Pedophile Organizations and Activism

Small groups of militant and highly organized child molesters operate worldwide through pedophile organizations, whose members claim genuine concern for the welfare of children. Their belief is that sex with children is harmless; some even claim that sexual relations with adults are healthy for children. Their goals include decriminalizing child-adult sex and child pornography, declassifying pedophilia as a paraphilia, and lowering or abolishing the age of consent.

Taking political action, they argue, "is ultimately one of the most important activities we as childlovers can engage in. Whilst on a personal level, self-acceptance is key, if we are ever to advance our cause on a greater scale, political action is necessary. Being convinced ourselves that we are right is simply not sufficient. We must take our message to the rest of society..."

Major pedophile organizations include NAMBLA (The North American Man-Boy Love Association) and PAN (Pedophile Alert Network) in the Netherlands. Members receive monthly magazines and newsletters that include seduction techniques and advice on avoiding detection and prosecution. One group's "Lure of the Month" column gives advice on approaching and seducing children. In one month's column, soap crayons were praised for their effectiveness: "Children undress themselves!"

NAMBLA's "Entrapment of the Month" column has alerted members to covert government child-pornography sting operations. In one newsletter alone, NAMBLA correctly identified ten sting operations in five different states. In just three years, NAMBLA exposed and compromised four federal sting operations as well, including Project Looking Glass, Candy's Love Club, Project Sea Hawk, and Project Borderline. Clearly, these organizations have connections.

The woman's counterparts of NAMBLA, Butterfly Kisses, promotes woman-girl love and coaches lesbians to take on positions of leadership a Big Sisters, Girl Scouts, YWCA and sports clubs, etc. in order to entice girls and young women into sexual relations with them.

These organizations present themselves, of course, as proud "freedom fighters"' associating themselves with the feminist and gay rights movement.

Various groups also promote 'holidays' intended to spread understanding and acceptance of pedophilia (for example the IBLD, or International BoyLove Day.)

In addition to attending pedophile conferences and conventions, many child molesters meet via the Internet where they may swap methods, success stories, even names, descriptions, and images of children.

Other pedophile organizations are disguised as research organizations: MHAMic (Male Homosexual Attraction to Minors information center) and IPCE are two big pedophile advocacy websites dressed up in academic clothing. They publish and have a hand in producing research that sounds and appears scientific and objective, but in fact is geared to serve a particular ideology: their goal is to legitimize sexual activity between adults and underage boys.

VIEWS AND STRATEGIES OF PEDOPHILE ACTIVISTS

In 1989, sociologist Mary DeYoung reviewed the literature published by pedophile organizations for public dissemination. She found that pedophile organizations used the following strategies to promote goals of public acceptance of pedophilia:

• Adoption of "value-neutral" terminology. According to Herdt, an anthropologist who has studied sex between adults and children in other cultures, pedophile advocates need to replace "dull and reductionistic" terms like pedophilia and abuse when discussing sex between "a person who has not achieved adulthood and one who has". Moreover, words like "child" or "childhood", which have psychologically developmental meaning, should be "resisted at all costs". (See also Promoting "objective" research below.)

• Redefining the term "child sexual abuse". Another recurring theme among those seeking to gain social acceptance for pedophilia is the need to redefine or restrict the usage of the term "child sexual abuse", recommending a child's "willing encounter with positive reactions" be called "adult-child sex" instead of "abuse" (Rind et al. 1998). For example, Gerald Jones (1990), an Affiliated Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Women and Men in Society at the University of Southern California, suggested that "intergenerational intimacy" should not be considered synonymous with child sexual abuse. According to her, the "crucial difference has to do with mutuality and control" (p. 278). Jones suggested, "Intergenerational attraction on the part of some adults could constitute a lifestyle 'orientation', rather than a pathological maladjustment" (p. 288).

• Promoting the idea that children can consent to sex with adults. The reconceptualization of children as willing sexual participants along with the decriminalization of consensual sexual relations is perhaps the key change sought by pedophile advocates. To counter developmental arguments that children cannot give informed consent, for example, David L. Riegel (2000) stated in his book Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers, "Anyone who holds to the idea that a young boy cannot give or withhold informed consent has never taken such a boy shopping for new sneakers" (p. 38). Apart from that, many also reason in the 1921 (First Congress for Sexual Reform) tradition of Kurt Hiller on intergenerational activities that, based on the theory that sexual activities are most and foremost a variety of social communication among others, also simple consent (i. e. agreement, willing) to sexual activity needs not necessarily yield detrimental effects in itself as long as the informed party watches their steps, and that exclusively simple consent yields the information needed for informed consent. Many activists in the childlove movement, amongst them Tom O'Carroll, Frans Gieles and Lindsay Ashford, actively campaign against the idea that children are unable to consent to sex.

• Questioning the assumption of harm. One of the greatest barriers to the decriminalization of sex between adults and children are the many studies demonstrating a consistent association between child sexual abuse and negative outcomes. Advocates of pedophilia have attempted to change these barriers in a variety of ways. For example, they often attribute the negative outcomes on parents or professionals who seek to prevent or intervene in intergenerational relationships.
  • Riegel (2000), for instance, asserted: "The acts themselves harm no one, the emotional and psychological harm comes from the 'after the fact' interference, counseling, therapy, etc., that attempt to artificially create a 'victim' and a 'perpetrator' where neither exists" (p. 21).
  • Similar arguments are made by SafeHaven Foundation, an organization for "responsible boylovers". On their website, they wrote, "The child abuse industry ... takes a boy who has enjoyed pleasurable and completely consensual sexual experiences with another boy or man, and traumatizes him in an attempt to convince him that what he did was 'wrong'". In addition, SafeHaven argues that, "many of the supposed traumas elicited by psychotherapy turn out to be nothing more than the result of the False Memory Syndrome" (SafeHaven Foundation, 2001).
  • In Pedophilia: The Radical Case, Tom O'Carroll writes: "The disparity in size and power between parent and child creates a potential for abuse. But, on the basis that parent-child relationships are generally positive we accept that inequality is simply in the nature of the thing. I would like to see paedophilic relationships looked at in a similar light."
  • Edward Brongersma in Boy-Lovers and Their Influence on Boys, where he reports the result of interviews with participants in adult–child relationships writes, "within a relationship, sex is usually only a secondary element", and he referred to supporting studies by Hass, 1979; Righton, 1981; Berkel, 1978; Ingram, 1977; Pieterse, 1982, and Sandfort, 1982.

• Promoting "objective" research. Pedophile advocates such as Edward Brongersma have argued that investigators of child sexual abuse have biased views. (Brongersma, 1990). As such, they frequently call for a less emotional and more non-biased approach to the subject (e.g., Geraci, 1994, p. 17; Jones, 1990), significantly including the language employed. A study that is frequently cited as embodying the type of "objective" research needed is Theo Sandfort's (1987) research on boys' relationships with pedophiles, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Sex Research. The study was considered the epitome of "objectivity" by some advocates of intergenerational sexual relationships (e.g., Brongersma, 1990, p. 168; Jones, 1990, p. 286), but critics have pointed to evidence which suggests that the study was "politically motivated to 'reform' legislation" (Mrazek, 1990, p. 318). Analyzing them, Robert Bauserman (1990, see also the Rind et al. controversy) concluded Mrazek's and others criticisms of Sandfort's study to be "vaporously distorted, irrelevant, or just plain false".

• Declassification of pedophilia as mental illness. Activists of the movement quote Moser and Kleinplatz (2003), who suggest that all paraphilia be removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). They write that objective, non-culturally-biased criteria for classifiying sexual behavior as psychotic is exceptionally difficult generally.

Further significant views and strategies not mentioned by DeYoung include:

• Referring to experiences of situations where adult-child sex interactions are not illegal, both historical and ethnical. Pedophile activists often point to situations where adult-child sex interactions are not illegal (though not necessarily common) and no negative effects are observed. Most refer to ancient Greece, while some employ ethnological studies. Very few also refer to post-antiquity historical situations in the Western world where such conditions existed.

• Pedophile activism is similar or identical to feminism, the gay rights movement, or to racial tolerance. Often by adopting anthropological theories such as by Marija Gimbutas, Mircea Eliade, Michel Foucault and others, some activists, including females such as Pat Califia, Camille Paglia, Katharina Rutschky, and Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, argue that pedophile activism, feminism, gay activism, and anti-racism would all be opposed to a chaste and racist male warrior role model present in all Indo-European cultures (the Lurgan hypothesis). The tolerance increasingly granted upon females and homosexuals since the Enlightenment is in fact but a repressive one in that only individuals of these groups would be tolerated that show distinctive attributes acceptable to the dominant culture.