flood of emotions came upon me that day. These people were talking about me. It clicked. These people who were saying that all pedos should die or be locked up or be taken as far away from kids as possible were talking about me. That’s who I was: a pedophile. And I was fucking terrified. And angry. Why couldn’t I just be normal? Why couldn’t I be attracted to adults like everyone else?

Why couldn’t I just be normal?

I started doing as much research as I could on the subject. I started reading article after article, blog after blog. I watched countless YouTube videos by people doing commentary on these non-offending pedophiles. I discovered Todd, his blog and numerous appearances he did, including a documentary on Barcroft. I also discovered Ender Wiggin, Daywalker and various other MAP/pedo twitter accounts that were active around 2016-2017. I saw the documentary “I, Pedophile” which introduced me to James Cantor. I did all this to educate myself and reassure myself. All of a sudden I so badly wanted to open up, to talk to someone who knew what I was going through. I also became quite careful with myself, to the point where I wouldn’t try to hang out or work with kids. Eventually I came out to my mum because I was just fucking desperate to talk about this. I read accounts of other pedos coming out so I thought I’d give it a shot. She didn’t throw me out of the house but she was very uncomfortable about it. I was fine though. At the time I thought it was the right choice.

I contemplated joining MAP twitter numerous times and even thought about MAP support chat when I saw Ender announce it. But I was always worried about it being linked to my real identity. Anyway, my obsession with reading articles, blogs and following MAP twitter (without actually joining twitter) lasted for about a year an a half. Ender’s blogs in particular were very helpful for me in terms of realising who I was. It was eventually getting to the point where I had read everything there was to read. I had heard all the arguments. And I was now in my final year at school where the younger, more attractive boys seemed to be in abundance. Slowly but surely, I was more at ease. I took the boys sports team for their warm up. I became quite friendly with the boys at the lunchtime club at school. I was realising that, contrary to what I used to think, hanging out with younger boys could actually be quite enjoyable if everything was appropriate.

I was still longing to talk to people who understood me.

I stopped with the reading of articles and blogs and for several months I had actually mostly forgotten that the community existed. I was old enough to join VirPed and I finally had the means to privately join but it just didn’t dawn on me until one afternoon in November 2018, I was watching some sports on the TV when my attractions entered my mind and I thought about all those blogs and tweets I used to read. Then with a pang I thought “hold on, I can actually join VirPed!” I realised that I was still longing to talk to people who understood me. That night, I sent an email to VirPed explaining who I was and the next day I made my account and an introductory post. And before I knew it I was finally, after all these years, talking to other pedophiles. I couldn’t believe it.

Anyway, on to how I became fully comfortable with my attractions. Around the time I joined VirPed, there was something going on in my life unrelated to my attractions that was getting me down. I was in my first year of uni at this point and my semester dates were such that I would have quite a long summer break. If this problem that was keeping me down were to continue then it meant the summer would be very depressing if I was just gonna be at home for most of it. So I started looking for something to do. And that’s how I ended up applying to be a camp counsellor. I started watching videos on what camp was like and reading up on experiences and I was super excited. Around the same time, joining VirPed made me tell my mum that my attraction to younger boys was just a phase and that I was “normal” after all, so there was nothing to worry about. Of course this is a lie, but I was getting all the support I needed from VirPed so I didn’t see how continuing to stress her out about this was helpful.

That summer I went to camp and was blown away by the experience.

So that summer I went to camp and was blown away by the experience. I knew it would be great but I wasn’t expecting it to be the best summer ever. I loved every bit of it. And I really, really enjoyed spending time with the boys there. When I came home I almost felt like a changed person. I was always on the way of being comfortable with my attractions but this sent my acceptance sky rocketing. Now there was no doubt in my mind that I was no more of a threat to children than non-MAPs. I became so confident, I did something I never thought I’d dream of doing: I met up with not one but two VirPed members in person and both experiences were honestly so liberating. And when I started my 2nd year of uni I took the opportunity to do some volunteering, helping out local schoolkids with their work. In addition to all this, I just became more comfortable with talking to other kids and their parents (keeping everything appropriate obviously).

I’m saying all this because I’ve seen a lot of MAPs have doubts about spending time with children. Now I want to make something clear: nobody should feel like they need to work or volunteer with kids. Obviously being around kids isn’t for everybody. But I get the feeling that a lot of members are unnecessarily too hard on themselves. If the last few years have taught me anything about my attractions, it’s that 1) they are never going away and 2) they are far from an uncontrollable impulse. I have seen posts from members who want to do everything they can to avoid kids, even going as far as to avoid family outings. Not wanting to surround yourself with kids is fine, but constantly avoiding them to the point where avoiding them controls your life isn’t healthy. If they’re around you, they’re around you. There’s nothing to be scared of. Just take a deep breath, acknowledge they’re attractive and move on. If one starts talking to you for whatever reason, feel free to have a conversation with them. If you’re at a family meetup and your younger cousin or nephew asks you to play football with him, go for it. If you notice a cute child in a movie, enjoy the view. I learned that we only have one life, our attractions won’t change so, as long as we keep everything appropriate, do we really need to feel guilty about legally enjoying our attractions? Personally I don’t think so.

This piece was originally published on ASAP International

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Your Questions To Pedophiles, Answered https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/12/22/your-questions-to-pedophiles-answered/ https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/12/22/your-questions-to-pedophiles-answered/#comments Sat, 22 Dec 2018 17:38:24 +0000 http://aboutpedophilia.com/?p=753 A comprehensive list of questions asked of pedophiles in a thread on Twitter.

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So, earlier in July, 2018, I came across a tweet that piqued my interest:

https://twitter.com/ReadytoglareYT/status/1019599593003073536

To my surprise (showing you just how jaded I am on social media at this point), many of the questions were very good. So, without further introduction:

To the first question, I am not entirely sure how natural homosexuality is, nevermind minor attraction. Is it a choice? No, absolutely not. Does it occur due to biology or environment? The evidence says it could be both: Some MAPs have trauma within the age they are attracted to, some do not. There is some evidence that pedophilia exists in the white matter of the brain.

As for our attractions, as most of us do not have urges to do anything with children, I have no idea how you can normalize an attraction affecting less than 10% of the population. I am familiar with the Tumblr MAPs, and I believe they would be wondering the same thing. If the question is whether we would like to act on our attractions, for the most part, the answer is no. While there are some pro-contact pedophiles out there who wish to make the sexual abuse of children legal, and think that children can consent to sex, it is my experience that their voices are much quieter than the anti-contact community, or those who are against acting on their attractions in any way. This answers the next questions:

Most of us have no desire to change the age of consent, though we are largely just as against child marriage being allowed in parts of the United States as anyone else is. While a pedophile’s views do vary from person to person, on the whole, we care about children too much to want to risk causing them harm.

https://twitter.com/LadyBellaCatt/status/1019645051939385345

My fantasies exist within my own head, and I do not act on them in any way. I do not stare at children I see, I do not try to get to know them, etc. So, in no way am I sexualizing children except within the privacy of my own brain. That does not bother me, because I am vehemently against acting on it in any form. I was sexually abused, I would not wish that pain on anyone. As to the second question, I do not force myself on anyone. There are plenty of harm-free outlets available that do not exploit or abuse children in the process, such as fictional imagery generated by artist drawings, rather than pictures of real children.

This is a question that is quite long to answer, and I have already taken a stab at it once.

Today, I believe there is nothing I need a therapist for regarding my attractions. I choose to continue seeing my therapist because I believe she helps give me perspective and process significant events in my life in healthier ways than I might otherwise. To me, seeing her is like performing regular maintenance on a car or bike. It keeps me healthy.

If your question is, can therapy change pedophilia, the answer is no. No amount of therapy can do that. The goal of therapy is to accept myself without stigma, shame, or self-hate, and see that I never chose the attractions. For the most part, I have accepted myself and my attractions, while understanding that having them does not put me at risk to harm children.

I first noticed my attractions when I was about 13 years old, and again, I have no urge to be sexual with children. I would not describe my attractions as urges, because they are a feeling, not a compulsion. Many pedophiles feel the same way. This is closely related to the next question:

I noticed when I hit puberty that the ages I was attracted to stopped at about 11 years old, and as I grew into adulthood, they settled to ages 4–14. I would certainly describe it as something I “never outgrew” because as I aged, in some ways, my age of attraction reversed.

Some of us would, some of us would not. Personally, I would not, because my attractions have been a part of me for so long that changing anything would be disorienting. Since no such therapy exists, I have not given it much thought.

No, I do not. The difficulty that can arise from having the attraction can be a problem, since it can fuel self-hate, depression, etc. which can interfere with one’s ability to form relationships and lead an otherwise fulfilling life. It can also drive people away from friends and family, into isolation, which is likewise unhealthy. Some do see it as a problem with forming intimate relationships with adults, some when they first discover their attraction are afraid of themselves for awhile.

https://twitter.com/cutekitty948/status/1019646185831911426

It is not itself a mental illness, the difficulty it can cause is mental illness. In other words, the attraction itself is neutral, it is the thoughts and feelings around the attraction that can lean towards mental illness, such as shame and stigma.

I recently wrote about “LGBT+ inclusion” here.

The word pedophile itself carries the stigma of someone having molested a child. This stigma must be challenged, since there is an obvious difference between someone who has molested a child and someone who has not.

https://twitter.com/AnaBananos/status/1019649906800197633

Yes, I do think I would be able to have children. In most human beings, the people they form close relationships to, particularly in the first few years of life, they develop zero sexual attraction towards them. This is known as the westermarck effect. It is the experience of other pedophiles with children that they are not sexually attracted to them.

Further down, someone asked if pedophiles were abused. I was sexually abused by a daycare provider when I was three years old, again by a local teenager when I was 8, and again by my mother when I was 12. This is not the experience of all pedophiles, however.

No, and no. I understand this is the experience of many pedophiles, if not the majority. I have no opinion on sex robots. There is not enough research to know whether they would be helpful to adult-attracted adults, let alone pedophiles, or whether they should be restricted by prescription.

As for question four, I have no idea what videos you are referring to. I agree with the tone of the following three videos:

So, essentially, yes, there are some pedophiles who identify as children in their age. In other words, where some might identify more as male, or as nonbinary, or as homosexual, these pedophiles feel they are a certain age range of child, rather than a mature adult. I do not identify as such. I used to be particularly attached to the idea of innocence, because I thought I was inferior because of my attractions, somehow less innocent because of being attracted to children. Since accepting my attractions as an unchosen trait, I do not get particularly attached to innocence.

https://twitter.com/ok_jahaira/status/1019625475910483970

I am perfectly comfortable with who I am. I do not believe it is acceptable to be with a child sexually or romantically, and I am also married to another man my age. While there are areas of my life, unrelated to my attraction, that I am always seeking to improve, I am comfortable with my identity.

https://twitter.com/imthaworst/status/1019620586404925446

1- Excellent question, I am not completely sure, but I explore this question in this article.

2- Children are capable of giving and denying consent, though they are not capable of understanding all that sex entails. It is possible to teach children to ask permission before hugging someone, etc, but they are not mature enough to understand the complexities of sex.

3- I have not acted on any urges, because throughout my life I have not had any urges. Sexually abusing a child is a choice, not a compulsion, and by treating it as an urge, you automatically assume that child molesters somehow “cannot help it,” where this is not the case.

4- Yes, I am married, and (5), yes, he knows about my attraction to children. He loves me and accepts me all the same, and supports the advocacy that I do.

These questions have already been answered at this point.

https://twitter.com/bireznor/status/1019625376950161408

I think MAP positivity is wonderful, and a much better contrast to “go kill yourself,” or, “fuck you,” or, “a bullet is the only cure for pedophilia.” As for dangerous, absolutely not. Dangerous would be someone deceiving themselves to think that they can change their pedophilia, where there is no evidence that this is possible, because it means they are clinging to false hope and not developing healthy ways to cope with their sexual attractions.

https://twitter.com/normaniobswssed/status/1019605135520038912

Talking about matters related to pedophilia and child sexual abuse is much better than burying one’s head in the sand and pretending these issues do not exist. The number one thing we can do to prevent sexual abuse is be aware of the facts around it: 1 in 6 boys and 1 in 4 girls will be abused by age 18. Of their abusers, only 20% are attracted to children, 90% are known and trusted figures in their community, 95% have no criminal record, and 35% are children. Given that, it makes no sense to ostracize and stigmatize pedophiles, who are not the main culprits of abuse.

https://twitter.com/distilled_meat/status/1019724465096286209

As already discussed, this is not possible. The best thing a pedophile can do is learn to accept themselves and find healthy and non-harmful outlets for their attraction.

Absolutely!

A pedophile is literally defined as someone with an attraction to prepubescent children. Since I am attracted to prepubescent children, the label of pedophile fits. The attraction to children is not reviled for good reason, child sexual abuse is reviled for very good reason. An attraction I never chose is not positive OR negative, it just is, much the same way I have freckles or a particular color of eye or hair.

As for why I have gone public with how I feel, and how I feel about child sexual abuse, because if I do not do so, how will any young pedophile know they are not alone? What will teenagers look to when they discover, as I did, that they have attractions to children that are not going to change? The news, which constantly conflates pedophile and child molester? Broader society, which thinks they should die or be castrated? How will anyone know the facts about child sexual abuse, including the ones we would rather ignore, if someone does not tell them? That 95% of abusers have no criminal record, or that 80% of abusers have no attraction to children, or that 35% of abusers are children?

I covered part of the answer to this here.

Essentially, all of the important people in my life know I am a pedophile. They do not view me any differently, including my husband.

I am almost exclusively attracted to boys, and I am married to a wonderful man. I do not make a conscious choice to stay away from children, I simply do not have the time to be around children, between advocating against sexual abuse, working a full time job, being married, etc. I do not believe I have a potential to harm children. Harming children is a choice, and it is a choice I refuse to make.

An account that later got suspended asked, “how do you think watching child p*rn or actually doing something inappropriate with a child should be treated by the law?” My answer:

I think that entirely depends upon what the circumstances are. Did they try to seek help? Did they turn themselves in? Were they outed in some way? As with any crime, the circumstances play a huge role in what kind of sentence they should receive. Generally speaking, most are wanting help and do not ever act again, so it is perfectly appropriate to give that majority a probation sentence with incentive to keep their nose clean. For the few that have multiple offenses, or show a propensity to reoffend, they should receive a stricter sentence.

Often enough:

https://twitter.com/Meatloafbitch1/status/1023282184625565696

It is worth noting that many of the questions being asked seem to confuse the idea of attraction with the act of sexually abusing a child. Not only are these not the same thing, most child sexual abusers have no attraction to children:

Source.

In other words, most pedophiles do not abuse children, and most abuse is actually fueled by something other than the sexual attraction to children. Some is situational, some is perpetrated by juveniles, some is about an unmet psychological need, some is simply about the availability of the child, etc. There is no one stereotype for why people choose to molest children.

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TGPP Transcript: Evert https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/11/22/ppodcast-transcript-evert/ Thu, 22 Nov 2018 21:16:44 +0000 http://aboutpedophilia.com/?p=725 Note: This transcript was transcribed by Gonzalo Urritia. 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...

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Note: This transcript was transcribed by Gonzalo Urritia.

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.


Meg: Welcome to The Prevention Podcast, this is Meg Martinez Detamonte, your host and I am here with Evert, who is a non-offending minor-attracted person, using the term NOMAP. Hi, Evert.

Evert: Hello.

Meg: So good to have you on our show today.

Evert: Yeah, thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here.

Meg: Of course. So, I just introduced you as a nomap and that’s kind of where I wanted to start because recently we’ve been getting a lot of people asking us why we use the term map, minor-attracted person and even the term nomap which stands for non-offending minor-attracted person. And Evert, you are pretty adamant about using this term in the place of pedophilia, or even anti-contact pedophiles so I was wondering if you’ll share that. What is the term nomap mean to you?

Evert: In fact, it’s more a rational word, a statement I make that I am attracted to minors, little girls, but that I am not offending in any way and I always have done that. It is more a term used by science than in normal life. Most people use the term pedophile but we see that the term pedophile is hijacked by criminals and society to talk about abusers. And I am not an abuser, I am a person attracted to children, girls.

So the term map does give me a platform to speak about it and also to speak to people who are also attracted to minors but maybe not prepubescent children, like I am. So it is a more general word used in the community to talk about people with our feelings without the pain or the difficulty of the conflation which society has.

 

Meg- That was very beautifully said. We here at The Prevention Project agree and that’s why we also use this term. First and foremost we find this term in the literature, the research literature as

well as people are studying a variety of individuals who are attracted to minors and as you very eloquently put it’s not all about prepubescent children which is what pedophilia represents.

I also love that you shared that the term pedophile is hijacked to be described or to use towards people who have actually offended or abused children when in fact, as we’ve said many, many times on this podcast somebody that’s attracted to children does not always go on offending or has to go on offending and can very much be committed to non-offending and to sharing that mission and vision.

Which again is beautifully said by you in that the term nomap is actually a statement and a platform for you. It’s a statement of you saying I am attracted to children but I’m committed to non-offending.

 

Evert: So between us I still call myself pedophile, because it states my form of attraction.

Meg: Right, yeah.

Evert: I don’t use “girl-lover” because it is mostly used to sell child porn. It’s a pity that the pedophile is used to shame on other people who are not liked. Like sometimes in politics you hear these words or in society that opponents are called pedophile without actually being pedophiles. So that’s why I call it highjacked.

 

Meg: And I think that’s a really great point because we do get a lot of people who are either trolling, but sometimes people who are just generally curious and say “Hey, why are we using this term, map, and not just calling them what they are, pedophiles.” And so I actually think it’s great to hear you say “Well hey, I do identify with the word pedophile because I’m a person who is attracted to prepubescent children, that would be a pedophile.

But I don’t agree with the fact that this word is hijacked and so I’m gonna also call myself a map so that I can, and more specifically nomap, so that I can very much state to the world that I’m a non-offending minor-attracted person. And so I do see and I want other people to see that map is definitely this umbrella term and somebody could still identify as a pedophile and a map.

 

Evert: One of the things we often hear is about the normalization of pedophilia. Our agenda is absolutely not “normalization of pedophilia”, that’s far away. We just want a little air to breathe.

Society is going to regulate things just to prevent children, of course it’s important and it is good to take actions against abuse. But if it also means that some people in society are taken away any point of living, any space of living, any place to be and feel safe then I think these rules are missing a very important point.

 

Meg: I would say that sometimes we are doing more harm than good when we highjack labels like pedophile and lump people all into the same category instead of getting to know people in individual basis and helping the people who need help and who don’t want to offend.

Our founder Candace Christianson said this several times, that why not help people and treat people who are seeking help regardless of who or what they’re attracted to. Why would we not help them? And so I love how you said using the term map can at least give us some room so that we can breathe a little and let people know “I’m minor-attracted but I’m not an offender. I have no desire to offend, I’m very aware of society’s laws, I actually am an advocate for child sexual abuse prevention and that’s me, I can be all of those things.”

Evert: Yes, and I hope that some child-abuse prevention organizations start realizing that it is not the pedophile who’s the opponent. It might even be the pedophile who can also be part of the community to keep children safe. They might be a risk but if we can control that risk and we can make the risk in a way less harmful then I think we have some good things gained.

And we are not opponents, we are in a way just like you, we love children, we want to protect them, we want them to be happy. And it’s unfortunate that in a situation where children might be I might get aroused but that doesn’t mean that I will act on it. If I’m on the playground maybe some men might be aroused by the mothers who stand there, I don’t know, but you don’t act on it.

 

Meg: I agree, I couldn’t agree more. We often hear people who for some reason fuse impulsivity with minor-attraction, thinking that all people who have a minor-attracted orientation are these ticking time-bombs that are going to offend and the reality is from what we’ve seen, all of the minor-attracted people that we’ve worked with have this capacity to control themselves just like any other person who’s attracted to an adult.

And so I’m really glad that you bring that up. And it leads me to go back to something that you said earlier about how you actually are acknowledging that there’s some risk and so I think that that’s something that people don’t hear a lot. They think “Well they’re using the term map or nomap and they’re saying that there’s no risk.” And so you’re acknowledging that people that have minor-attractions can be of risk.

 

Evert: We are just as much risk as any other one, if we look at persons who abuse children they’re not only pedophiles. If it was I would be happy but it isn’t. People who abuse children have several forms of sexual attraction. They have several backgrounds, they can be male or female, they can be Christian or another religion. It is the person which is the problem and I am a person and I have a certain risk and it is mostly that in a point where the self-control is lacking that a risk

can become a danger. So keep people on the safe side by making them strong in awareness, strong in their own self-esteem and strong in self-control. That is the point I’m trying to make. That is how we could take part in the prevention.

 

Meg: Absolutely, so you’re saying that it doesn’t really matter the person’s orientation or the person’s attraction or not, what matters more is what’s going on individually when it comes to self-control, self-esteem, shame and other symptoms that may participate in a person deciding to act out and offend against a child.

Evert: Yes, and unfortunately we notice that many peers are in that middle state. They don’t have that self-esteem, they are ashamed, they hide away on several forms like marriage or live alone in a house outside society. I think that every psychiatrist or psychologist would mean that these people might have mental health risks.

Meg: When you say peers are you talking about other people who have come out as minor-attracted that you’re aware of?

Evert: Yes.

Meg: So talking about that community of people who come out as minor-attracted, Evert, share with me what you think the difference between a pro-contact map and an anti-contact or a nomap is.

Evert: Well, pedophilia is simply the attraction, the sexual or romantic attraction towards prepubescent children. And if they are older they’re called hebephiles or something. The feelings are always the same, the age might vary and the appearance of the child might vary but the feelings are always a certain attraction and maybe a form of arousal or fantasy. That is all the same. The difference between pro-contact is that they actually want to act on these feelings, they want to act on their fantasies.

They want to act on their urges. And they decide to let their interest prevail above the other. While a nomap or anti-contact pedophile is actually choosing to let the interest of children stand above their own wish simply because they see that a small amount of joy doesn’t weigh up to the damage that would be done. It’s very simple. It doesn’t have to do anything with law or fear for police or whatever. It is the simple fact that you love a child and the child is more important than yourself. If you love another you want them to be happy and safe. And so I choose to be not-acting on it.

 

Meg: Thank you so much for sharing that, I love how you put it. and I think it’s good for our listeners to hear it stated in that way in that it’s not always just about fear of legal action, it’s truly for a lot of nomaps about putting the interest of a child above their own, which in many circles is prevention. You know, it’s prevention of how do we keep these children safe and happy and healthy and prevent any harm or abuse.

So I appreciate you sharing that. Just connecting this to what you said earlier, you also shared that there are people that are kind of in between you were saying, that are isolated and not necessarily on this pro-contact bandwagon where they’re acting out but they’re not necessarily involved in a community that is very much believing in non-offending or anti-contact principles like you are.

 

Evert: We actually don’t know how many people with minor-attraction there are on this world, because most are hiding. And pro-contacts speak out and hurt and you see them on television, so everyone gets aroused or gets hating about what they’re seeing and if we want to speak out we are blocked, we are denied any access of platforms.

It’s very difficult to get these people in this middle who are hiding and looking outward to show that there are other alternatives. That there are ways to live happy and still feel happy and a little bit honorable about who you are. That these feelings are not a horror but actually are part of yourself. And that you can act strongly in society with these feelings. Many pedophiles who aren’t shown might work already with children in jobs or they help children in a wonderful way, they never act out in a sexual way. But you don’t see them.

And my fear is if a person in this situation, in this hiding is getting into mental problems by whatever, it could be people who become depressed by society, by problems on work or other things. If they get into low self-esteem and low mental state they become a risk without knowing it. They might act on it without knowing it.

They might hurt a child and see it happen while they’re doing it and then, actually I write it many times, if we can in any way prevent a pedophile or a map or a person who is attracted to children, even heterosexuals or homosexuals who feel attracted to children, if we can prevent them to act out we save two lives. It’s not only the life of the child. What would happen with a person who has done this? How can he live with himself? What would society do? So that’s important to me.

 

Meg: Right, and it’s important to us too here at The Prevention Project and as a program created by an abuse survivor, we believe just as well that we are creating hope for two lives. We’re creating prevention for children who may be at risk to be harmed, and then we are also creating hope for people who are at risk to harm children.

And I know that we’ve spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about our program that treats maps or people who are minor-attracted who don’t want to offend against children, but we also treat a variety of other people who are at risk for creating victims. Adult victims or child victims because we do believe that that life matters as well, the life of the person who is struggling.

So I love that you’re bringing this up Evert and sharing your goal, and it sounds like your goal and your mission is to reach these people who are in hiding and to give them a sense of community to where they feel accepted enough to open up about what’s going on with them and seek the help that they need. How are you doing that?

 

Evert: Well, the first thing is you have be visible, you have to be known, and that is difficult so I want to emphasize that what you are doing is actually so important, it’s not important for me to speak out like I’m rallying for an important position, it is most important that these words reach people and make them think about “maybe I should reach peers and I don’t seek peers on porn sites, I will find criminals who want to make money out of me.”

No, I want to find platforms where they can speak safely with pedophiles or other maps about their feelings so that they can understand what they are and can maybe ask questions or whatever. What you are doing is so important, you’re spreading the word. And that is prevention indeed.

Meg: Well thank you so much for saying that.

Evert: Thank you very much for doing this.

Meg: Well that kind of leads to another question that I wanted to ask you, because as we’re wrapping up our season we’re wrapping up our interviews and our podcast producer was like “You need to interview Evert” so here we are doing that and I wanted to ask you why this podcast was so important to you and why you were so interested in being a part of it with us.

Well in a way I already said it, why I find it important, these words need to be spread. It’s not important that my words but people who are feeling attraction to children and maybe they’re in doubt if they are or not. They have to be able to find a way to speak about it and to find out. And that’s why your platform is so important and I myself have been in this mental state which was very disturbing.

I really lived in a double life, in one way I felt fully confused about myself and on the other hand I had to support a family. And I had difficulties and I had to fight myself out and I had help from peers on the good side. So now I am almost fully accepted myself as a pedophile.

(Laughs) Almost.

There are sometimes that I had a little bit of self-censorship. Would I take pictures or not, whether can I look at children or not, but in a way I feel glad that I reached this point and I want to share this possibility for everyone. And that makes me give so much energy.

That is my mission in a way.

Meg: Yeah and we love having you here to share your experiences, I think a lot of our listeners that are maps and nomaps share that thought that you had about “It feels like I was living a double life and it feels like I’m in hiding”, I think a lot of people can relate to that and I mean I guess what I would also say is, what would you say to some of those maps that are in hiding, that don’t agree with the pro-contact voices out there but maybe feel too afraid to go under the label of map or nomap and speak out on public forums or on social media or even to their intimate, close family circles. What would you say to some of those maps that are in hiding and aren’t sure of what to do?

 

Evert: The first thing you have to do is don’t fight yourself, you will lose. You have to take and accept what you are. There is no one who changed these feelings, who can cope with them, you can use them even positively but we can’t deny them, you can’t hide like I did.

I tried to live as heterosexual, I looked at adult porn and had sex with my wife. Looking back it was all nothing more than a theater. It didn’t satisfy and they must understand that situation. So to get out and get happy like I am now means to accept what you are and try to find ways to speak to us. Come with questions you have, you’re not a monster, you’re just a person like any other, one who has a sexual feeling and the only difficulty is some people don’t like that.

 

Meg: And I think that this process of accepting who you are is how we’ve come up with so many different words and names and labels for it as we discussed earlier because I think it helps people to realize “Ok, this is what an actual pedophile is”. You know, scientifically if you will, and this is what a minor-atracted person is, and this is what an exclusive minor-attracted person is, and non-exclusive minor-attracted is, I think it’s in our nature to create these labels so that people can go through that process of acceptance.

 

Evert: Of course. But one thing that’s also very difficult is when I speak to a heterosexual they will listen with their heterosexual background, they will see everything from the side of a heterosexual. And if I talk about my feelings to a peer I don’t need much words. He immediately understands. And that’s why they must seek out peers. You can’t explain it to a normal heterosexual. Certainly not a few haven’t reached the situation of putting your feelings in words.

 

Meg: What I do think is that people that have this sense of support, more often are able to accept what’s going on inside them and talk about it and be more aware, as you’ve mentioned. Be more aware of what’s going on inside them and how they can control their thoughts and their behaviors and their emotions to a degree.

 

Evert: Actually, you have build up a motivation not to harm children. And when you’re confused you don’t have that motivation, it’s broken into pieces. So you have to repair it, and you have to have a clear view in life about how you want to live your life as pedophile or as a minor-attracted person.

 

Meg: This podcast, I do appreciate you sharing so much about your story and your vision and mission and purpose going forward as an advocate for nomaps and as a peer, really, to anybody that’s experiencing these feelings so that they can feel like they’re not alone and I think that drives and definitely contributes to our purpose which was to truly bring light to those in the dark, and so in closing I just wonder if there is anything else that you want to share, not only to maps out there but to the world, about this topic. As we seek to bring light to those in the dark.

 

Evert: Well, I want to state one thing also, because it also is important about the situation. We as map activists, I don’t really think I’m an activist but I’m speaking out, we are always told that we want to be part of the LGBT community.

And in a way you see immediately reactions from this community revolving or almost disgusting and the fact that we want to be part of that, I think we are not at that moment yet, we still have to find a way to simply be here instead of be openly and with right in society and I hope that many, many LGBT persons don’t feel endangered by us, we don’t have such thoughts or agenda.

And they themselves must understand that they sometimes have the same routes, same way to go to accept themselves or find a way to live with their feelings. We have so much in common and I think “I don’t want your help, the only thing I ask is don’t be an obstacle, give us the space to make our own way out”. And I think that it’s also important to know, for people who have been or are part of the LGBT community, another thing I think is I want to speak out to people who are responsible for making laws or decisions on these things, that with fear and disgust you don’t make good decisions.

If we look at all the policies there are, we hardly see any effect. And I hope really as many people like you and others say, let’s take another way. The way of prevention. And I hope the people start changing their minds and we get on this way of prevention and we certainly will support that.

 

Meg: And you know, we couldn’t agree more with your last  statement, the way of prevention and that’s exactly why we choose to do the work that we do and choose to have this podcast and guests like you on it who truly believe that prevention is the  intervention and prevention is actually the answer, and so again, Evert, we really appreciate you coming and being on this podcast and dedicating your time, I know you said that you’re not an activist but I would also call you one, you’re out here speaking out and sharing your mission and doing so to help others and again to move forward with this mission and vision of prevention and we so appreciate you being on our show today.

Evert: Well, thank you too for letting me speak out and giving me the opportunity to help others. Because that’s also part of my big wish in life is to help others and not harm them.

 

Candice: Thank you for listening to this week’s podcast. Please visit 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!

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TGPP Transcript: Dillon https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/11/22/ppodcast-transcript-dillon/ Thu, 22 Nov 2018 17:58:38 +0000 http://aboutpedophilia.com/?p=723 Note: This podcast was transcribed by David. 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...

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Note: This podcast was transcribed by David.

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.

Candice:

Hello everybody, I’m Candice, and I am the host of the Prevention Podcast. We are doing a series of interviews talking with different anti-contact pedophiles across the globe, and I’m really excited today to be talking to Dillon, who has agreed to be on our podcast, so welcome, Dillon.Dillon:

Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Candice:

Yeah, I’m so happy you’re here. I just want to ask you some questions that I think are hot-ticket items, if you will, that I think our global community is always curious about. I know I am, and especially the research world. I think a lot of times we guess on what we think about people that have pedophilia, and so it’s really an honor to have you actually sitting here with me, especially since you’re an anti-contact pedophile. So I just want to acknowledge that.

Dillon:

Yeah, I think it’s important to acknowledge.

Candice:

What does the term “anti-contact pedophile” mean to you?

Dillon:

I think it’s pretty cut and dry, between pro- and anti-contact. I think anti-contact is just simply you acknowledge that you have these attractions to children, but you’re not willing to act on them, because you see the problems it can cause, and morally you know it’s wrong. And obviously, you know there’s legal repercussions as well. But I think, with an anti-contact pedophile, the morals are more what play into it.

Candice:

Okay. How long have you known you were attracted to children?

Dillon:

That’s an interesting question, because looking back on it, I think when I was like 11 or 12 I started to notice some kind of difference, where like I would be at school, and I would see different kids who I thought were attractive. But I didn’t recognize it as being an “attraction,” or anything sexual at the time. It was just my desire to reach out to them and be friends with them. But I think the first realization I really had of it when I was about 17 years old. I had been reading stories online, like erotic stories, that made it kind of obvious to me that I was attracted to children indeed. But I was in denial. So then, when I was 17, I remember seeing a kid and thinking “oh man, that kid’s really attractive.” And that’s when it really hit me really hard, and I was like, “oh no.”

Candice:

Wow, okay. So when you say, “oh, no,” what was the impact to you? Like, “oh, no,” because…

Dillon:

Well the thing I thought was, “I’m one of those people.” Who likes kids, like I have this urge and can I control that? I don’t know if I can. Being at that young age, I didn’t have complete faith in myself.

Candice:

And, how would you say your attraction to children has impacted your life?

Dillon:

 

So, I would say it’s definitely impacted my life. I’ve kind of tried to confront it, and I went into a pretty dark depression for a while. And that was something I hadn’t really experienced before. That’s one way it affected my life. It’s also caused me to second guess a lot of things. Like, if I’m ever going to do some volunteer work with kids, or something like that, sometimes it makes me question myself, which I think is a good thing. But it also makes me anxious about what other people might think, who I’ve told. So I really have to be honest with myself, and ask myself those hard questions. Like, am I going to volunteer with kids because I want to, or because there’s something else in my mind?

Candice:

And then how do you, when you’re asking yourself those questions, how do you keep yourself accountable? What kinds of support do you have in place so that you do stay safe?

Dillon:

Right, so, I have a lot of friends who I talk to pretty frequently, and a lot of friends who I really trust, and who I’m out to about this. And they’ll ask me how the volunteer work I do is going. I’m also going to a therapy group, with a bunch of people who are also attracted to minors, and they help keep me accountable as well, where basically every time I go there, it’s maybe not quite expected that I’ll talk about it, but you know it kind of is in some ways.

Candice:

So, being accountable, checking in, making sure that you’re being safe, so that if you are volunteering, that you are keeping yourself in check, and you’ve got the support and the therapy to do that.

Dillon:

Exactly.

Candice:

Because, the goal at the end of the day is to make sure children is safe, right? Safe from harm.

Dillon:

Absolutely.

Candice:

Yeah, okay, great. What do you want the world to know about pedophilia and/or minor attraction?

Dillon:

So, like you said at the beginning that people kind of assume or guess a lot of times about pedophilia, a lot of times I think they’ll assume that any pedophile is a bad pedophile, you know? That any pedophile is someone who molests children, or is constantly downloading child pornography or whatever, and has all this malicious intent. And I guess I just want the world to know that that’s not the case. There’s a lot of people out there who are attracted to children, but they realize that it’s morally wrong, you know, and that they don’t want to hurt a child like that. And I think there’s a lot of, for me it’s not all physical, the attraction. A lot of it is emotional. And I don’t think people know that either. I think that the desire to connect with a child doesn’t have to be sexual, you know? It can be very much emotional.

Candice:

So for you, what you find yourself drawn to sometimes is the emotional connection with a child, more so than even than the sexual.

Dillon:

Absolutely.

Candice:

Yeah, and I think that’s a great point to get out into the world. Because there is that assumption that pedophile equals child molester. And what we’re finding, at least in the research, is now that there are biological underpinnings that say, wow, it might actually be sexual orientation, over this sort of “oh, you know, I wake up and I choose to be attracted to children,” right?

Dillon:

Right.

Candice:

Okay. So we believe that aspects of pedophilia, and we’ve talked about this, can be a sexual orientation like we talked about. But we’ve also had many, many individuals say that they had something, a traumatic experience happen in their life where they had that arrested development. So for instance, something happened at 6, or something happened at 10, and so that also has impacted them, and they’ve found that in their attraction, and I’m just curious what your experience has been, if anything related to that.

Dillon:

Right, so I agree. It can be a sexual orientation. But I also think that it can be childhood trauma. And maybe it could even be both of them combined. But, in my experience, I don’t think it’s a sexual orientation at this point. I’ve thought that before, but going to therapy has sort of helped me to realize, because my mom died when I was 10 years old, and really looking back on that, I’ve seen that I repressed a lot of emotion at that age. And you know, in some ways, I grew up too fast because of it. And I feel like that has definitely affected who I am now, and the attractions I have. And I feel like part of it is because I went through that emotional trauma, that traumatic event in my life has led me to have that desire to connect with kids.

Candice:

So I think it’s really important that you said, you know, you felt like it was sexual orientation, and now what you’re realizing, and maybe it’s both, and I think we see that as well, so often that people have sexual orientation towards a child and they’ll also report having a traumatic incident occur in their life, where they did get stunted. Like you said, mom dies at 10, and then what I’m hearing is, “wow, I find myself attracted to that age.” And now that I’m going through that trauma, I’m going, “wait a minute, it’s changing.”

Dillon:

Right.

Candice:

Okay. And I thank that’s really important for people to know, especially listeners who are anti-contact pedophiles as well, or even pro-contact pedophiles, who might say, “huh, I’ve never thought about that. I also have had this experience happen, or something traumatic in my childhood to think about.”

Dillon:

Yeah. And it’s funny, because like, before, I was very much like, “nah, I think it’s an orientation, I don’t think it’s anything else.” And the reason I thought that way was because I was worried that if I said it wasn’t an orientation, that there would be some therapist who was like, “okay, then we can fix it then.” You know, I didn’t want to go that route, because I really don’t believe in that route.

Candice:

Yeah, okay. Like the reparative therapy, right?

Dillon:

Yeah. I didn’t want someone to treat me like I was broken.

Candice:

Okay, sure. Well, and my guess is, we live in a society that believes pedophilia, and pedophiles are the lowest of the low, right? And so it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to be judged by a therapist.

Dillon:

Right.

Candice:

And I think even therapists, I’m a therapist and the reason why I created the prevention project, for instance, and this podcast, is that even therapists can be judging. And so we get a lot of referrals who say, “We don’t want to treat this individual who has an attraction to a child.” And I say, we will, we’ll provide them with support. And my passion and my emphasis is not to change people who have pedophilia in the sense of “reparative therapy.” I do have a number one goal of keeping our society safe, keeping children safe, and I know that you, for instance, as an anti-contact pedophile, have the same goal.

Dillon: Definitely

Candice:

That you don’t want to harm anyone, especially children.

Dillon:

Yeah. And I’ve even had an experience with a therapist who was totally judgmental. I just had one therapist who basically, he had me in his office, and this was my first therapeutic experience. And he just kind of gave me a questionnaire, and just asked me all these different questions, and his result was that I was at a “moderate risk factor” to molest a child. And it really annoyed me, and I really felt judged. Like, is that all you see me as? As a risk factor? So I definitely had my own experience of a judgmental therapist.

Candice:

Well, I appreciate you saying that, because, I see you, I’m looking at you as we’re talking, and you’re a person, sitting in front of me. You’re someone’s son, you may even have a partner. You may even have siblings, you have a mom and a dad, right? You’re a human being, I’m looking at you, you’re not a monster. So I think often times, and this is another reason that we’re doing this podcast, therapists and researchers and scientists and so on, want to assume or judge or lump everyone in categories. People are labels, and they’re numbers, and they’re statistics. And that’s where I’m really passionate about looking at you as a person, and saying, I’m going to ask you the questions. I want to hear from you and I want the world to hear from you.

Dillon:

Absolutely. I really appreciate that.

Candice:

What else would you like to share on our podcast? Anything else that you feel like you want the world to know about anti-contact pedophilia?

Dillon:

I think maybe that like we said, people really see pedophile and child-molester as interchangeable words. And I feel like a lot of people, and I’ve read some comments online, where people just kind of assume, they’re just like, “oh, you’re a pedophile, you must be after children, you must be preying on children. You must have all these malicious intents.” And, I just want the world that you know that we’re on the same boat that they are. We’re trying to prevent it as well. And for that reason, we wouldn’t want to hurt a child. That’s why we’re anti-contact. But, honestly, everybody has their things about them that are just different, and they have to deal with.

Candice:

Sure. And that’s where, I would say,I think the sexual orientation comes in, where it’s like, “Okay, I’m born with this attraction,” right? Because I’m guessing, Dillon, that if you had a choice, that you would prefer to not have this attraction. Like, “I wish I could wake up and say, oh, it’s gone.” And here you have it, and so I think for folks who have been interviewing who have pedophilia, some will say that it feels like a prison sentence.

Dillon:

Right. Well, I mean, having it, I wouldn’t necessarily say that anymore. I mean, sure I’d like to wake up and not be sexually attracted to children, but that’s not going to happen. So I’ve come to this new thought process, new belief about it, where it’s like, this is what it is, and I’m going to do the best I possibly can with it. I’m going to find a way to make it helpful in society, you know? I’m going to make sure I lock down the sexual side of it, and get that out of my head as much as possible.

Candice:

And get the support that you need, and the therapeutic guidance, and like you said the peer support, and make sure you’ve got your accountability group to ensure that you are safe.

Dillon:

Exactly. And I’d say that again, I would like to wake up in the morning and not have the sexual side of it, but I would still want the emotional side of it.

Candice:

Yeah. Well, as human beings, we all are emotional, you know?

Dillon:

That’s true.

Candice: And I think we all can have that emotional connection with a child, and have it be a healthy one. So it’s good that you have the support and awareness around that, and the understanding around that, so you can stay safe and healthy.

Dillon:

Absolutely.

Candice: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Dillon, I really appreciate you coming on The Prevention Podcast.

Dillon:

No problem. I appreciate you guys doing it, and inviting me.

Candice:

You’re so welcome.

Candice:

Thank you for listening to this week’s podcast. Please visit http://theglobalpreventionproject.org/  to learn more about our project and programs. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast at https://thepreventionpodcast.com or iTunes. See you next time!

 

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Why someone sexually abuses a child https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/11/08/why-someone-sexually-abuses-a-child/ https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/11/08/why-someone-sexually-abuses-a-child/#comments Thu, 08 Nov 2018 23:16:00 +0000 https://aboutpedophilia.com/?p=1354 I’m a registered sex offender. No, I won’t tell you where I live or nothin. You trolls can kiss my ass. I get your reaction. I get you’re mad at me. I get you wanna do all sorts of things to me. But please hear me out, cuz I think this matters. I hurt a...

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I’m a registered sex offender. No, I won’t tell you where I live or nothin. You trolls can kiss my ass. I get your reaction. I get you’re mad at me. I get you wanna do all sorts of things to me. But please hear me out, cuz I think this matters.

I hurt a child I cared about. Yeah, I know, if I cared so much, why’d I hurt the kid? Lemme get there. I wanna tell you why that happened, cuz I think you can learn from it. I wanna share it, because I hate what I did, and I don’t wanna see it no more.

A normal childhood

…whatever the hell normal means, I’ve got no idea. But I went through special education and was eventually “mainstreamed” to be included in normal classrooms both with and without an aid present. I saw therapists throughout the entire time, and psychiatrists who prescribed lost of medication to try to help me. They all said I had ADHD, then it was ADD. All I know is, it’s hard for me to sit down and write something like this, and writing it took over a month.

No, I don’t remember no abuse in my childhood. I always wondered if I did, what with having pedophilia and all, but no. No memories, nothing shady running in the family, none of that. Not sure why I have pedophilia. That’d be the sexual attraction to kids, not th abuse of one.

I had loving parents who had their flaws just like y’all do, I enjoyed many of the interests a typical boy likes — frog-catching, space, science, sea critters, climbing trees — and I went to the same schools you did.

My parents divorced and moved when I was 9, but there’re lotsa kid from divorced families. I was bullied for not liking sports and for being in special classes for my ADD, but I had some support with that. I had issues with my mother and the people she dated, but many people have issues with their parents for one reason or another. My parents eventually remarried, and I didn’t really like both step-parents. They both got on my nerves in different ways, and drove me nuts with trying to win my trust and shit. But everyone has problems when their parents are divorced. Ain’t nothin’ special about divorce.

Recognizing I had pedophilia

About the only thing that was weird was I noticed a sexual attraction to little boys, which I didn’t realize as such until I was 16 years old or so. While ya’ll were going through puberty and you were liking what you like, my brain was developing attraction to boys. The signs were there as early as 12–13 years old, but I didn’t have words to describe what was happening, even if I had understood it. The first few years, it was not a big deal. I did not see it as a problem, because I never thought I could or would act on it. I mean, to me, being sexual with a person was marriage, and no way could anyone marry a child. So… okay, who cares? Nothin I did to choose it, nothin I can do to change it. These days, I accept it, cuz’ there ain’t much else I can do.

“Help” from clueless folk

So, when I was in high school (senior, I think it was), I was discovering that people didn’t like people that liked kids, and it was dawning on me what that really meant. To me, liking kids was a good thing. Who wouldn’t want to like kids? Kids are great, and working with them is a blast. But there were them other words in the news reports about the church thing, like “pedophile” that had me thinking, cuz’ people use that word to describe abusers, not just people with an attraction. Now, like a good Christian, I went to a Christian high school and a Christian college, and I tried to sort this shit out.

It was dawning on me with the Boston churches that was covering up abuse that when people talk about liking kids… that ain’t really what they mean, they mean sexual-like, you know, being a pedophile. I started thinking… maybe my sexual thoughts are something I should get help with, some guidance from a mentor. Well, long story short, that guy I asked for help from had no idea what he was doing, didn’t pause to figure out where I was at in how I thought, and basically, he saw me as a risk to children. That was final year of high school, and it didn’t help one bit.

The mentor I ended up with, and his friend who were self-described experts in helping men of faith with sexual shit, decided that I would blow up and hurt the people around me. He labeled me a ticking time bomb. A lot of other things happened, but I stuffed everything I was talking to them about, primarily because of their reaction. I stopped talking to people about it. I kept it a secret, and it festered for years until I was in college, trying to manage school, a job, staying fit, and working with kids all at the same time.

Where’s that lead, you think?

It leads to a long series of shitty thoughts and decisions, duh. I had no support, I tried to hide what I was struggling with, and it became an issue that started taking over my thoughts. Why? Because I let it take over my thoughts. Before, I thought that was beyond my control, but looking back, it was a choice, even if I saw no other choice than to figure it out on my own.

I started looking at child porn, to have an outlet that was “not really harming a child.” to my mind. But I was convinced that I was doing the right thing for the right reasons. To me at the time, it didn’t hurt nobody, but it was hurting me an’ kids too. I only realized that years later. Cops here knew about all that, but never charged me, thank God. I guess they thought convicting me of sexual assault of a minor was good enough.

The real reason for the porn were for meeting needs I was neglecting (I will get to those needs in a moment), and I was spendin lotsa time on it, more and more as college went on. As a result, they was slowly changing how I saw being sexual with a child. My thoughts and beliefs on being sexual with a child went from it being an utter impossibility, to possible and even permissible with the right child who was okay with it. I became a pro-contact pedophile, cuz’ I thought it was okay in the right situation and the right kid.

What was once a pebble was now becoming a mountain.

OVERWHELMED an’ alone with a boy

By this point, I would spend hours every week on downloading new child porn to view, because I thought it was helping me (thank God they never charged me with that shit). I was in a situation where I was constantly neglecting my needs and trying to ignore what I needed in regards to my ADD: Quiet, less time around people and distractions, all that shit. No, my highly social job, weekly exercise classes, and going to church were the opposite of what I needed. They didn’t help me focus. Too much distraction, too much going on.

Spending time with an 8-year-old boy, whom I knew through his older brother at my exercise group, ain’t what I needed. I was piling social activity after social activity on myself when I needed more alone time and quiet, less distraction.

I couldn’t even feel how overwhelmed I was, and my belief was that I needed to help people, which led to ignoring my feelings more. My needs didn’t matter, cuz’ I needed to help people like a good Christian. These issues were building and building, and putting me in a place where I was totally overwhelmed, and I had no idea that I even was overwhelmed. That frog analogy, where the frog jumps out if the water’s boiling, but stays in if the heat gets turned up slowly? I’m that frog. No one suddenly decides to just abuse a kid. It’s a process. Least, it was with me.

Eventually, I began sexually abusing that 8-year-old boy, because I convinced myself that it would help him learn more about himself and about hygiene. I asked him, that first time, if I could put lotion on a rash he had on his groin. I deceived both him and me into believing my touching and looking at his penis was about him being healthy. Even if he was willing at first, it was still undeniably child sexual abuse. He had no way of properly consenting, which makes it child rape. Now, some folk don’t think I should be calling it rape, cuz’ there was never penetration, but what else do you call it? Mo-lestation? Bullshit. Where I’m from, if it ain’t with permission, it’s rape. So yeah, I raped a child I cared very much about, because my decisions had put me in a really dark place.

I was trying to meet some needs by shit that wouldn’t ever meet them: Needing to be alone more, needing less noise so I could focus, needing to feel comfortable in my own skin, needing to pay attention to how I was feeling, self-care, looking only at the shit I can control, all that stuff. One of the constant phrases we repeated while in treatment was, “Our best thinking got us here.” That was very true: My attempts to solve my own problems, without support, led to five years of bad decision-making starting when I was 16 asking that stupid mentor for help that led up to the sexual abuse of a child I cared deeply about.

Whoa… a child molester who doesn’t minimize?

Yeah, a child molester who fully understands the gravity of his actions and regrets them. My actions were confusing to the boy I hurt, and were not helpful, as I deluded myself into thinking. I don’t care for my stupid behavior, and my pledge is that it ain’t never gonna happen again, because where I used to think that I was out-of-control, no, my behavior’s a choice. I have become an anti-contact pedophile because of my choice to sexually abuse a child and the aftermath that choice caused.

So then what?

So, I realize I’m jumping around here, but I actually manipulated the boy into telling. He was the kinda kid that would do the opposite of what you told him if you told him to do somethin he shouldn’t. So I told him not to tell anyone what I was doin. He told a teacher, the teacher told the cops, and I got a call from the family wanting to know what was what. ‘Bout a week went by, very depressing week mind you, and I had a dream where I was hurting another kid, and I just lost it. I tried to off myself with a bag over my head, and it didn’t work, so I called the cops. Yeah, real fucking smart, but I had noone else I could ask for help. That’s how shit hit the fan.

Over a few months, after spending a month in jail, I went through psych evals, a few court dates, and finally, I was sentenced to ten years on probation with a stay of imposition. They said if I kept all my requirements, I’d end up with a misdemeanor instead of a felony. So I worked my ass off to understand all the things I needed to do. Got off probation in October.

My requirements were somethin like this:

No contact with anyone under 18 for the purposes of gettin’ to know ’em

No porn of any kind

No social media or shit that could lead to contact with minors

Keep all my probation meetings, an’ first they were monthly, then every other month, then at the end I had to check in once a year

Complete sex offender therapy

Get gainful employment or make good efforts

Had to have internet use monitored to make sure I did my shit right

My conditions also notified me of my duty to register as a sex offender, and what happens if I don’t

If I just knew then what I know now…

Many sex offenders I knew in treatment constantly said they wish they knew what they learned in treatment before they hurt someone. It ain’t just some shit about how they wish they hadn’t been caught, the people I knew really valued what therapy was teaching and wish they learned that shit before they fucked up. I know this from from goin’ to sex offender treatment for near two and a half years and seeing about twenty guys who now live their lives in a healthier way, at peace with what happened, but still wishing they knew then what they know now.

That was the origin for my finding people on the internet: Wanting to make that help more available before someone fucks up like I did. I wanted to see if there were other pedophiles who spoke out about this, and I found a shit-ton. Ender, Robert, Jack, Daywalker, and Nigel over in France… lotsa people talk about it. Hopefully my story can help people too.

Yeah, there were a few guys who didn’t make it. One had a relapse with drugs and thought he needed to focus on that, not the sexual acting out he did on them drugs. Another got kicked out for pot, a probation violation. Another, because he couldn’t follow the requirements, but I hear he went back after he did what he need to. But that’s three people out of twenty, an’ from my understanding, the norm for sex offenders is staying compliant and keepin our toes in line. All that shit you see on the news? They only report the bad shit, never the good.

What is the point here?

The point is this: It wasn’t a single, sudden decision that led to abusing the boy. It wasn’t as if I woke up one day and decided to be sexual with a child. It weren’t out of a desire to cause pain to someone and get pleasure from that. It was a process that, for me, took five years. That time between the start of poor decisions and neglecting mental health and the sexual abuse of a child means that my actions were preventable. If someone had the right response and help, I woulda leapt at it. We need to know help is out there. My therapy program was connected to AASECT, the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, and they can help people with sexual issues. I seen a good website, www.virped.org that’s got all sortsa good shit. So, if you’re dealing with pedophilia, they can help, and they don’t judge you.

But my point is, I’m a human being, I ain’t no monster, and people liked me and cared about me an’ they still do. I wasn’t no freak in no trench coat waiting to nab a kid off the street, I was the guy everyone loved. I volunteered, I worked, I did all the shit a normal person does. If you’re looking for the monster, you ain’t gonna see me, the guy that goes to a Christian church and a Christian high school and a Christian college and helps with the kids.

Wait… human?

The idea that someone who sexually abused a child is human? Most people call bullshit. The idea that sexual abuse is not a result of what the media has caricatured sexual abuse into, but the result of complex mental health needs that could be addressed before the abuse happens? Again, bullshit to most folk.

These’re mind-blowing ideas that most people are not prepared to accept. Sorry to disturb you, but I think those ideas can help children avoid the sorta pain I caused. I think we need to be real in how we talk about these issues, even if it’s uncomfortable and messy. Why?

What I did to my victim was evil and wrong, and that is why I want people to learn what I have learned, without the pain I caused, the lessons I learned the hard way… before a child is raped, abused, or molested. No one should have to go through what I put that boy through. No one should have to go through what I went through trying to get help and being called a time bomb, and being turned away from that help. It don’t help no one, and it played a hand in me hurting the kid. I own the shit I did, but it didn’t happen in no vacuum.

Abuse is shit that needs to stop, an’ the laws we make ain’t doin that.

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The (not) Reasons I’m Anti-Contact. https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/11/04/the-not-reasons-im-anti-contact/ Sun, 04 Nov 2018 18:01:35 +0000 http://aboutpedophilia.com/?p=607 For nearly 20 years now, I have been outspoken on the internet about my pedophilia and about my anti-contact positions as a pedophile. I have done this in various places and under a number of different aliases, but my stance on the core issues of the matter have never changed, regardless of who I found...

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For nearly 20 years now, I have been outspoken on the internet about my pedophilia and about my anti-contact positions as a pedophile. I have done this in various places and under a number of different aliases, but my stance on the core issues of the matter have never changed, regardless of who I found myself talking to or where the conversation was taking place. Over the years, those conversations havetaken place on various usenet newsgroups, on the old BL boards, on non-pedophilia related message boards, comment sections under articles, on YouTube, and maybe even some other forums I’m forgetting about.

I’ve spent years arguing the anti-contact position, and if I were able to compile all of the things I’ve written over the years on the matter in one place, I might have myself a fairly lengthy little book. However, today, I don’t want to bring up the reasons I’m anti-contact. I’ve done that enough and such an entry would get far too long. No, in this entry, instead of talking about what my reasons for being anti-contact are, I want to go into what my reasons for being anti contact aren’t. One, because that’s a much shorter list, and two, because it’s something there seems to be a lot of confusion about out there.

One thing for certain, is that if you’re speaking as an anti-contact pedophile, the things you’re saying are nearly certain to piss someone off. If it’s not some pedophile-hating, moral-outrage-shouting, myrmidon from the general public, it’s a pro-contact pedophile. Or, sometimes, both at the same time. (Thanks to Twitter, mostly.)

We all know that a lot of non-pedophiles view all pedophiles with absolute contempt, and it often doesn’t matter how anti-contact or how “virtuous” we may be. A lot people out there are just as apt to tell me that they’d like to “cure” me with a bullet through my skull as they are to say the same thing to a pro-contact pedophile. They don’t care. A pedophile is a pedophile and nonce is a nonce. Being sexually attracted to children alone is enough to qualify you as a monster. Also, when you insist to such people that you are anti-contact, the tendency is for them not to believe you. They think you must be hiding your true motives and that you’re just trying to manipulate and deceive them. That’s what pedophiles do, right?

On the other side of this coin, we’ve got the pro-contact crowd. Before Virped, whenever I was speaking in any forum with other pedophiles, that’s who I always found myself sparring with, and I never could seem to get around it. I tried at times to just stay silent on the contact issue, but I always found the things the more vocal pro-contacters said to be so grotesquely wrong that I never could keep my mouth shut for long. I don’t suppose I need to tell anyone that this did not make me very popular in some of those old pedophile groups. Eventually, I always wound up vastly outnumbered, would be shouted down, and would wind up leaving out of pure frustration. Thank god for Virped.

So, I hear the pedo-haters on one side, suspecting that my anti-contact stance is simply a front. It’s an act to soften people up in hopes of one day achieving a more pro-contact agenda. They always seem to find one way or another of making this accusation in so many words as they hurl their righteous indignation my way.

On the other side, I hear the pro-contact folks, assuming that I and pedophiles like me have “turned our backs on the childlove movement” and that we’ve “given up” in hopes that people will finally just like and accept us. We’re traitors, sell-outs, and our treachery knows no limits.

While I can’t ultimately speak for anyone but myself, I want to once and for all state that all of the aforementioned assumptions about my motives for being anti-contact are absolutely, thoroughly, 100% incorrect.

So, I say the following to both the pedo-haters suspicious of my anti-contact activism, and to the pro-contact crowd at the same time. I’m talking to both groups simultaneously here, and I’m going to address all of your misconceptions in a very condensed manner, so pay attention. Take this to heart and know this…..

I have held a solid core belief that adult-child sex is wrong from the beginning. I pretty much became an anti-contact pedophile the very moment I realized children were sexually attractive to me. I’ve never held NAMBLA-like beliefs and gave up on them because they were too difficult to achieve. I do not hope for a future where adults and children can legally have sex and think we can only get there if we “play our hand right” and “play by the rules” for now. I’m not anti-contact because I want anyone’s sympathy and I don’t aim to “normalize” pedophilia. (Whatever that means.) I do not expect a congratulatory pat on the back for not molesting children or for being anti-contact and I’m not just hoping I can get people to like me a little more. My anti-contactism HAS NO ULTERIOR MOTIVE! I am anti-contact because I truly and steadfastly believe it’s what is right, not because I think expressing those beliefs will benefit me in some way, either in the foreseeable or distant future.

(Damn, I just coined a phrase. “Anti-contactism”. In fact, I think we can even just go ahead and take the hyphen out of that. “Anticontactism”. I like it!)

To illustrate my point even further, I’ll ask you all to use your imaginations a little. Imagine, if you will, that there really were such a thing as a crystal ball which could tell the future. Now, imagine I found myself one of those crystal balls and figured out how to use it. If I were to look into that imaginary crystal ball and see that nothing will change in terms of how society views and treats pedophiles/MAPs fifty or more years from now, or ever, I still would not change my beliefs, my involvement with Virped, or the manner in which I conduct myself as a pedophile. I’d be disappointed, but I wouldn’t change a damn thing.

The mere possibility that my efforts, my words, and now my involvement with Virped could keep even one pedophile from acting out with one child at any point ever is enough for me. That’s who I am, that’s what I am, and that’s what I’m about. People on one side or the other can keep on not liking it all they want, just as long as they understand what it is they aren’t liking.

Glad I had the opportunity to clear all this up.

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And On That Day, I Knew What I Was https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/10/02/and-on-that-day-i-knew-what-i-was/ https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/10/02/and-on-that-day-i-knew-what-i-was/#comments Tue, 02 Oct 2018 14:08:09 +0000 http://aboutpedophilia.com/?p=603 As many of you who already know my story are aware, when I was about 13 and a half, I started developing an attraction to younger boys that came seemingly out of nowhere. Before that, I was only turned on by women and same-aged girls. Not only turned on by, but sexually obsessed with. Most...

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As many of you who already know my story are aware, when I was about 13 and a half, I started developing an attraction to younger boys that came seemingly out of nowhere. Before that, I was only turned on by women and same-aged girls. Not only turned on by, but sexually obsessed with. Most of the molestation and sexual bullying I endured at the hands of older kids as a boy had been done by females, and it led to a hypersexuality that I’m certain isn’t healthy for a preteenage boy. However, up to that point, not once had my premature obsession with sex and pornography been directed towards males at all. As the 13.5 year old me rapidly discovered his attraction to younger boys, he found his attraction to females disappear completely and almost immediately.

I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom in the late summer of 1988, looking at pictures of boys in the Sears catalog. (Yes, kids, this is before the internet.) Why did my mind and my heart suddenly race at the thought of what those boys might look like if you took off all those clothes they were advertising? Then, the more overtly sexual thoughts crept in. I tried to repel those thoughts and wish them away but they just kept coming back stronger. It was as if the attraction had started out as a babbling brook but very rapidly turned into a raging river that I could no longer swim upstream against, no matter how hard I tried. It was futile to resist, and before to long I surrendered and let that torrent of raging water take me where it would.

In 1988, the boys section of the Sears catalog passed as fap materiel for me. Gotta love that 80’s hair style on the middle boy, huh?

As I rifled through the boys section of that big, thick catalog, I remember asking myself in my head, “Am I gay? Why am I turning gay?” However, it didn’t take me very long to realize that I was not turning gay in any normal sense. I was well into puberty at that point, and the boys who I began finding attractive were all younger and prepubescent. I had no idea what it all meant though. I had no frame of reference. I was totally lost and confused. I hoped that maybe it was a phase and that it would go away, but the more the weeks and months wore on, the more this new found attraction hard-wired itself into my being.

Keep in mind now, that in the late 80’s, the word “pedophile” was not nearly as much a part of the public vernacular as it is today. At 13, I had never even heard the word. Sure, I knew there were people out there who molested children but I didn’t have any concept of the fact that there existed adults who were primarily sexually interested in children. I had been warned all throughout my childhood of molesters, but didn’t really have much of a handle on who they were exactly either. To me, child molesters were dark, shadowy, creepy strangers who wore trench coats and sat in windowless vans outside of schoolyards, with a bag of candy and a perpetual erection. They were people who abducted children, chained them up in their basements, did unspeakable things to them, and finally left them in shallow graves somewhere. Surely I wasn’t becoming one of those, right? I couldn’t be. I knew I was a nice person and I didn’t want to hurt anyone.

Then, in the early months of 1989, there came the day when I found out. The day I found out what I was, or, at least was given a label to apply to myself and my new sexual identity. They say labels aren’t important, but they can be, especially when you’re trying to categorize something for the sake of making sense of it.

The devastatingly handsome lad from Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” video.

It was right around my fourteenth birthday, give or take a month or two. I was sitting in my living room, watching MTV, when the Madonna video for the the song “Open Your Heart” came on. Now, I’m not much of a Madonna fan and wasn’t even back then, but I was a bored teenage kid who would watch whatever crappy video came on MTV. At the time, I was probably waiting patiently for the next Guns n Roses or Motley Crue video. This was long before on-demand, mind you, and to see a rock video, you often had to wade through half a dozen or more teeny-bop videos and just enjoy the rock ones when MTV decided to air them. Though not a fan of Madonna, this video grabbed my attention and held it, because this video featured a stunningly gorgeous boy who appeared to be about 10 or 11.

So, I watched this video and was absolutely transfixed by the beauty of this boy. My heart skipped a beat every time he was shown on camera. Then, at the end of the video, Madonna bends down and kisses this little boy on the lips. It was all I could do not to excuse myself to the restroom for a fap right then and there. How badly I wished I could have kissed those lips like she did.

Towards the end of the video, my mother had come into room and witnessed the on-screen kiss. When Madonna’s lips pulled away from the boy’s, my mother became visibly perturbed and exclaimed, “Oh my god! What the hell is wrong with Madonna? Is she a pedophile or something?”

In the video that played in my mind, that was me on the left.

What had my mom just said? “A pedophile?” Having never heard this peculiar P word before, I hesitantly asked her, “What is a pedophile?” It was immediately clear she was made uncomfortable by my question and didn’t want to answer me, but I persisted. I wouldn’t let her off the hook, even though I could see that my steadfast inquiry was making her squirm. After a minute or two of pestering, she relented and reluctantly explained to me that a pedophile was an adult who was sexually attracted to children.

The second that explanation finished leaving her mouth, I knew it. I knew that’s what I was and what I was becoming. Now I had word for it though. A “pedophile”. I was a fucking pedophile! Sure, I had only just turned 14 myself, but that didn’t matter. That is what I was and that was suddenly my new reality.

As an aside, I know that the clinical definition of pedophile states that, to be a pedophile, one must be at least 16 years old and at least 5 years older than the children they are attracted to but I don’t completely agree with those criteria. Sure, I understand the need to apply those specifications to the definition from a clinical standpoint but, in reality, that clinical, textbook definition of pedophilia is far from infallible. I was every bit as much a pedophile the day I sat watching that Madonna video with my mother as I am today. Not from a clinical standpoint, but from a reality standpoint.

It’s hard for me to believe that day, that epiphany, that moment of clarity I had at 14 happened over 25 years ago. Christ, a quarter of a fucking century! How I’ve survived this long with all this is anybody’s guess, but how I survived the first few years of it is nothing short of a bloody fucking miracle.

From that day forward, I had a word to give some frame of reference to what I was, but it didn’t make me feel any less alone. Alone, confused, bewildered and lost. I only wonder what my life might have been like had 14 year old kids like me, in 1989, known they had places to turn for help and support for such things.

That’s why I do what I do, by the way. That’s why this discussion and this issue is so important. That’s why the topic of pedophilia needs to be wrestled out of the shadows and brought into the light, in a realistic sense. This is why we need to break through all the hysteria and dispel the myths. This, above all else, is why my fellow Virpeds and I will not be silenced and will not go away, no matter how uncomfortable the message we have may make some people.

If kids who came of age dealing with what I had to deal with did so in an environment where they did not have to feel ashamed and afraid to open up and reach out for help, how much better would things be for them and possibly lots of people around them? Sadly, I still don’t think we foster such an environment in our society, but I think we’re getting closer to a time and a place where we will, and I’m proud to be one of the people leading the charge to make that happen.

Brett

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I Am Brett. I Am A Pedophile. Here Is My Story https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/10/02/i-am-brett-i-am-a-pedophile-here-is-my-story/ https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/10/02/i-am-brett-i-am-a-pedophile-here-is-my-story/#comments Tue, 02 Oct 2018 14:04:34 +0000 http://aboutpedophilia.com/?p=599 So, I’ve decided I might as well start a little blog of my own. Not sure I’m going to do much with it, but we’ll see. In my first blog post, I’m going to tell a little bit of my story. This is kind of long, but it obviously has huge chunks of things left...

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So, I’ve decided I might as well start a little blog of my own. Not sure I’m going to do much with it, but we’ll see. In my first blog post, I’m going to tell a little bit of my story. This is kind of long, but it obviously has huge chunks of things left out that I’d like to have left in. To tell the whole story, I’d need to write a book. A very long and fucked-up book. We’ll call this, the ultra, ultra abridged version.

Anyway, about me. I am a pedophile in my early 40’s and my life has not been easy. I understand that most people’s lives aren’t easy, but then most people aren’t cursed with the least desirable form of sexuality imaginable. The good news is, I have never acted on my pedophilic attractions. Specifically, I am primarily attracted both emotionally and sexually to preteen boys but also to girls in the same age range, although not quite as much. I see my pedophilia as a burden and a curse and every single day is a struggle.

I come from a background of childhood sexual abuse and bullying. I won’t get into the details of that too much, because then this would get too long. I will say that I was never the victim of an adult pedophile offender though. Most of the molestation and abuse I was subject to came at the hands of older kids in my neighborhood. To this day, I am sometimes hesitant to call what happened sexual abuse, and instead find myself more comfortable with the term “sexual bullying”. However, when I’ve used that term with other CSA survivors, some have been quick to point out that bullying is abuse, therefore sexual bullying is sexual abuse. Either way, I know the experiences I had as a child were sexually traumatic, and had a profound impact on my sexual and emotional development.

Because of a lot of the things that had gone on, I spent my preteen years obsessed with sex and pornography, and the sexual frustration, confusion, and shame this created ate at me. If only I’d at least known how to masturbate to orgasm, perhaps this would have lessened the frustration a little but I didn’t know how. I only knew how to “play with myself”, and I did that a lot, but didn’t find it all that satisfying. I felt like I needed release, but I didn’t know how to achieve it and it drove me crazy. Through all of the sexual teasing, tormenting, bullying and abuse I experienced as a child, I never once had been brought to orgasm. I don’t think I even truly knew or understood what one was until the day I actually achieved one.

Finally, when I was very close to my 13th birthday, I figured it out. After that I began masturbating every day. Sometimes to pictures in lingerie catalogs. Sometimes to fantasies of pretty girls at school. I would have masturbated to pornography but I generally only had access to that when other kids were around and didn’t want to jerk off in front of them.

This habit of jerking off to lingerie catalogs and fantasies of girls I knew went on for about a year. Then, in my 8th grade year, a few months before my 14th birthday, something changed. I don’t know what the fuck happened. I don’t know how or why the switch was suddenly flipped in my mind. All of the sudden, out of the blue, boys started to look good to me. At first, it was just a little, but within probably a month of having my first sexual thought of a boy, they were all I thought about or masturbated to.

It didn’t make any sense. I had never been attracted to other boys at all before. Not even a little, tiny bit. At first I thought I was becoming gay, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that wasn’t it. I was nearly 14 and now well into puberty. The boys that suddenly looked good to me were all younger. Only ones with prepubescent features. After that, I grew up….. my attraction did not.

So, on into my teen years I went with this horrible new affliction ripping me apart inside. I had no frame of reference for the things I thought and felt, other than the horrible things you’d hear on the news about child molesters. I thought I knew shame and self-hate before then but this brought those to a whole new level. I had been dealing with suicidal thoughts since I was in the fourth grade, but now my suicide ideation became almost more of an obsession. What had I become? How could I be this sick and this hopeless? I was a pedophile. I had become a true creature of evil. The worst possible form of life. What had I done to deserve this fate and this level of torment?

For the first year or so of knowing and understanding that I was a pedophile, I was terrified that I was doomed to become a child molester. Surely prison awaited me some day. Surely everyone who had these types of thoughts and attractions acted on them eventually, right? There was no denying to myself what I was, and there was only one way I thought that could end.

However, by my mid teens, I had resolved to myself that I would never become one of those dirty, creepy men you hear about on the news molesting little boys. I knew I wasn’t like that and I didn’t want to be that. At the time, I still figured probably everyone else on the planet who was afflicted with the types of attractions I had must act on them. I was going to be the one who didn’t though. I was going to break the mold. I was going to be the one who beat this thing, and the one who wouldn’t let it make me become a child molester, even if I was the only one in the world.

At 18, I disclosed to a friend of mine about my childhood sexual abuse and about my pedophilia, all in the same conversation. I had decided to kill myself that night and I intended to. I don’t know what convinced me to call him that night and disclose before I went through with it but I did. I couldn’t believe I was telling someone but the words just started flowing out of me, as did the tears. I remember sitting in a fetal position with the phone to my ear, tearing at my hair and sobbing while I told him everything. He convinced me to come to his house that night and sleep over to keep me safe. He also told me he could hook me up with his family’s therapist.

I visited the therapist he hooked me up with for about a year and a half. If it hadn’t been for my sessions with him, I don’t know if I’d be here today. He really helped me sort some things out, put some things in perspective and get some things off my chest. However, I went to him with the false hope that therapy could fix me. That it could cure my pedophilia. Of course it couldn’t. Nothing can cure it.

Since then, not much about my sexuality has changed. I am more or less exclusively attracted to preteen boys. Preteen girls are attractive to me as well, only not quite as much as boys. I have no sexual attraction to adult women at all. I am not necessarily sexually turned off by them but I’m not interested either. Besides, being in sexual situations with them is extremely uncomfortable and triggering. I can’t handle it, and I want to run for the hills. Also, I am completely sexually turned off by men and even boys past puberty. Once they are pubescent, any and all attraction disappears.

As an aside, how strange is it that my sexual attraction to children just happens to be only to children who are in the age range where my own childhood sexual trauma took place? When they are about 7 or 8, they suddenly become sexually attractive to me. (In rare cases, children of either sex as young as six may trigger an attraction but never younger than that.) Before that, they just look like babies to me. I will say that I absolutely LOVE younger children but only kind of on the same level that I love puppies and kittens. It’s just that specific age, about the same time they loose their baby teeth and start growing their first primary teeth, the attraction starts. Then, at puberty, it ends completely. Starts at 7 or 8, ends at 12 or 13. The same age-range my abuse occurred at. Fucked huh?

My attraction to children isn’t just sexual though. It’s deeply emotional too. I can’t stand to see a little kid who’s hurt, or who looks scared or sad. I can’t stand to see them cry. When I do, all I want in the world is to swoop in, take them in my arms, hold them and make their pain go away. I can’t even watch a movie that has a sad scene involving a little kid without going to pieces and crying all over myself.

Fortunately, when it comes to the sexual aspect of my attraction, I have been blessed with a solid core belief that it is always wrong and harmful for an adult to be sexual with a child under any circumstances. I actually spent quite a few years posting in “boylove” forums and was not shy about expressing this opinion even there. Needless to say, that did not make me popular in those circles. Guys who will have sex with 10 year olds and try to claim the relationship is “mutual” do not like it when one of their own walks in and tries to shatter their delusions. In fact, they tend to get really fucking pissed.

The good news is, a couple of years ago, I found the forums over at Virped (Virtuous Pedophiles.) Since then, the Virped community has become my life, and I have never been so dedicated to a cause as I am to ours. A support group run for pedophiles, by pedophiles, and one in which the members are all committed to not acting on their attractions is something I would not have dared hope for just a few short years ago. I wish I could go back in time and tell the 15 year old me that this community would exist someday, and that he was not alone in the world. If only there had been a Virped when I was younger man. I’ll never know what kind of a difference that might have made in my life , but I do know that it will make a difference the lives of young pedophiles going forward. Better late than never.

We all know you can not cure pedophilia. Even therapists who’ve been treating pedos for years will tell you that. You can not cure it, you can only hope to contain it. I already contain it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t torment me on a daily basis. Sexual attraction to children is a curse of the worst order. It drives me to drink, it drives me to hate my life, and it has nearly driven me to suicide more times than I can count. There is no hope. It will torment me until the day I die. If there was a magic pill I could swallow that would make me stop being attracted to kids, I’d claw my way through hell to get a hold of it. Unfortunately, the only way to remove it from the brain is to put a gun in your mouth and pull the fucking trigger. How I haven’t done that over all these years is anyone’s guess. Sorry if that’s morbid but it’s true.

In closing, I want to say this. I do struggle with my pedophilia, and I am tormented by it, but the not abusing children part is easy for me. I’ve been alone with kids I was attracted to hundreds of times, (perhaps thousands), and while I’ve had sexual thoughts in those situations, acting on them has never been something I’ve actually been tempted to do. I’ve never really even considered it. The very thought seems not only wrong, but also unrealistic and stupid, for a variety of reasons that I probably shouldn’t have to spell out.

So, that’s my story in a nutshell. It’s certainly no fairy tale, but it’s far from the worst of the stories I’ve heard from some of my friends who also carry this burden. My life has not been great to this point, and I’m far from being what anyone would consider a successful adult, but my hope is that I can use my experiences and the insight they have given me to affect the world around me in positive ways. Through my participation in Virped, and my efforts to be a voice in the wilderness on the topics of pedophilia and CSA, I hope that I can have an impact on others who’ve had their lives affected by these things. In doing so, my ultimate hope is that I/we can affect the world in such a way that fewer people have their lives affected by these things in the first place. Perhaps that’s hoping for a lot, but either way I’m all in, and will continue to be so until the day death mercifully takes me.

Brett

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Coming Out to a World that Hates Pedophiles https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/09/12/coming-out-to-a-world-that-hates-pedophiles/ Wed, 12 Sep 2018 15:51:45 +0000 http://aboutpedophilia.home.blog/?p=549 Some pedophiles use the term ‘coming out of the toy box’ to describe the process of disclosing their sexual orientation to other people Coming Out to a World that Hates Pedophiles I have been sexually attracted to little girls for 60 years but choose to not act on it. I am not exclusive and am happily...

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Some pedophiles use the term ‘coming out of the toy box’ to describe the process of disclosing their sexual orientation to other people

Coming Out to a World that Hates Pedophiles

I have been sexually attracted to little girls for 60 years but choose to not act on it. I am not exclusive and am happily married with three children and ten grand-children. I spent a lot of time with children over the years without any problems, including teaching school and having foster children. My pedophilia simmered in the background during the 25 years of my first marriage, but when I did ask a counselor for help, she promptly abandoned me without a referral.

Three years after living in our home, our foster daughter falsely accused me of molesting her. That never happened, but I told my wife that I am indeed sexually attracted to young girls. She encouraged me to become a counselor so I could help other people with pedophilia. When I had almost completed a masters degree in mental health counseling, Walden University dismissed me based solely on my sexual orientation. I experienced severe anxiety but at the time the only hospital in our county had banned me from their premises because of the false allegations, even though no charges have ever been filed.

Gary Gibson on the Dr. Phil show

 

I came out to many of my family and friends, who were all very supportive because they understood the difference between attraction and action. In 2014, I came out on a live Oregon Public Broadcasting talk show without any serious repercussions. Earlier this year I did an interview for an article in The Sun, not realizing the impact it would have on our lives. About the same time, someone posted a YouTube of my coming out at an Association for Sexual Abuse Prevention workshop that my wife and I conducted in Portland, Oregon. It ended up on Facebook and created quite a stir in our local community. It also got the attention of the media and within a week my wife and I participated in two television and two radio live talk shows. The next week we appeared on the Dr. Phil show. We were immediately banished by our church and received a number of credible death threats. Now this isn’t about “poor me,” as I understand that many of these people assume I am a child molester, but I don’t understand why they hate my wife so much.

Tabitha Abel, Gary’s wife, interviewed for British show ‘This Morning’

 

What can we learn from this experience? Not all pedophiles are child molesters. Many people who work with children experience some level of sexual attraction to them. The majority of people with pedophilia will never molest a child, but will also never come out. Hating and ostracizing pedophiles does nothing to protect children. When someone does come out, we should support them in not acting on the attraction.

If you or someone you love is sexually attracted to children, you may call me at +1 541–891–6168. Check out our website at ASAPinternational.org.

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TGPP Podcast: Ayden, Sex Offender, Anti-Contact Pedophile https://aboutpedophilia.com/2018/09/11/prevention-podcast-ayden-sex-offender-anti-contact-pedophile/ Tue, 11 Sep 2018 02:27:34 +0000 https://tnf13stories.wordpress.com/?p=85 Note: This was transcribed by the same MAP volunteer that transcribed Bertus’ interview. 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...

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Note: This was transcribed by the same MAP volunteer that transcribed Bertus’ interview.

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 relating 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, and I have my co-host here today with me, Meg Martinez-Dettamanti.

Meg:

Hello everyone!

Candice:

Today we’re interviewing an individual by the name of Aydne. It’s an alias to protect his confidentiality and any identifying information. This is going to be a little bit different podcast today because, and Aydne you’ll share this more with us, first I’m going to welcome you –

Aydne:

Hey.

Candice:

We’ve been doing interviews with individuals who are non-offending, anti-contact pedophiles, cause you’re anti-contact today and you have admitted that in your past you did have a sex offense against a child.

Aydne:

That is correct.

Candice:

Okay, so I appreciate you being honest about that. One of the things I want to say before we get started, and I have asked Meg to do this interview with me because I, you know, people know that I am a survivor, and we have 33 countries now that are listening to us, and it definitely may be emotional for me as a survivor to be interviewing someone that has a history of abusing a child. And so I appreciate Meg being on this with me and I want to say that it’s important to me to have our listeners hear you share, Aydne, because you know if I was ever able to interview my abusers from when I was a child, there are things that I would want to know, so I appreciate you being willing to be on our podcast today.

Aydne:

Absolutely, and I’m sorry for what you went through, it ain’t right.

Candice:

Yeah, I appreciate, I appreciate that. So let’s just go ahead and get started. Meg, do you want to start us off?

Meg:

Sure. So, some of the other minor-attracted individuals that we’ve talked to, Aydne, have actually said that when they do bring their story to the surface, whether they’re coming out as their true identity (we just did an interview with Todd Nickerson, which is his real name) or if they’re coming out as an alias but to be an advocate for the MAPs community, to be an advocate for minor-attracted non-offending anti-contact individuals, we’ve heard that they have a lot of support, or they’ve said that they have a lot of support from survivors, such as Candice, because they’re saying that the survivors are applauding that they’re willing to come out and get treatment and to get help and to commit to prevention, rather than stay underground, or even be locked up with the key thrown away. So what are your thoughts on that?

Aydne:

Well I don’t think lockin’ people up is the solution. At all. I actually tried to get help, umm, beforehand, and it didn’t go well. What ended up happening was I told somebody and they freaked out about it. They didn’t want me around kids, they wanted me to stop doing certain classes, they wanted me to… stop… being me, basically. And that pushed me as far away from help as you can get. So I think that the number one thing we can do is to support pedophiles that want to come forward for help.

You know, pushing them away, talking about locking them up and throwing away the key, and death threats, and “just go get help”, whatever “help” is to people. I don’t think that’s helpful. I think we need to treat pedophiles as human beings. I definitely support that idea. And at the same time, I’m flattered and honored that survivors would be willing to support a cause like that because it’s very important to me to see that other people learn that sex abuse doesn’t have to happen. It doesn’t have to be the case. We can do something about it beforehand. People can get help beforehand, if there’s help out there beforehand.

Candice:

Yeah, I really appreciate you saying that Aydne, because I agree. This is why I have the Prevention Project, this is why we’re doing this podcast, and we really agree with you and have seen many men come through our programs who do not want to harm anyone including children, and without our help they have feared that they would be at higher risk or would have done something.

It’s also interesting too because we know that there are a lot of people who end up abusing children that are not pedophiles. I do want to explore a little bit more with you, kind of back it up if you will, to talk about what was going on when you were younger, and noticing those attractions, and then trying to get help and it sounds like the doors closed. So if you’re open to sharing, you know, when did you first know that you were a pedophile? What age?

Aydne:

I was about thirteen. I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. I just kinda noticed that I liked younger boys, you know. 12, 11 years old at the time (when I was 13). And I wouldn’t have called it an attraction, I would have just said I liked boys a little younger than me. As I grew older, that didn’t change, it kinda stayed at 11 and 12, and then kinda started reversing. But before that, I kinda felt a little bit with the mental health system, and IEPs, and you know, special schoolin’ if you will. That’s because I was diagnosed with ADD when I was about 5.

So, you know, already from an early age, I kinda had that “I’m different from people” feeling. You know, that I’m, I hate this word, but, “special”. So that was kinda my childhood, you know. There was some mild bullying stuff, you know, stuff kids all over probably go through. And, you know, learning about my attractions and what they really meant, you know, I come from a Lutheran background and people from Christian backgrounds, from Lutheran backgrounds, at least back then, they don’t look kindly on liking other men, let alone boys. I kind of internalized some of that. I kind of viewed it as off-limits, you know. I wanted to be attracted to women, to girls, and it just wasn’t there.

Candice:

And so when you say girls at the time, you were thinking like, “here I am, I’m 13, and I want to be attracted to kids my age. If it’s not boys, I wish I could be attracted to girls, I want to grow up and be attracted to women”.

Aydne:

Exactly.

Candice:

But yeah, I just want our listeners to be clear on that. And so here you are, and this is obviously before anything crossed over for you, where you crossed over into actually offending against a child, right? This is years before, is that right?

Aydne:

Yeah, that’s years before.

Candice:

Okay. And so, throughout this process, did you reach out to anyone like in your teenage years, to try to get help with that?

Aydne:

I didn’t really reach till high school, you know, Christian high school, Christian college, eventually. I asked a teacher about it, two other teachers about it, and they, the one’s reaction was like “this really isn’t my area, I don’t know a whole lot about this. I’mma direct you to this guy, he kinda knows his stuff a little better”. So, you know, I talked to the other guy, and his reaction was like “well, you gotta stop working with kids. You gotta stop being interested in kids, you gotta stop working with kids. You gotta avoid kids at all cost”.

And I’m like, “why”, you know? Like, I’m coming to you for help, I’m not coming to you to hear a bunch of garbage about how I’m a risk, how I’m a danger. And he kept using words like innocence, and stuff like that, like I could control my attractions somehow. And, you know, I’m looking at that from my perspective as a teenager and going “this guy doesn’t have a clue. If this is what I get for telling people, then, you know, forget it. I don’t wanna go there.”

Meg:

So it sounds like you felt really misunderstood by the first few, let’s say, authority figures or professionals that you looked to for help.

Aydne:

Oh yeah.

Meg:

I want to clarify something, Aydne. So you said earlier when we were talking about kind of, when you started noticing your attractions, that you wouldn’t call it an attraction, and I wonder, because we’ve seen this a lot, if you felt like it was more of an emotional connection, or you know, fitting in more with individuals that are younger than you, as opposed to your peers, like Candice was saying. And if that’s the case, is that why as a teenager you were continuing to be around kids or working with kids in whatever capacity you just mentioned?

Aydne:

For me, it was really identifying with that younger crowd, because I didn’t really feel like I fit in with adults. I didn’t really feel like I was mature enough to fit in with adults. Certainly not as a teenager. So I think that was definitely part of it. At the same time, it was sexual attraction. I would have just referred to it as “liking”, you know. I didn’t really, people didn’t start using the word attraction around issues like that until, I dunno, late 90s? Till I was in college.

Candice:

You know what we’re learning, and you know this too, is that there’s definitely an emotional attraction, mental attraction, as much as there is a physical or sexual one. It’s definitely not as black and white as I think just the typical lay-person might assume. You know, we hear individuals who have attractions to children who will say “I feel emotionally attracted to the child, and I can keep it at that, and not move into a sexual attraction”. And we go back and we can find that things occurred in their own childhood at that age that they’re attracted to, and that’s kind of where they’ve gotten stuck. And so, there is that connection, that level of innocence if you will, that they find that they too connect to.

I think it’s very, it’s just very complicated. It’s not black and white. And I think our society really likes to try to force it. As we’ve seen on Twitter, there’s a lot of trolls that will just try and pidgeonhole and force it into, you know, “if you have this attraction you are absolutely going to cause harm to a child, you’re going to offend”. And, you know, here we are talking with you today. We know that you, today, are very passionate about being an anti-contact. A man first, and an anti-contact pedophile as well. Is that right?

Aydne:

Absolutely. I don’t, I suppose I’m skipping ahead, but some people knowing the situation and what happened, they look at it and they go “you were just a kid, and you made some mistakes that, yeah they’re gonna cost you in the long run, yeah they really impacted somebody else, but they were, you know, understandable”. I think the word is “situational” some people use. And I go, “no, they were decisions to hurt somebody. They weren’t, they didn’t happen out of the blue”.

Meg:

Right. I appreciate you saying that, and validating the victims and the survivors out there. It seemed to be as you were telling your story that one of the things that happened was you decided not to trust anybody else. You said “you know if I’m going to get this kind of response”, which I do think a lot of minor-attracted individuals or pedophiles get, which is “you just need to stay away from kids, try living in this society and in this world by just staying away from kids”, you know what I mean, which may sound easy for someone to say to you, but is definitely an impossible task, and can be really discouraging and I think lead individuals that have minor attractions just to go underground with what they’re thinking and what they’re feeling.

And so, you know, noticing that that happened in your life and, I think that is definitely coupled with what you said with “this actually became a decision of mine. And other people might have looked at it as, you know an opportunity or a situational crime, butm you know because of this underground nature of my desire and my thoughts and my feelings, I feel like it was a conscious decision.”

Aydne:

Sure. And when I isolated, it wasn’t, it wasn’t pretty. When I isolated, I didn’t tell nobody about it. I tried Googling. You know, searching stuff on the internet. And, you know, you look up “help for pedophiles” and, you know “what is pedophilia”, cause, you read the news reports about pedophiles and pedophilia, and I’m like “oh well, that’s probably what I have is this pedophilia, whatever that is. You know, I like kids”. So, you know, I did my own searching, and I just kept finding these articles that, you know, now I know they’re hogwash, but back then I didn’t know that. And I’m looking at these articles, these government reports, that basically say “once a pedophile, always a pedophile.

Once somebody abuses a kid, once somebody has an attraction to a kid, they’re gonna abuse a kid, they’re gonna keep doing that, and there ain’t no cure, there ain’t no stopping it, except to lock the person up”. And I’m like, “well then I really can’t tell nobody about it”. So, you know, it really worked me into this isolating place. So there was that window initially where I wanted help and I wanted to understand it, and I think I missed it. Cause when I started isolating, I started looking at images of kids, you know.

And then it became adult pornography, and then all the while I’m going to high school, I’m going to college, I’m trying to figure my life out and what I want to do with it. You know, I’m in this isolating place, I’m trying to work a job, I’m trying to have a social life, I’m trying to stay fit, did exercise classes back then, and I really worked myself into a place where nobody knew what was going on. They knew I was struggling with something, but they didn’t know what it was, or how they could help, you know. Some people was like “oh, you seem lonely, you should get a girlfriend”. And I’m like, “I don’t.. like.. girls”. And I can’t tell people that because I’m in this religious environment.

Candice:

Definitely sounds very, like you said, isolating and like, locked in a box, almost in the prison of your mind, not feeling like you had a place to share who you were and what was going on. And then you’re reading about things online, and we know in the media how individuals who have crossed over into sex-offending. And so it sounds like before you had done that, even, you had spiraled into this world of shame, and feeling like a terrible person, and –

Aydne:

Absolutely, I felt like I was a monster.

Candice: Which we hear so often. And then, you know, it’s perpetuated in the media. I do wanna say for those who that are listening, because again I think we have so many people now that listen to us, what we know with people who look at child pornography — not in all cases — but, you know there are some individuals who will look at child pornography and not cross over into a contact offense. And so, in your case — and some do — and it sounds like in your case, again, you’re trapped in your mind, you reach out to people, they’re telling you to get a girlfriend, you don’t feel like you have an outlet, you feel like you’ve missed this window of opportunity to get help. And so now you’re in the shame spiral, coping by escaping through porn, you’re looking at child porn, and it sounds like it’s a recipe for disaster.

Aydne:

That’s exactly what it was. It kinda worked me into this mindset where I guessed it’d be alright as long as nobody knew about it. I kinda worked myself into this mindframe where, well if I’m gonna be a monster anyway, and that’s when I was taking exercise classes, and I met an older teen, and, you know, he and I’d see movies together, talk about lotsa stuff, you know, religion, philosophy, you know, his classes, my classes. And you know, getting to know the older teen, I got to know the rest of his family, and he had a younger brother, and, you know, I’m already in this isolating place, and that kinda set the backdrop for what ended up happening.

Candice:

Well, let me add to this, so I hear, so there’s definitely what we call thinking errors, you know. There’s grooming thoughts, you know, of if it’s the right kid, and so on and so forth. Which we know, when we’re working with folks who cross over into sex offending we talk about, you know there’s that grooming behavior that we want people to understand, and those thinking errors that, “oh it’s okay”, or “it’s just once”, and so on and so forth. And so I hear that going on with you with this boy who ended up being what, it sounds like your victim. I do want to ask you, were you a teenager at the time when you sexually offended?

Aydne:

Early 20s.

Candice:

Okay. I just, I wasn’t sure on that. So, we’re gonna fast forward. So, you get charged? Were you charged?

Aydne:

I was charged. And they charged me with, you know, sexual abuse of a child under thirteen. Umm, I tried to kill myself. And I didn’t really have anybody I could talk to about why I did try to kill myself. So I told a friend, “hey, I just tried to kill myself”. I don’t know what I expected him to do, you know. He called the cops. I take an ambulance ride to the hospital, spend a week in a mental hospital. And so I got charged. In the hospital they actually recommended a program to me. And, you know, I went to the program. Before I spent that month in jail, I was already kinda set up with a treatment program to kinda help address what had happened and why it happened, and you know, kinda workin through some of that afterwards.

Meg:

So Aydne, you kind of explained, I was in this mindset. You know, we talked a lot about what led up to the offense, that you were charged, that you were in the program. Tell us about what changed your mind, cause I think that’s what listeners are really interested to hear, is what brought you from that mindset, from that space, over here to be someone who considers yourself anti-contact, somebody who’s a huge advocate for the prevention of child sexual abuse. What changed your mind and caused that shift, not only for you internally, but for you to be public about it?

Aydne:

Well, for me, I was on probation a long time and, you know, got to talking with a lot of the guys. Heard about Virtuous Pedophiles; probation said “nope, can’t do that, you gotta wait till you’re done”. But once I was off probation, I was like, I wanna be a part of people knowing how this stuff happens, and the best thing that I could do in that situation was tell my story. You know, so I got to know people on VirPed, and, you know, I was gonna use WordPress at first, but somebody recommended Medium and, you know, that’s kinda how that got going.

And, in terms of why I wanted to move past that and be a voice, I really regret what I did. I never got the chance to apologize. And for me, speaking out and saying stuff about it, and trying to tell people “this is how stuff happens”, you know, if people are looking for the monster, for the creepy guy in a van, they ain’t gonna see the guy that’s working with kids, that’s cheery all the time, you know, does a great job with the kids, families trust him, church trusts him, you know, they’re not gonna see that guy.

They’re not gonna see that guy that’s struggling and alone and he’s working with kids and being around people to try to cope with and distract from all the thoughts that are going on. You know, people knew I was struggling with something. They didn’t know what it was. But if people are looking for that monster, they’re never gonna see me. They’re never gonna see the old me, they’re never gonna see the guy that’s wrestling with himself. They’re just gonna see the people that have already done stuff. And, from my understanding, the people that have already done stuff ain’t gonna be likely to do it anymore.

You know, if they get help, they understand why they did it, they put a plan in place to address the risks, they do that they’re not gonna go out and hurt people no more. It’s enough of a shock to deal with the criminal justice system and stand before a judge and know that judge has the power to send you to prison if he really wants to. You know that, that stuff, that’s a pretty strong deterrent.

Candice:

It definitely sounds like that was a deterrant for you and I think, you know I have a background working with sex offenders, and now I have crossed over obviously into the prevention piece, and I know in my work with sex offenders, back in the day, there were individuals that the judge didn’t scare them, probation stipulations didn’t scare them, uh, they just kept doing what they were doing, even treatment didn’t seem to sink in. And so it’s nice to hear that for you, in your case — I mean I’m not saying, you know, “all individuals that commit sex offenses don’t change and they end up back in prison” — but I do want to point that out, that some don’t learn unfortunately, and go on to commit another offense.

Now I do really appreciate that you have made that change and that shift, that treatment was effective, and that you’re willing to come on, you know, just on our podcast as well as be a voice out in the global community to say “we can prevent this before it happens; this is me, I know; and, these are ways we can prevent children from being abused”. I do appreciate that you write on Medium. I think when we see other pedophiles, and mind you they’re non-offending, and anti-contact such as yourself, writing about this, I am happy about it, because in my world it’s about, you know, all of us. I support anyone who wants to be an advocate against harming a child. And so I appreciate that you have made that commitment and that you feel like you have learned. You know, you have learned from this experience of harming a child.

Meg:

The other thing I just wanted to mention, Aydne, was I really liked how you said “if everybody continues to just look for the stereotype and doesn’t hear me and my story, they’re not gonna see me”. And I really think that that’s impactful just to show that this is an issue, this is something that can happen to a wide range of people, there’s truly no profile. And so, echoing what Candice said, I truly appreciate you coming on the podcast to tell your story if it’s just to show, you know, that things like this happen in a lot of different areas to a lot of different individuals and we need to be aware of that first and foremost and squash some of our stereotypes in order to help people and also to help children.

Candice:

Well, and the individuals can be 18, and we’re also hearing younger than that as you’ve shared. Every single person that we’ve spoken with that has an attraction to children says it started when they were a teenager. And so, you know, when the folks come to our program, 18 to 75, I mean there’s definitely a range, and they’re men and they’re women, and they’re young men and older men, and they’re young women and older women. And so I think our world needs to be more awake and alert to the reality that we’re talking about an age attraction, and there is help out there thankfully. There’s several prevention projects out there globally. And folks, there are folks out there who say “I have an attraction but I will never offend and I’m committed to that”.

There’s mental health treatment, we provide that to those men and women, but we also provide treatment for men and women such as yourself who say, you know, “if we were to rewind”, and our program was out there for you, you know, before when you were struggling, we are there for people who say “I have this attraction; I’m scared, I’m at risk; I don’t have anyone to share my thoughts and fantasies and so on with”, we are there for them and we know there’s a lot of global programs out there.

And then I also again appreciate that yes, you did make a terrible choice. You know, you harmed a child. And, I also want to acknowledge and commend you for accepting the consequences, going to get help, not fighting the system but saying “I’m accepting this”, challenging people when they minimize what you did, and also making this lifelong commitment now Aydne, to ensure that children are protected. And so thank you for coming on our podcast today and being willing to share your story. Is there anything else that you want to share today?

Aydne:

I would just really emphasize that people look for the monsters. They don’t look for the people that are struggling. Because that week before the family came forward and said “this is what’s going on” and me trying to kill myself, you know, I was telling friends, family members, coworkers, this is what I’m dealing with. You know, somebody said that I did this, and not a single person said to my face, every single one of them, “there’s no way you could possibly do that. You’re too nice, you’re too kind, you love kids. You wouldn’t ever hurt a kid”.

And, I mean I was sitting right there in the open, with the accusation there and everything, and people still didn’t believe it. So I would definitely say: learn the facts, learn where people can get help from, and do what you can to just be aware. You know, there’s somebody I ran into Twitter early, “T” something or other, and he’s got a website, he’s got a blog, he’s got, good gravy if I’d come across that… I mean Virtuous Pedophiles has got a bunch of different resources too. There’s Ender, he’s got a Medium too, he’s written about a bunch of different things. And there’s all these resources now that weren’t there before, and people can go to these resources and get help, people can got to these organizations and figure out how to prevent this stuff. I know that’s what you guys specialize in too, so.

Candice:

Well, indeed. And I think, you know, what you’re saying, what I heard you say, is you want people, if there’s an accusation that comes out against someone, such as what happened to you, take it seriously, and ask the question of the person. Some people might listen to this podcast and say “oh, well you’re saying you’re a victim”.

Aydne:

No. I ain’t a victim. I mean, maybe I’m a victim of my pedophilia. Maybe. I think that’s a stretch. But I made decisions, it didn’t happen by accident. No way.

Candice:

Well I appreciate you saying that too, for those listeners who say, “well this guy is claiming he’s the victim, you know he tried to kill himself”. What I’m hearing you say is “no that was my reality. Like I’m not playing the victim here, it’s like, ‘this is the reality’. I’m a monster, if I feel like this is my life, this is what I’m gonna be doing for my life is harming kids, I may as well kill myself”.

Aydne:

Exactly.

Candice:

Well I, yeah, I think that’s a really important message as well in terms of taking it seriously if somebody’s accused, asking more questions if you’re a family member or a friend and you feel like you’re seeing something of a loved one, or not, it could be a colleague or a coworker or anyone really, because there are many people out there that have pedophilia, and many people who will never offend who have pedophilia, and there are some people who are at risk, and at more risk, and so again, I appreciate you being on our podcast today. Thank you Aydne.

Aydne:

Thank you.

Meg:

Thank you Aydne.

Candice:

I’ll just say this — I have really appreciated this podcast. This definitely was one of our dicier ones. Stay tuned for next time, join us bi-weekly, and let’s continue to talk about it. Thank you.

The post TGPP Podcast: Ayden, Sex Offender, Anti-Contact Pedophile appeared first on Pedophiles About Pedophilia.

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