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Adam Lanza’s Pedophilia Essay

Most Arguments Against Consensual Pedophilia Are Contradictory Or Fallacious

1. Editor’s Preface

1.1. Notes About Lanza’s Essay

This is an improved version of the essay on Adam Lanza’s hard drive. This existence of this essay has been mentioned in many news reports on Adam Lanza, and has thus been heard of by tens or hundreds of millions of people. Although, most people have never actually read the essay, nor would most people understand the ideas that Lanza was trying to explain.

Link to Original Document of Adam Lanza’s Pedophilia Essay.

In the video description of his first video on pedophiles, Adam Lanza wrote that he did not have the motivation to finish writing the essay and he later her died by suicide about 14 months later. Since he is dead, and since I don’t think that his all written, rational and insightful essay should go to waste, upon myself to format and edit it as needed, and publish it on my site for other people to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_O%27Carroll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wilson_(criminologist)

1.2. ZC’s Thoughts On Pedophilia

Before I read Lanza’s essay, I always found pedophilia and child pornography to be too disgusting to bother thinking any further about whether anything related to pedophilia should be legal or not. After reading his essay, I now think that most arguments against consensual pedophilia are fallacious. However, I still oppose many pedophilic sexual interactions, based on arguments that Lanza has not addressed in his essay.

I believe that pedophilia can be defended within the humanist value framework of the Modern West. However, I am a biological realist, not a humanist. I still oppose normalizing pedophilia because it is maladaptive and unnatural. I also believe that human sexuality is heavily based on imprinting. Exposure to pedophilic interactions could cause children to imprint abnormally, thus causing them to have permanently abnormal sexual desires for the rest of their lives. I also suspect that pedophilia could be connected to the pathogen hypothesis for male homosexuality, but more evidence would be necessary to prove this.

Ephebophilic interactions (sexual activity between adults and pubescent adolescents) should be fully legalized.

At a minimum, I think that if a rational society legalized or decriminalized pedophilia, there should be consent from three parties: the pedophile, the child, and the child’s guardians. Pedophilia is very maladaptive, but if all three parties consent, then this should be the bare minimum for being sanctioned by society.

The reason why parents should consent to their children having relationships with a pedophile is that children are generally a biological, social, and selfish investment from the parents perspective. Society is designed to put the parents rights before the child, whether any person sees that as right or wrong. If parental consent is required for children to engage in pedophilic relationships, then that would effectively outlaw or and prevent most pedophilic sexual relationships and activity from occurring. I also don’t think that a society should freely allow pedophile material to be seen. towards anybody, since it’s maladaptive, I oppose that for the same reasons why I oppose normalizing homosexuality simply because both sexual orientations are not natural nor normal. Society could allow pedophilia, but it should never be normalized.

2. Quotes By Adam Lanza About Pedophilia That Were Not Featured In His Essay File

From “Rambling vlogrant of a ruminative vagrant (Part 1/2)”:

“And this kind of ties into an interest I have, which is…well, heh, um…basically the way in which society treats pedophiles. And before I go any further, I should say, I’m not a pedophile, I’ve never knowingly had any contact with any pedophiles…at all. And, just strictly an academic interest in the subject, but… it’s… this whole bullying theme, it’s remarkable how they can say that homosexual teenagers are being bullied, when any discrimination which homosexuals face is infinitely more insignificant when compared to the discrimination which pedophiles are faced aga-w- faced against. Um, I mean, first off everyone hates you, you’re subject to innumerable hate crimes just right off the bat, but if you’re ever known to have engaged in a pedophilic relationship with a child, you’re instantly imprisoned for long periods. You’re put on a sex offender registry for the rest of your life. You are brutalized in prison, and people actually celebrate that as if it’s a good thing. And then if you’re lucky enough to escape prison with your life, you’re on that sex offenders registry or possibly castrated, you’re tracked with a GPS device in some instances, and…there are just, so many issues that pedophiles face, and everyone seems to think that it’s not a problem at all, it’s somehow justified that they’re treated in that manner.”

“And…and, you have to develop such extensive arguments just to refute that delusion, that somehow having sex with children is harmful to them innately. When, I’m…I’ve written an essay that’s already 10,000 and, I’m nowhere near finished and it’s already 10,000 words long with eight-thousand words in notes that I have to add. It’ll probably end up over 25,000 words and it’s just refuting this simple nonsense. And basically, all that it really boils down to, is that children aren’t harmed by having sex, the reason why pedophilia is opposed is because it combines an ata-atavistic cultural opposition to sex with the undermining of authority of adults who relegate children to the property of status. Uh, sorry, to the status of their property. I’ve…typed that sentence, or forms of it, so many times, and it’s really all that it is. It’s just that you’re undermining their authority to impose their cultural values on children, and of course when you interfere with that process, people are going to react violently. And it’s…not innately harmful for children to have sex, it’s… so absurd, I’ve never seen a valid argument stating as such. And, um, really that’s all that culture is. It’s just the imp - the reason why I’m interested in this topic of pedophilia, is not because I have any ties to it, at all. It’s because it really represents what culture is. It’s a bunch of lies that exist to propagate itself. Infecting countless children for countless generations and just…continuing to perp-perpetuate, heh, I promise in the future I’ll make some videos about pedophilia.

From “(Pointless) CulturalPhillistine The Movie Part 2/6”:

It’s what bothers me, people defer to these authority figures, of psychiatrists and doctors, thinking that they know what they’re doing. But they don’t have this well of wisdom, they’re fulfilling their own psychological de-deprivation. That’s why they’re doing what they’re doing, it’s not because they have wisdom. Isn’t it funny how I would be called insane, but everyone else seems to think they’re perfectly fine? Don’t you understand that you’re all heavily damaged and that I’m heavily damaged and that’s what life is? I’m just going to keep repeating myself, I sound like Gary, don’t I?

Wouldn’t it be funny if I tried to apply to a university and … and wrote, oh man, this is funny, in my, originally I was writing that um, pedophilia essay as um … the general essay for a college application. Why was I doing that? Basically, just saying, “Fuck all of you I know the truth and you don’t” and now like, I know they’re gonna reject me for it, but I enjoy that rejection because I’m a masochist too because that’s what culture does to me. It’s, it’s really ironic, people see pedophiles as hurting ch–, uh, they call me a pedophile because I admitted that I find um, young teen-aged girls attractive. Who have the bodies of anorexic pale twelve-year-old boys, but they’re post-pubescent so by definition I can’t be a pedophile? And you think about why people hate pedophiles so much. It’s because they’re … I already explained it in my first rambling video so, I don’t really think I have anything else to say about that … topic. I still haven’t elaborated on what I mean by “Pedophilia is not innately harmful,” culture is by definition harmful. I used to have such an interest in reading … anything which goes against the position that sex is horrible for children. But I’ve lost that interest because I recognize that my interest only existed because … it was a retaliation against culture. Because pedophobia is culture, and now I can see that that retaliation was cultural too. And even if it had not been, feral values are just as messed up as culture is.

Video description from “On pedophiles and children (Part 1/8)” [published on 2011 October 14]:

I have to emphasize for the fifth time, I AM NOT A PEDOPHILE. My position is that children would not be harmed by consensual sexual interaction with adults any more than other adults are, unless their culture forced them into being ignorant of it and manipulated into being horrified by it.

I recognize that my anti-pedophobia was only a futile retaliation against culture, so I will never have the motivation to improve any of this. [links to several other YouTube videos, including the other parts of this series]

Transcript of audio where Lanza explains how and why the essay was written:

Hello, I’m your host Philip Greaves Junior[1] and I’m going to just jump right into this so I’m sure I’m going to be missing a lot of things, it’s going to be very redundant, it’s going to be very unorganized, but I should say that before I start, I’m not a pedophile, I’m not remotely pedophilic, I’ve never knowingly had any association with anyone who is remotely pedophilic, I have never seen child pornography, I’ve never tried to look up child pornography, I have absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia or anything like that.

My interest in anti-pedophobia is entirely academic and if you think, if you think that, if you’ve listened to my other videos and by the time that I finish reading this quasi-essay, that… I’m just trying to justify some latent pedophilia, then I really have nothing to say to you, just flame me or whatever.

But I’m just going to just start this video.

“And I should warn you that I haven’t worked on this in a while, other than adding a few excerpts a few months ago from an online discussion I found between a pedophobe and a post-modernist. I haven’t done anything to this in months. And I appeal to things like rights, and I sound like a complete moralizer so just try to excuse that and pay attention to what I’m actually saying.”

“And what I’m saying, I should say is… that pedophobia, anti-pedophobia is a very expansive topic and this essay isn’t going, isn’t meant to cover even a small portion of all of it, it’s just a response to the assertion that children, even if they consent to sex, really don’t consent, it’s statutory rape because for some reason, they can’t consent. And I’m just addressing that, in this. And once again, this is going to be completely unorganized because this essay really never got to a presentable stage, I just threw out my thoughts everywhere.”

This quote from the audio of “On pedophiles and children (Part 8/8)” is also worth reading (or listening to), since it states Lanza’s final audio comments, after he finished narrating the essay:

That’s pretty much the end of the relevant section, that– that’s pretty much the end of … it’s – I know that all of this sounds very inflammatory but, I mean I’ve sounded inflammatory regarding this subject because it just seems so insane. It’s like I’m trying to argue against people who assert that God exists, and at least, at least in that case I know that there are other atheists, but I mean there’s pretty much no one who’s anti-pedophobic. When I was fourteen and I first thought about it for the first – when I was fourteen and I first thought about pedophilia, I thought … how can you possibly say that homosexuals are discriminated against, but pedophiles aren’t?

“And how can you possibly say that children can’t consent to having sex? I mean a few years ago when I was… 11 I easily could’ve had sex. And for some reason some people would even argue that when I was 14 saying those things… they would say that somehow I was incapable of consenting, that’s completely incomprehensible to me. [sigh]”

“Is this really terrifying as it sounds, there’s… voluntarily… voluntary mutual masturbation between a 5 year old and a 50 year old. It’s the same thing between an adult, between adults doing, it’s the same thing that would happen between adults. It’s not going to harm them anymore than it would harm the adults unless the child’s culture created an environment in which they were ignorant of sex and they were manipulated into being terrified of it.”

“The… primary factor in all of this, that determines whether or not sex is harmful, really depends on their willingness to participate. That’s the more important thing than, that’s the most important thing. You’re - you’re not doing your children a favor when you dismiss them as being sub-humans, saying that they can’t have sex, you’re really just doing yourself a favor.”

“And I’m not saying… ‘you’re evil’ as like to [???] I wouldn’t say to him, you’re evil for having a child. Although, well I wouldn’t say you’re evil for having a child even though I think that’s… it’s kind of cruel, heh. What I would say to [??7] is, just be honest about what you’re doing, having a child… isn’t in the child’s interest, it’s in your interest. The entire purpose of children is to propagate certain values and of course when one of those values entails being morally outraged by sex, of course they’re going to… be terrified of it.”

“But it’s not something that’s innately harmful about sex, it’s the culture that’s causing the problems. It’s the culture which is causing all of these problems. But I’m pretty much done with this topic, if you’re interested in this topic of anti-pedophobia, which I would argue is even more… infinitely more expansive than feminism ever could be, um… you can go to… IPCE.info, it has a ton of information on the topic, it’s a great website.”

“And… I think I’ve covered everything. Um, if you have any questions I’ll try to answer them, but otherwise I’m… I’m done with this topic. [laughter]”

3. Lanza’s Introduction For His College Application Essay

After some careful consideration, I’ve decided that I can’t comfortably abide by the 500 maximum word limit. I can’t bring myself to believe that anything valuable about a person can be demonstrated in such little space–I would have to write some gimmick. You are certainly welcome to fling this over your shoulder at any time if this is an instant disqualifier (or if informality gets on your nerves), but I would appreciate it if you read up until the end of the first paragraph, pretending that the entire essay is 500 words in length. I suspect that you’ll be sufficiently interested in the unorthodox topic to want to finish reading the entire essay.

4. The Villainization, Persecution, And Hypocrisy Towards Pedophiles

4.1. Society’s Hypocrisy On Louis Conradt’s Suicide vs Tyler Clementi’s Suicide

Tyler Clementi’s suicide seemed to be something new to everyone, and I was the only one who remembered a similar death. Clementi’s roommate had placed a hidden camera in his room and recorded eighteen-year-old Clementi having sex with another man, and broadcasted the events over the internet. The ridicule which Clementi received as a result of this was presumably what caused him to jump off of the George Washington Bridge on September 22, 2010. I do not mean to say that I was reminded of the several other young homosexuals who had died by suicide earlier in the month: the comparison was more tangible than that. It was the death of 56-year-old Louis Conradt on November 5, 2006. He had fallen prey to a sting operation which was broadcasted on NBC’s former television series, To Catch A Predator.

The show originally emerged from the activity of Perverted Justice, a civilian watchdog group. Members of the group posed as boys and girls ranging from 10 to 15 years old and searched online chat rooms for adults who were willing to engage in sexual activity with them. Once they found one, they posted his personal information on their website. They additionally contacted as many people involved in the adult’s life as they could, such as employers, to inform them about what he had typed to their decoy. When NBC became involved with Perverted Justice, the adults began to get invited over to a house which was covered with over a dozen hidden cameras. When an adult arrived, the cameras recorded him being confronted by the host of the show, who carried a transcript of the sexually-explicit online conversation with the Perverted Justice decoy. The host read the most embarrassing sentences to the adult and asked several questions about what he was intending to do. When the nervous adult stepped out of the house, he was dramatically arrested by the police. He was subsequently charged with numerous crimes, usually including at least one felony. NBC nationally broadcasted the events for the amusement of its viewers. Louis Conradt was one of the pedophiles who had agreed to meet what he thought was going to be a 13-year-old boy for sexual activity. When Conradt didn’t show up at the house which was leased to NBC, police pursued a warrant for his arrest. The To Catch A Predator crew drove to Conradt’s house to wait outside along with the police. When all of the legal technicalities were completed the next morning, they broke into his house and encountered Conradt. He reportedly said, “I’m not going to hurt anyone”, raised a pistol to his head, and shot himself.

Perhaps this is making you uncomfortable, and some awkward questions might be surfacing in your mind:

  • “Is this doctrinaire madman expressing sympathy for a pedophile?”
  • “Is this supposed to be a sick kind of bigoted satire against homosexuals?”
  • “Is someone in the office pulling my leg?”.

Independent of whatever opinion anyone might have of Louis Conradt, the similarities between his death and Tyler Clementi’s seem obvious. Both men felt as if they had been forced into killing themselves owing to the way in which their society treated them in the course of pursuing its voyeuristic entertainment through surveilling their romantic lives. In Clementi’s case, there was national sympathy expressed for weeks and the students who were responsible for broadcasting his sexual activity were universally condemned; in Conradt’s case, the only criticism which was ever directed toward Perverted Justice, NBC, and the police, only applied to the technical methodology of his arrest. Xavier Von Erck, the founder of Perverted Justice, responded to Conradt’s death by effectively saying that he would have preferred if he hadn’t died, but the only thing which bothered him about the situation was that they would not be able to press any charges against a dead man.

4.2. The Villainization And Legal Persecution Of Pedophiles

Why is it that one of these deaths is considered to be tragic, yet the other is dismissed as being nothing other than an inconvenience and has been completely forgotten? If hypothetically only one of these cases can be considered tragic, why is it Tyler’s death by default? Momentarily forget about all of the details pertaining to the lives of both of them for a moment, and only focus on the way in which their society responded to their sexuality. While the treatment which Tyler received was unjustified, it effectively amounted to nothing other than simple ridicule. In comparison, the treatment which pedophiles receive cannot be described by words.

They are perhaps the most universally condemned, vilified, and isolated group of people on the planet. Pedophiles, virulently rejected by their fellow LGBT activists, have literally no one for them other than several effete associations which haven’t been active in decades. In contrast, homosexuals have innumerable support groups to help them with anything they might need. While the discrimination which homosexuals receive is primarily directed toward them from other private citizens, the absolute contempt which pedophiles are subjected to is institutionalized by their government. If someone has been identified as an active pedophile, he is automatically imprisoned for prolonged sentences. If the other prisoners discover that someone is a pedophile, he is brutalized beyond belief, with the rest of society nodding in approval. The prospect of this happening is a significant incentive for pedophiles to commit suicide before being imprisoned. One pedophile who was being charged with child molestation expressed possibly the same sentiment which Louis Conradt was feeling by saying, “If it comes down to that, I’ll swallow a bottle of pills. I’d rather go on my own than die in prison”.

Everyone who is convicted of engaging in pedophilic activity is given a life sentence independent of the actual verdict. If a pedophile is lucky enough to leave prison within their lifetime, after being subjected to mandatory castration in some cases, they must live the rest of their life branded as a violent rapist. They are constantly under the supervision of their government, in some cases through the use of GPS bracelets. Their personal information is widely divulged to their neighbors, as if public castigation against them is encouraged. They can be evicted or denied service by landlords and can be denied employment without any opportunity for legal recourse while any other group could successfully win a civil rights lawsuit. Left itinerant and without meaningful employment, they are additionally subjected to the universal seething rage of everyone around them, and no one has any sympathy for any harassment, vandalism, death threats, or overt violence which is directed toward them.

Why is this the case? Is it right that pedophiles are the one social group which everyone can agree deserve to be tortured, if not outright killed? Are they truly the demons which everyone sees them as, which lead one judge in sentencing a pederast to saying among shouts of “Shame!”:

“…the crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon one’s self to prevent one’s self from describing, in language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise in the breast of every man of honor who has heard the details of these two horrible trials. That the jury has arrived at a correct verdict in this case I cannot persuade myself to entertain a shadow of a doubt …

It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried… I shall, under the circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for a case such as this.“

4.3. The Definition Of “Pedophile”

Although the judge was speaking of pederasty, he presumably would have been even more appalled by pedophilia. Both terms are among a vague series of categorizations for adults who are sexually attracted to youths:

  • Pedophilia is the sexual attraction to prepubescent children.
  • Hebephilia is the sexual attraction to children in the early stages of puberty; Louis Conradt was technically a hebephile, not a pedophile.
  • Ephebophilia is the sexual attraction to pubescent adolescents.
  • Pederasty is generally an instance of an ephebophilic relationship between males.

Pedophilia is commonly used as a blanket-term to encompass all of these, and I will be using it to refer to all of these for the sake of simplicity. Recognize that, however devious, perverted, or illegitimate it might be seen as, and despite the derogatory “phile” appended to it, pedophilia is merely a sexual orientation. It’s a part of the rainbow, along with homosexuality and heterosexuality. A pedophile could live their entire life without ever coming into contact with a child because the only requirement for being one is having a sexual attraction to children. However, allowing myself even in the slightest to define pedophilia here as including adults who merely have a dormant sexual attraction to children, would be vapidly conciliatory, and would not address the larger issue. For that reason, the definition of a pedophile which I will be using is an adult who both desires and engages in sexual activity with any person who is considered to be under the legal age of consent; id est, a child.

People who deny the legitimacy of sexual orientation being based on age rather than gender believe that gender is a sort of immutable pseudo-metaphysical categorization of humans yet age is not, so it does not constitute a sexuality. Telling pedophiles “You can’t handle a relationship with an adult?” is no different than telling gay males “You can’t handle a relationship with a woman?” Age is a part of sexual orientation.

Statutory-rape laws encode the outdated and sexist idea that a woman’s virginity must be protected for her father’s sake and that she herself can never desire on her own, Levine argues.

– Hanna Rosin, “Lust Busters

4.4. The Persecution Of Marginalized Groups

Before addressing whether or not the treatment of this group of people is right, the nature of persecution itself must be addressed. Regarding the subject of apathy of persecution, there is a quotation by the pastor Martin Niemöller which goes by several forms and is quite popular. An example of it is:

  • First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
  • Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
  • Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
  • Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Everyone feels good about saying such things, but the use of this quote is actually quite counter-productive because it insufficiently addresses the problem of historical perspectives. If you were to look at many of the groups which have been persecuted throughout history, you would find that many people have never actually been explicitly apathetic to the persecution. They were simply incapable of seeing that the persecutory treatment of some group was wrong. After all, Martin Niemöller himself was an anti-communist who was not merely apathetic to the way in which communists were treated by the Nazi Party, but actively supported it, incapable of seeing that it was actually unjustified.

For example, many Christians during the Middle Ages did not somehow know in the backs of their minds that persecuting “blasphemers” was wrong, yet did not care enough to do anything about the issue. They genuinely believed that blasphemy warranted floggings, imprisonments, and murders. The highly influential theologian Thomas Aquinas illustrated this belief by saying that heretics “by right …can be put to death and despoiled of their possessions by the secular [authorities], even if they do not corrupt others, for they are blasphemers against God, because they observe a false faith. Thus they can be justly punished [even] more than those accused of high treason”. The harm which the Christian persecutors inflicted was not caused by apathy, but by a barbaric perspective.

Simultaneously, every generation of people believes that they are lucky enough to be living in a society which is the most enlightened of all history. They believe that they have the best perception of the world out of anyone, and that they are not fundamentally fallible. As much as everyone thinks that this is somehow non-applicable today, this absolutely includes the current generation just as much as prior ones. Bigotry prevails when people have genuine certainty, without any willful ignorance nor deliberate malice, that their actions are justified by their somehow optimal perspective. People must understand that they do not think any fundamentally differently from anyone who lived hundreds of years ago; we do not have some sort of metaphysical comprehension of everything which transcends anything prior people were capable of understanding.

Because of this notion of certainty that we have in our perspective, and being aware that people in the past have always had this identical perspective for themselves while still being fundamentally wrong (as best as we can discern), we can assume that we have beliefs which are fundamentally wrong; the only problem is that it’s not exactly a simple matter to identify which ones they are. People who use that Martin Niemöller quote should not be asking themselves “What can we do to stop the persecution of X group?”, which is highly dependent on their preexisting prejudices, but rather, “Who is X group?”. You can ask yourself if the treatment of pedophiles is genuinely nothing other than the correct way to deal with them, or if this is yet another unseen incarnation of communists, trade unionists, and Jews.

4.5. The Demographics Of Pedophiles

Just like all marginalized groups, pedophiles are stereotyped in undesirable ways. In their case, a typical pedophile is portrayed as being a creepy old man in a dirty rain coat who hides in the bushes of a park with a bag of candy. This, however, is no more legitimate of a representation than any other generic stereotype for its associated group. What then, is a typical pedophile like? To Catch A Predator was actually quite successful in demonstrating that there is no such thing as a typical pedophile. The pedophiles who appeared on the show represented every age group, from 19-year-olds to a 68-year-old. They were of every race, major religion, and type of personality. They were employed in a wide variety of fields, which included education, engineering, marketing, medicine, law enforcement, fire control, and law; Louis Conradt was a district attorney for over twenty years. The one similarity between the pedophiles who appeared on the series was that every one of them was male.

This is not because every pedophile is male; female pedophiles rarely look to the internet to meet children because they generally have greater access to them without causing suspicion. It is not too unusual for females to be in situations where they can undress or bathe children, and it is considered to be culturally acceptable for females to cuddle, kiss, and fondle them. Females comprise 6% of reported child molestation cases, although this number is lower than the real value owing to the aforementioned reasons in combination with a lower likelihood of being reported.

As Plummer perceptively points out, one obvious problem with the stereotyping of paedophiles and the consequent myths that arise as a result of these stereotypes is that the myths and stereotypes usually direct us to look only at the behaviour of men. Similar activities when performed by women such as cuddling, caressing, touching and stroking children are socially acceptable. But for a man to engage in such contacts is inviting the label of paedophile and possibly risking imprisonment. The stereotypes surrounding paedophiles erect a sexist myth – and that myth is that only men have intimate physical relations with children. The myth conveniently ignores the fact that women often engage in similar sexual behaviour and therefore perpetuates two common views. The first is that ’men should not do this but women can’ and the second that ’any man who does this is deeply disturbed’. But by perpetuating these myths, we conveniently forget that children have sexual needs and emotional components that are well documented by contemporary psychology. The very barriers that we put between ourselves and paedophiles are in a sense the same barriers that we put between ourselves as parents and our own children. With both groups we prefer to stereotype them (’paedophiles are monsters’, ’children are innocent’) and in this way avoid realities that we would otherwise be forced to face.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

The age range of the decoys was also fairly representative of what the most pedophiles are attracted to, although skewed toward the ephebophilia range. Pedophiles who are attracted to prepubescent girls have an age preference of 8-10, and pedophiles who are attracted to prepubescent boys have an age preference of 10-13.

Socrates, along with innumerable other Greek men, practiced pederasty. The trial from which the earlier judge’s excerpt came was for the highly lauded poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

6. The Power Disparities And Sub-Humanization Of Children

6.1. The Power Disparities Between Parents And Children

Those who see only a negative potential in power discrepancies between pedophiles and children should bear in mind that there is a comparable discrepancy in the parent-child relationship – in which women, as mothers, may sometimes with justice be dubbed the oppressor. Mothers often make the ’ageist’ assumption that their children aren’t old enough to things that they want to do (regardless of her actual development), that they need ’protecting’ from a new experience. This assumption is oppressive. The reality is that children need to be freed.

Similarly, the psychological need of many women to keep their children as children, rather than letting them develop, is often an oppressive fact during those children’s later childhood and early adolescence. In extreme forms, it can go on well into adulthood. This type of oppression is common enough. The sexual constriction of children in early childhood by their mothers is all but universal in Western cultures.

In the Freudian formulation, little boys fear that their fathers will castrate them, but in fact, it is generally mothers who take upon themselves the role of imposing sexual taboos. It is the mothers who tell their little boys (and girls) the places where they must not touch themselves, the parts they must not play with. And if the barriers against masturbation in infancy are gradually being broken down, mothers still reinforce prohibitions against guilt-free sex play with age-mates, to say nothing of the incest taboo and the prohibition of sex with adults. It is the mothers who must answer for the ’complexes’ which are the result, and which give our culture its characteristically guilt-ridden flavour. The father may appear superficially to be the stern law-giver in the family, but mother is the law-giver-in-chief to both girls and boys in the formative early stages. Her threatened capacity to withhold love is a far more potent weapon in fashioning what Freud called the ’super ego’, or castrating conscience, than any sanction wielded by the father.

The disparity in size and power between parent and child creates a potential for abuse: a mother could not batter a baby as big as herself. But, on the basis that parent-child relationships are generally positive (and, in addition, given that safeguards can be built in, such as according rights to children), we accept that inequality is simply in the nature of the thing. In itself, it is not an aspect on which we would focus our attention in determining whether a particular mother-child relationship was good or bad.

I would like to see paedophilic relationships looked at in a similar light. I believe that the comparison with the parent-child relationship is in most cases more appropriate than that with adult sexual relationships. Another model, made much of in J.Z. Eglington’s Greek Love, is that of teacher-pupil – the mentor relationship. Why should these models, traditionally asexual as they are (in our culture), be appropriate? Essentially because, notwithstanding the sexual element of paedophilia, the affectual structure of a paedophilic relationship, so far as the child is concerned, is more like that between parent and child, or between teacher and pupil, than between lovers.

Sometimes the child feels ’love’ for the adult, in a romantic sense; more often, in the case of pre-adolescent children, the affection for the adult is not different in kind to that which it would feel for a parent. On the adult’s side there may of course be romantic, essentially non-parental feelings, but in any discussion of the impact of the relationship on the child, it makes sense to take as one’s model that which best fits the child’s perceptions.

– Edited From: Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Power and Equality

On a more general level we can look at the undoubted fact that in this society children are the property of their parents; they are placed in the hierarchical family structure which demands that they be non-sexual and denies them the liberty to choose with whom they want to associate. However much a child may suffer persecution from peers and be unloved by parents, because of this property relationship, a friendship with an adult is frowned upon. Together with the wrath which results from their breaching of property rights, paedophiles also incur wrath because many people consider sex to be basically brutal and exploitative by its very nature and not mutually enjoyable. Some people therefore assume that any paedophile relationship must necessarily consist of an adult sexually exploiting a child. Consequently the law operates on the assumption that the superior power position of the adult has been used to force the sexual relationship. The criminal justice system then, according to this argument, is not primarily concerned with the safety of the child at all but with the safety of the family structure and the maintenance of private property.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

The notion of ’protection’ by means of taking all decisions out of the hands of the party to be protected, and giving all responsibility to ’authorities’ who are presumed to know best, is clearly evident in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) procedure. In this case it is the social worker who is presumed to know best. And the social worker is clearly charged with the task of convincing the child and family ’of the necessity for prosecuting the offender to protect the community’. What if they are not convinced? What if the child was very fond of the adult and knew a damn sight better than any social worker that he was not a danger to the community? What if the parents knew it too? – for parents often do oppose prosecution.

It appears that this ’we know best’ attitude is even allowed to influence the judicial proceedings when they are under way, in the SPCC scheme of things: evidently they do not feel they are overreaching themselves by moral blackmail of the accused, in persuading him to plead guilty so as to protect the child. Yet this kind of pressure is just as unfair, in terms of being contrary to the ordinary rules of natural justice, as the Israeli system described above. Incidentally, it should be realized that the person most sensitive to the harm done by police and court proceedings is often none other than the accused. I have known several people who have pleaded guilty when they might have escaped conviction, simply to save the child from the anguish of it all. One of them got a life sentence for his pains! Can it really be satisfactory to rely on a system which exploits the courage, the moral strength, the sheer goodness of the accused, in order to condemn him?

– Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Towards More Sensible Laws

6.2. Comparing The Power Disparities Of Relationships

If sex is not between equals, how do you prevent coercion?

The same question and argument could be applied towards men and women, since men are stronger and more powerful than women. Even if that was a good rationale to prevent sex between unequals, it would be a rationale to prevent any interaction between unequals… unless one could demonstrate that sex is different for some important reason.

Adults have more power than children, so their relationships are illegitimate.

This argument against pedophilic relationships can be applied to females to oppose their premarital sexual relationships. Because males in such a society have more “power”, that makes their relationship illegitimate? What is wrong with that? Someone could say to a male that, “The institution of an adult male having sex with an adult female is rife with innumerable centuries of domination and oppression. Females cannot countenance the power dynamics involved in such a relationship, and thus must be prevented from engaging in any until they attain our societal milestone of marriage”. No one believes that a pretentious “power disparity” argument applies to the legitimacy of sexual relationships between adults, so there’s no reason why it should arbitrarily apply to children.

The proposed solution to eliminating instances of a discrepancy of authority in relationships, is to use the authority of adults to control children as property, rather than allow them to live in the way they desire. It is counter-intuitive and self-defeating. Adults are prevented from “exploiting” children by making children slaves to their parents.

Children are forced into relationships with their parents by stripping away their right to employment and property. It’s no different than forcing women to have husbands by stripping away their right to employment and property.

Children should be prevented from behaving the way they desire because adults have more authority.

This is no different from saying “Slaves should be prevented from behaving the way they desire because free people have more authority”. The issue would have absolutely nothing to do with the slaves. All of the fault lies in the institution which oppresses them and continually contrives justifications for its existence.

All that pedophiles can say to anti-pedophiles is, “This has nothing to do with specious notions of institutions, power dynamics, and society. This is what we want to do and it only involves us. Nothing else matters.” The real reason why anti-pedophiles bring this up is because of a patronizing perspective of children as being sub-human.

The issue present here is the notion of societal authority. Children should not be taught that they are to be submissive to the will of adults. It is appalling that such a practice is accepted. Children are treated as sub-human, and then society is appalled when an adult has sex with one.

6.3. The Hypocrisy Of Criticizing Power Disparities

How can anyone criticize a pedophilic relationship as being based on a power discrepancy, while supporting the power discrepancy in every single non-romantic relationship that children are forced into having with adults? Why is it that the presence of sexuality makes one relationship abusive, yet not any of the others?

It is because the opposition to pedophilia from a power-disparity perspective has nothing to do with pedophilia in itself. The reason why it is opposed, like the others, is because of an atavistic opposition to sexuality.

What about the power disparity between a politician and a subject? A politician has the ability to write an arbitrary law which allows police to kill the subject on sight, yet no one objects to this for the reason of a “power discrepancy”.

What if the instance of power changed? Or what if there is one person who is significantly better at doing something which the other person is completely unable to do? Would it be right to persecute the ones with more power in their field for “abusing” the one with less? What if a child desired the wisdom, experience, or strength of an adult? There is innately a “power disparity” in every relationship.

Instead of eliminating sexual relationships which have power discrepancies, it seems as if the most prudent solution is to eliminate the notion of power, the idea that it is right for one person to be subject to the caprice of another, and instead allow people to live in the way they desire. If a child wants to have sex with an adult, why can they not?

In any event, the pedophile doesn’t have any “power” in the relationship. Numerous people will want to kill the pedophile as soon as he is discovered. How can it be said that there is any power involved in pedophilic relationships? In fact, there is a subversion of power- a subversion of the power of society. Society vehemently opposes pedophilia, so any power that is involved in a pedophilic relationship will always be weaker than the power of society.

6.4. Manipulation And Children’s Desires

Young children above the age of infancy become susceptible to manipulation of a less direct kind, characterized by deception. When children acquire language, they can be told untruths, from the relatively (though not entirely) benign Father Christmas myth, to the pernicious threat of the ’bogeyman’, who comes to take away naughty children.

Sexual myths usually fall into the pernicious category, alas, so that the whole area of sexuality becomes poisonously invested with mystery and darkness – and the perpetrators, far from being paedophiles, are usually ordinary parents who, because of their own sexual anxieties and conflicts, are inclined to fob off children with such classics of deception as the idea that babies are brought be the stork.

If the use of deception is a possibility for parents, it is of course a possibility for paedophiles too. A paedophile who concocts a non-sexual ’reason’ for he and a small child to strip naked together, say, may succeed in arousing the child’s sexual curiosity and excitement. This would quite clearly be manipulation, based on exploiting the ignorance of the child as to the adult’s motives.

Supposing, by contrast, the paedophile had been scrupulously non-manipulative. Supposing, instead of playing tricks, he had simply, and openly, invited the child to ’play’ sexually. Both approaches would require for their success the child’s willing involvement and participation at all stages. The fact that in the more manipulative case the participation is induced by sleight of hand is really less important than the fact that the child is relaxed and enjoying the situation. Indeed, the sleight of hand may be an effective means of enabling the situation to occur ’naturally’, so far as the child is concerned, without any embarrassment or uncertainty on the adult’s part.

If the child is being led, or manipulated, it is at least a benevolent manipulation, in the sense that it leads – so long as the child is willing – towards a pleasurable and harmless outcome. Parents constantly engage in benevolent manipulation of this sort, without fear of social condemnation: usually it is called not ’manipulation’, but ’encouragement’.

Very often, parents will presume to anticipate a child’s long-term wishes by ignoring, or manipulating their way around, her or his immediate wishes. For instance, in teaching a child to swim. The child may at first be tearful and apprehensive of going into the water, or beyond a certain depth. By encouraging ’pull’ forces, and cajoling ’push’ forces, the parent persuades the child to have a go, to not be afraid, to do that which is not at first desired. The parent does this in the full knowledge that eventually the child will relax, learn to swim, and enjoy the water.

– Tom, O’Carroll, Paedophilia: The More Radical Case, “Consent and Willingness

6.6. Personal Anecdotal Experiences And Quotes

Perhaps a personal anecdotal experience will help you to see this. A while ago, I knew a thirteen-year-old boy online. He was the youngest person in an online group of people ranging from mid-teens to late thirties. He didn’t speak very often, but a couple months after first meeting him, I asked him about his opinion on something and we got to talking about various things each night. At one point, he degraded something he had said because he was “just a kid”, and I replied that age meant nothing to me. Another time, he asked me what I thought about homosexuals and I said that someone’s sexuality was irrelevant to me. He thought it was amusing that I appeared to not judge anything about anyone. Soon after, he confided in me that he was bisexual and that I was the only person he had told. He began talking to me about sexuality and all sorts of personal things, like his anxiety over being in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, of being in an abnormally-homophobic school, and of his attraction toward his male best friend. I had never tried talking about his sexuality to him. He brought up the subject himself because, for the first time in his life, someone was actually willing to listen to him as a person instead of the label of a child. He appreciated that very much, and even joked about wanting me to be his father for the next five years.

All of it made me wonder how many lonely children there are who are dismissed as being unimportant because of their age. While there was nothing pedophilic about any of this, it illustrates how a pedophilic relationship could begin. One pedophile in his journal described:

“Boys just want to know about sex and no one really wants to tell them about it – they want to play with themselves and with other people and they want to do it more times than teachers or parents would think possible. All I do is give the boys what they want and to let them talk about things that no one else would let them talk about”.

6.7. Is Anti-Pedophilia Really About Protecting Children?

After the pedophile was discovered by the police, and subsequently died by suicide in standard pedophile-style, one of his young lovers said of him:

“I could really talk to him about this girl whom I wanted to fuck. We had petted but I guess I was a bit scared about what to do then and she, I think was like me. We spent a bit of time together (him and I) working out what I should do and it seemed to work. When I went back to his place a week or so later I was very proud and couldn’t wait to tell him what I’d done and how it had gone. He seemed very pleased with me and asked me all the details and I told him and we were both happy.

It was really a big kick to have (him) do things to me. I mean I really liked him touching me there and all over the body in fact. I might have felt a bit guilty to start with but as the years have gone by I just see it for what it was; just a bit of fun and a way for me to get a new experience.“

Pedophiles have the capacity to relate to children better than the rest of their society’s adults, precisely because they do not see them as “children”. Pedophiles are seen as reducing children to sex-objects, but it’s instructive to see how the rest of society actually views children. This perspective might explain why pedophilia is so abhorred by society. A clue is provided in a quote from Xavier Von Erck’s personal website. A couple of months prior to Louis Conradt’s death, he said that, “I’m not in this to protect children. It’s a nice side benefit sure, but my motivation is to make life a living hell for predators and pedophiles online.

Most people’s opposition to pedophilia is purportedly based on a desire to protect children. However, Von Erck’s rationale for targeting pedophiles indicates that he’s actually mainly motivated by a visceral hatred of pedophiles. Moreover, the mother of a girl who had consensual sexual activity with an adult said:

My little girl was abused and abused. She probably knows more about sex than I do. It sickens me to have to say it, but I think she came to like it. She must have, she was always excited when he came around to the house… when police told me what he had done to my little girl I thought she would be better off dead.

For the pedophile, she said that she “just wanted to tie him on an ants’ nest and pour boiling water over him”. This is a view which is expressed invariably by adults: that children are better off dying than having consensual sex. Where does this dogma come from?

Hidden beyond the overt treatment of pedophiles in this society, it is instructive to see the treatment of children. What is the life of a child like? Battery of children, euphemized under the cute-sounding “spanking”, is fully legal in the United States. Bizarrely, the penalty for loving a child is significantly worse than the penalty for hating one. Children’s free wills are suppressed and annihilated in every conceivable manner within families. Their associations, location, and every action are subject to the arbitrary caprice of their parents. They are denied their own thoughts, opinions, values, and religious beliefs, instead being manipulated into adopting their parents’. Within the rest of society, children are denied property; their parents can instantly siphon it from them, regardless of how the child obtained it. Furthermore, they are forced into all of this through being denied employment, and they are denied the right to have even the remotest impact on their government which institutes all of this.

If an adult discovers that a child has chosen to engage in a pedophilic relationship with another adult who is able to sympathize with the child’s pain, the relationship which the child considered to be valuable is instantly destroyed. Children are indoctrinated into believing that they have been unimaginably abused by the pedophile, even while their own parents continue to control every facet of their life. They are labeled as horribly damaged victims, and are subject to the (abusive) will of psychiatrists who “treat” them into believing that they can overcome their “abuse”. Doesn’t it say everything about society’s view of children when consensual pedophilia is compared to necrophilia and bestiality? Society views children as being no different than inanimate, unfeeling matter at worst, or mindless animals at best.

Consent is extremely important to me. On the contrary, people who oppose pedophilic relationships are the ones who do not care about consent. They completely dismiss children’s wills and desires as being nonexistent. Imagine that the world takes away the only person who loves you, and tortures him for the rest of his life, and the world tells you that you have done something very wrong for not submitting to its will, which demands that you abstain from such a meaningful relationship. The world shouts that your feelings are nonexistent at worst and completely illegitimate at best, and that you must be taught to see everything in the same way everyone else does. People think of children as being fundamentally different than adults, as if their emotions are meaningless, and that they must be conditioned into having the values the rest of society has.

I can only come to the conclusion that adults do not fear pedophiles at all. Adults fear the freedom of children. The assertion that children are incapable of consenting is an indication of the abusive mentality which is inflicted upon them daily in this society, dehumanizing them and oppressively relegating them to the status of slaves. The opposition to the sexuality of children cannot be conceived as a concern for them. The adults who oppose it are self-serving. The world believes that children are not people: Children are property.

7. Protecting Children

7.1. Do Pedophiles Really Want To Abuse Children?

What the younger one in the relationship from earlier said:

“I can’t really think how this could have possibly affected me adversely, but I sometimes think about what would have happened if we had been caught. Certainly, he would have been devastated by the law and the police. I think I would have been made to feel as though I was some sort of freak and might well have sort of begun to think of myself as being a queer or whatever. But that’s all that might have happened. What really happened was enjoyable and didn’t affect me in a major way at all.”

Do any of these quotes by pedophiles[2] expressing their admiration for children imply anything about a desire for abuse? It seems like projection to say that they do:

“He’s just like a flower in bloom. He’s at that perfect stage in which he is hermaphroditic. That is to say, he is neither all male nor all female, not that anybody is of course, everyone is some mixture of those two characteristics, but he is at the moment in that wonderful limbo between being a child and being an adolescent, that is, he is certainly an adolescent at this point, but he still has this soft feminine grace about him. A 12 or 13 year old boy.”

“I would try by saying that it’s the freshness of their mind, the nimbness of their bodies, the way in which they move, they act- They’re graceful.”

“I just want to be able to walk down 5th avenue and see adults and children mingled together.”

Pedophiles as a group are not psychopathic. They love children and would not want to harm one. The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure, which everyone was freaking out over at the end of 2010, represented the general opinion of pedophiles when it explicitly stated that there should be no penetration with prepubescent children.

7.2. The Traumatization of Children

When children are taught that engaging in sexual activity is immoral, of course they will feel guilty. Adult panic or disgust about young people seeking pleasure for themselves is responsible for much of the trauma that minors experience when they are caught behaving “inappropriately” for their ages, even in a consensual context. Children are also less likely to report sexual abuse when they live in a culture that suggests that engaging in unpleasant experiences is their fault in some way. Children end up developing issues regarding sexuality due to how society treats sexuality.

An associated myth concerns the very common view that the child is traumatised and socially and sexually seriously damaged. We have dealt with this point in length in past chapters, but it is worth reiterating that the evidence simply does not support these assumptions. In the short run, the studies suggest that problems with the partners of paedophiles often flow from the reactions of parents and officials, who respond to news of their son’s relationships with such horror that it elevates the significance of the event in the child’s life. Even in the study showing the worst possible result–Gagnon’s sample of 333 victims – only 5 per cent of the ’victims’ had what Gagnon called ’damaged adult lives’. Even here though ’damaged adult lives ’is a vague term and diverse causes of the damage besides the paedophile relationship could be possible.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

It’s also worth viewing the following meta-analysis:

Rind, Bruce; Tromovitch, Philip; Bauserman, Robert (1998). “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples.” Psychological Bulletin, 124 (1): 22–53.

Think of it intuitively. Imagine the position of a child whose family just found out about (consensual) sexual activity he had with an adult. The father is pacing around yelling that he’s going to kill the adult. The mother is crying hysterically. The siblings are afraid to treat the child normally. Subsequently, all sorts of strangers begin interrogating the child over and over. Other children treat him like a freak. Doctors examine them against their will. If they hadn’t been raped by the adult, they most certainly are raped by the doctor. Everyone is constantly treating the child differently. He’s under constant supervision.

If the adult is out on bail while the legal process begins, the child is forced to move to a far location. Even if the child liked the adult, he is incessantly compelled to testify against him and is forbidden from associating with him again. The court process takes an unimaginable amount of time, during which the child keeps getting interrogated by many different strangers. Psychiatrists and the rest of society tell the child that he has sustained something unimaginably horrible. The child is under the impression that sexuality is something absolutely evil, and that he is terrible for having participated.

Was the sexual activity really harmful, compared to the obscene response of the child’s society? All of this is done under the pretense of protecting the child, who really needs protection from the people who claim to be acting in his interest. There is nothing metaphysical about sexuality. The only reason why everyone perceives sexuality as being dangerous of children is because everyone feels that childhood sexuality is in some sense “wrong”. Despite any contrary evidence, they continue to profess this.

Children would not be “scarred” by their voluntary sexual experiences any more than adults in typical sexual relationships would be “scarred”, unless their society shamed them into believing that they should feel guilty. Children have consented to sexual activity are only mentally damaged when they are socially conditioned into believing that what they did is deleterious in some ill-defined way. This is no different than submitting to oppressive religious beliefs that premarital sexual activity should be viewed negatively, and that anyone who engages in it should feel shame and remorse for having committed their sins. In reality, there is nothing innately pernicious about the nature of sexual relationships between adults. There is nothing innately immoral about sexuality in general. The morality of child sexuality should not be evaluated any differently than the morality of adult sexuality.

7.3. Preventing STDs And Physical Damage

Children cannot have sex because they could get STDs or physical damage.

This is just another ad hoc justification. If STDs did not exist, pedophilia would not be any less opposed. STDs are stigmatized because they pertain to sexuality, not because they’re diseases. As for physical damage to children, 95% of consensual pedophilic relationships do not involve penetration.

If STDs are to be perceived as a serious threat, then it makes more sense to expose children to full information about sexuality as early as possible, instead of deferring any relevant information until they reach adolescence. The most important information about pregnancy and STDs can be sufficiently explained in fewer than five minutes. If needed, it’s easy to explain either of them in greater depth. Children should also have access to contraception and protection, rather than the current situation where they have nothing.

People need to realize that children are exposed to risks significantly more harmful than STDs (i.e. automobile accidents, domestic violence, suicidal thoughts, etc). If people were genuinely concerned about the health of children, they would exhibit it in other ways. They don’t seem to care what unhygienic actions they take. They also don’t care about nutrition.

Quite the contrary, I don’t think I am encouraging the kind of behavior that some priests in the Catholic church have been practicing. Rather, I think I am arguing for an atmosphere and an attitude opposite to what began in the Catholic church, which would be more protective of children.

7.4. What Is The Best Way To Prevent Sexual Abuse?

Most data on pedophilia is distorted. Many studies have built-in methodological biases towards producing figures which make the proportion of molestations look artificially high. Instances of rape and molestation are conflated with instances of consensual activity. Many findings are also based on offenses which resulted in a conviction, so they are heavily biased towards relationships which gave rise to complaint by the child. Consensual instances are also less likely to be revealed to authorities.

Children are less likely to report sex abuse when their parents have made it clear (by their behavior) that they don’t like talking about sex. When children are mandated to obey society’s authority figures, forbidden from knowing about sex, and cannot engage in sex, society cannot reasonably expect children to decline when another adult says that they must have sex.

It doesn’t help anyone to treat sexuality in the worst light. Sexuality is not a matter of violence. A better approach to combating sexual abuse is to educate children about sexual activity, consent, their right to refuse, and their right to report any violations of consent.

Where the literature suggests that negative consequences of a short or long term nature occur as a result of child-adult sexual contacts, it is found that the consequences are generally associated with three common factors. The first relates to a situation where physical force, coercion or psychological pressure is used. The most adverse reactions occur when physical violence is involved, especially when the child attempts to resist but is unsuccessful. The second negative consequence occurs when poor communications exist in the child’s family. Sexual matters cannot be discussed openly and the child receives, or anticipates receiving strongly negative reactions to disclosure of sexual activities. The third relates to a situation where there is little sexual knowledge on the part of the child or alternatively where the child has absorbed parental values suggesting that sex is dirty, painful or frightening. But even when the last two conditions exist the effects, the research would suggest, are nowhere near as traumatic as popular folklore would have it.[*10]

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “The Effect on Children” (1981)

“I was abused as a 13-year old, but it wasn’t abusive just because of my age. No, it was abusive because this guy was lying to me and keeping me from my family. Sex is OK if it is consensual and safe, no matter what the person’s age is. There isn’t some metaphysical category of ”children“ who are all nonsexual, naive, innocent beings.” – Unknown Testimony

7.5. The Counterproductive Justice System

The response of the criminal justice system both to the ’victim’ and ’offender’ in adult-child cases is counter-productive. We have already seen that the older male is treated with contempt by both the police and the courts and little sympathy is shown towards the way he will be treated in prison. Similarly, the young male’s treatment bears a remarkable similarity to that received by incest victims. In both paedophilia and incest, considerable distress to the boy or girl occurs when parents, relatives or the police themselves discover the relationship. Constant and often insensitive questioning adds to this distress and it is not unusual to find that many researchers have noted that far more damage is caused by the confrontations the child has with his parents or the legal authorities than by the act itself.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “The Effect on Children” (1981)

Not all those involved in the prosecution process are that dogmatic, thank goodness. In a letter to The Times, [note 30] a police surgeon of twenty-five years’ standing echoed Ingram’s feelings by pronouncing that legal proceedings in most paedophilic cases do the children more harm than good – and he was honest and courageous enough to admit that the examinations of children he had been obliged to conduct over the years contributed much towards this harm.

– Unknown Excerpt

In the case of paedophiles as opposed to, for example, parents, it is assumed that any disparities and inequities in power between the adult and the child will be exercised by the adult malevolently. In reality, however, many paedophiles are patently well disposed towards their partners and take the role of loving teachers, house parents, or simply close friends. Clarence Osborne often epitomised the benevolence that exists in paedophile relationships because, in many respects, he displaced the interest shown by their parents. In short, it is a myth to assume that paedophiles necessarily use their greater experience and power in a destructive way.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

8. Rights

8.1. Parental Rights

Inevitably, every parent will shout “But what of my parental rights?”, or their right to “raise” their children however they see fit. By definition, the existence of “parental rights” can only entail the license to curtail other people’s rights, i.e. children’s rights. It’s no different than a slaveholder being aghast over someone else telling him that he cannot enslave someone. “But what of my rights as a slaveholder?” he asks. It’s nothing more than a weird cultural perversion that enables parents to control children. Parents cannot logically object to someone else preventing them from controlling their children under the notion of “human rights”, unless they view their child as being sub-human and thus beyond human rights.

There are two common justifications for why parent get to control their children until they reach some arbitrary age: 1. The child is alive due to the parents, and/or 2. The child is financially dependent on the parent. By this logic, if someone were to rescue someone else from death, the rescuer would have a right to enslave the survivor because they would not be alive without them. Similarly, if someone were to help someone else escape from a labor camp, then that person gets to enslave the laborer. The correct solution is to stop forcing children to be dependent on their parents, just as slaves should not be forced to be dependent on their owners. Parents do not have a right to parenting, just as slaveholders do not have a right to slaveholding.

8.2. Children’s Rights

In all of this, there is one resounding question: What should we do? How can children be anything other than property? Children have continually been the conceptual fall-guy of civil rights groups.

  • Slaves, “We are not children. We are not any different from freemen.”
  • Women, “We are not children. We are not any different from men.”

It is time for society to stop viewing children as sub-human. The liberation of children is the final frontier of civil rights. Such a multifaceted revolution cannot be realized immediately, so I will only prescribe actions which are simple enough to be executed in the current political environment.

Children must no longer be the property of their parents. They should not be viewed any differently from a tenant living with their landlord. They should not be subject to their parents’ coercion to opinions, religion, memes, education, careers, etc. Most of all, this includes the right to be free from corporal punishment. “Spanking” should not be viewed with more toleration than wife-battery. The cultural conception of “age-appropriate” material and information must be eliminated.

Children should have the opportunity to separate from their parents as early as is possible. To prevent independent children from becoming destitute, children must have a right to employment and a right to contract for land. Children should not be disenfranchised from voting either, since they are subject to laws. They are to be viewed no differently than adults. People must be forbidden from acting on behalf of a child without the child’s consent.

Lastly, children should be sexually liberated. There are many dynamics regarding how consent works, but there simply is no artificial construction of an “age of consent”. All romantic relationships should be decriminalized between consenting people. Current laws which protect against genuine abuse, such as battery, already exist. There is no reason to outlaw a relationship owing to whatever arbitrary labels this society may want to append to people.

Children should be more autonomous in every way. They should be informed about sexuality. They should be free to engage in it with anyone who agrees. The right of children to have sexual relationships is a small step toward liberating them from the oppression of adults, which they currently endure.

[C]hildren should have the right to conduct their sexual lives with no more restrictions than adults … [and] must be provided with all information about sex and related matters so that they are in a position to make reasonable choices… A punitive and draconian justice system that directly punishes a paedophile, indirectly scapegoats a boy who has been involved in a sexual relationship with an older man, … and does so with an impact that severely damages both… For the reality is that boys have come to men and will continue, for time immemorial, to come to them in order to have their sexual and emotional needs met.

For [Clarence Osborne] has shown us that… young people in western countries feel sexually repressed, alienated from adult company, and emotionally bankrupt… Young boys are sexually active from a very early age and will pursue their sexuality whenever they can find an opportunity to do so; young males wish to give and receive affection in ways that we as a community have not clearly understood before; men who have relationships with boys often do so for benevolent reasons… But if we don’t heed the lesson that Osborne taught us, then we will continuously reinforce bigotry and prejudice and we do so at the cost of further damaging our children’s welfare.

– Paul Wilson, The Man They Called A Monster, “Challenging the Social and Sexual Barriers” (1981)

Pedophilia undermines an atavistic societal opposition toward sexuality. It subverts adult authority. If pedophilic relationships were condoned, then it would be a recognition of the rights of children, which demonstrably do not exist in this society. Children, being people with their own legitimate thoughts, feelings, and desires, deserve the same rights that adults receive. Instead, they’re currently nothing other than the sub-human property of adults who have free-reign to do whatever they please with them. It’s quite ironic that everyone views pedophiles as manipulating children, with everyone being completely unable to observe what they themselves do to children.

8.3. Education And The Right To Refuse

If one straddles the fence on consensual pedophilia, and even if one does not, education seems to be of the greatest importance. Granted, we live in a time where most adults cannot frankly discuss sex with a child without fear of repercussion. I can’t even form a close friendship with a young friend without raising suspicions. That makes education difficult. Sometime, somewhere, someone has to fight this if it should ever change.

What children really need is the option to refuse. The freedom not to engage in sexual activity is as important as any other aspect of sexual freedom. But children are raised in such a way that they cannot refuse adults. Parents have insisted that children accept all forms of affection from relatives and friends - being picked up, fondled, hugged, kissed, pinched, tickled, squeezed - leaving children with little experience in saying no. They also have little experience in trusting their own reactions to people and in resisting the promise of rewards. They are not informed about sexual matters, do not understand their own sexuality or that of others, and thus cannot cope effectively in this area. Our society keeps children ignorant, and then we hypocritically worry that they will be vulnerable to sexual advances.

9. Conclusion

A man is walking down a street at night. He comes upon a few houses and, being a bit of a voyeur, looks inside each window he passes to see what his neighbors are up to. In the first house, he sees a child being ordered around. He thinks to himself, “What a great work-ethic those parents are instilling in their child”. In the next house, he sees a child being told what thoughts are appropriate, and he says, “What great values those parents are instilling in their child”. In the third house, he sees a child being spanked and proclaims, “What great discipline those parents are instilling in their child”. He approaches a garden and sees a child who is sitting on the lap of an adult. He arrives just in time to hear the child say, “It’s a good thing my parents haven’t found out about us”, as the two lovers passionately kiss.

Our voyeuristic friend screams in horror at the scene which would be considered romantic if only the younger lover were a few years older. A policeman runs over to (beat) and apprehend the pedophile, and thus begins the process of persecution. The lonely child, previously happy about having his adult friend, will be “treated” by his society to “overcome his abuse”. He will grow up cold, isolated, and terrified of sexuality. I cannot comprehend how someone can look at this situation and say that the first three children are abuse-free, living in “loving homes” with “parents who care”, yet the fourth child is considered to have sustained horrible abuse.

The only abuse which I can conceivably see the fourth children receiving comes not from the pedophile, but from his society, who shoves the child into the dirt and leers, “Who are you to have sexual feelings? You don’t have feelings at all. You’re a child. It’s not your place to have emotions”. Society then shoves the pedophile into the dirt, and shouts, “I expected better of you! I thought you were one of us, an adult who respected our right to control each of our slaves in the way we see fit. How dare you love a child?”, while kicking the pedophile until he eventually dies a miserable and inevitable death.

Am I the only one who sees the partially-buried corpses of blasphemers, communists, trade unionists, Jews, and all of the others who have been (persecuted in history), decomposing in the dirt alongside him? The pedophile turns over and sees the rotting corpse of a Middle Ages blasphemer of Christianity. He sees all of the scars, the worst of which being the B which had been branded onto his forehead, and the pedophile knows what fate his own sex offender status will bring.

The child turns over and sees the corpses of slaves (rotting) all around him. Society snarls at the child and shouts, “Stop crying! You won’t end up like them. You’ll grow up and become one of us eventually. The lives of slaves was terrible because they were never freed, but your slavery is only temporary”. Yet the fact that every person is at one point an oppressed child does not mitigate their treatment in any way. If it alters the nature of it at all, it makes it become even more pernicious that everyone is subjected to this without anyone escaping its clutches.

How can I look at the treatment of both pedophiles and of children, and see anything other than a tragedy? (The depths of my soul scream) that this is wrong, this is evil, and no excuse exists which can justify this. Meanwhile, this goes completely unseen. All sorts of civil rights groups march up and down the street nearby this cemetery and protest everything imaginable except for this. The pedophile fashions a NAMBLA sign and manages to crawl to the street and begs the LGBT group to let him join. They shove him back into the dirt and shout, “No! You’re not one of us. You’re scum and you’re making us look bad by associating with us!” as they go back to proselytizing about Tyler Clementi. Louis Conradt’s corpse is (rotting) in the cemetery along with Clementi’s, yet not a single person cares to mention him. Is his death really to be forever ignored because a young boy agreed to meet him for sexual activity? I am unable to see how Oscar Wilde’s “love that dare not speak its name”, which earned him a sentence of hard labor, could be thought of as so horrible when he declared to the court and the world that it was

“… such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as ”the love that dare not speak its name,“ and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

– Michael Hattersley, “How Gay Was Dorian Gray?

10. Disclaimers

I am not expecting to change anyone’s thoughts on pedophilia. That is not the actual purpose of this essay. It is also not meant to be a thorough analysis of pedophilia, although I would have loved to have the opportunity. I deliberately tried to limit this essay to as many a priori assertions as possible for the sake of brevity.

Perhaps contrary to what you might have expected, I have absolutely nothing at all to do with pedophilia. I am not myself one, I have never been touched by one (at least not from what I’m aware of!), and I have never knowingly had any contact with one. Then why would I write about pedophilia out of all subjects for a college application essay? I can almost hear you shouting, “Does he have no idea of what’s appropriate?” as you crumple this page. Pedophilia is certainly not my idea of a conversation-starter, but as strange as it may sound, this is the most appropriate topic I could select. It is my belief that the best way to understand someone is to understand the way in which they think.

For all of these reasons, I have to conclude that the most noble form of activism would involve the advocation of pedophiles’ rights and the liberation of children. This is why I’m currently considering becoming a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

Structured, stoic, methodological, thoughtful, calm, and dispassionate.

And I am aware of its obscene length. Being inappropriately thorough is actually a component of my personality. The most amusing description of me which I’ve heard is, “You usually sound absurdly calm, as if the world could be ending and you’d just rub you chin and say, ‘Interesting’”.

11. Lanza’s Reflection On His College Application Essay

I could have written about a more mundane topic, but it would not have illustrated my thought-process as well. Somewhat amusingly, this also allows me to evaluate the school.

  • If I would have been rejected independent of my essay, then I could have written anything and still get rejected.
  • If I was otherwise eligible however, I could use my topic to evaluate the college. While each admissions officer varies, they presumably would not have fundamentally different criterion for selection.
  • If one were to be aghast about my topic and could not comprehend why I would write such things, then it would be safe to assume that all of them would also have some level of dismay.
  • If one were to find this to be an intriguing topic, all of them might have had some level of interest. Presumably, the admissions officers would also reflect the overall college considering that the applicants have to go through them to even be there.
  • If they would have been interested by this topic and not aghast, then it’s possible that there would be many people at the college who are like-minded. The most important criterion for me is the type of people which are there, so that I can engage in discussions which pertain to topics such as this.
  • If I could not do that at such a college, then I wouldn’t want to be there in the first place.

And in the course of writing this, I realized that it illustrates something else about me quite well. While rhetorical questions asked to the own writer are to be expected, they are highly reflective of my life. All I have ever been able to do is talk to myself (rhetorically, of course). I have been isolated my entire life. At such a college with like-minded people, I would be able to have discussions with others rather than always thinking about things while alone.

12. Sources That Lanza Cited

Inflation Of Conflict: the 9-21 Age of Consent argument. Rhetorical question arguments, look over when you’re finished.

  • Okami, Paul (1991). “Self-reports of ‘positive’ childhood and adolescent sexual contacts with older persons: an exploratory study,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 20, 437-457.
  • Leahy, Terry. (1992). “Positively experienced man/boy sex: the discourse of seduction and the social construction of masculinity,” Journal of Sociology, 28(1), 71-88.
  • Leahy, Terry (1994). “Taking up a position: discourses of femininity and adolescence in the context of man/girl relationships,” Gender & Society, 8(1), 48-72.

None of these are freely available online, and I only recommend the first. Paul Okami is a deeply honest researcher, and all of his work is well-worth reading. “Sociopolitical Biases in the Contemporary Scientific Literature on Adult Human Sexual Behavior with Children and Adolescents” is a fantastic primer on the problems with most “child sexual abuse” research.

Footnotes:

1

Greaves wrote and self-published a book titled The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-lover’s Code of Conduct.

2

These quotes were made by pedophiles featured in Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love Boys (1994). Lanza mentioned this documentary in “On pedophiles and children (Part 5/8)”.

Last Modified: 2025 July 09, 12:31

Author: Adam Lanza & Zero Contradictions