Media Storm - S2E3 Unoffending pedophiles: Clinical or criminal?

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Warning: References to child sexual abuse and pornography Read the transcript here: https://mediastormpodcast.com/2022/08/08/2-3-unoffending-pedophiles-clinical-or-criminal/ How can we prevent pedophilic acts from happening? Pedophilia is a clinical disorder before it becomes a criminal act. It's estimated to affect as many as 1-5% of the global male population. Does our failure to acknowledge its existence - and introduce preventative outreach - ultimately harm children? With first-hand sources, our exclusive investigation reveals that young boys undergoing pedophilic puberty are being routinely abused on the dark web, teenage girls with pedophilia can find no evidence that their disorder even exists, and medical professionals have been forced into hiding for trying to help. In the UK and US, therapy is only offered for pedophilia after criminal abuse has occurred, but non-offenders seeking help risk being handed over to authorities. Germany offers a world-only fully-funded, confidential therapy for pedophilia. Its founder, Professor Klaus Beier, takes us through 15 years of successful abuse prevention. In the face of a “global pandemic”, with child pornography exploding online and the vast majority of abuse escaping criminal justice, he says most countries have ignored the evidence and refused to introduce preventative healthcare. The episode is hosted by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia). Production Researcher: Sarika Gandhi Fact-checker: Mafalda Lorijn Music: Samfire @soundofsamfire Producers: Tom Salinsky and Deborah Frances-White Get in touch Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com Media Storm is brought to you by the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We thought a lot about how to do this episode, didn't we, Helena? Yes, not an easy episode, was it? No, but I really wanted to do it. Yeah, you were very insistent, whereas I had some reservations. And so I think will many of our listeners, because this episode is about non-offending paedophiles, meaning people who are attracted to children, but don't act on it. When Matilda pitched me an episode on paedophilia, I wasn't sure it fitted Media Storm's mission at first because we report on and elevate the voices of marginalised groups.

And when you think marginalized, you don't really think about pedophiles. But I thought, okay, the non-offending ketophile, the person that lives with this clinical condition and doesn't act on it, this is a person that is so unreported on, most of us don't even know they exist. And in reality, they may be far more common than we realize. And so we agreed if we were to do this episode, it required a different format. It didn't feel right to do a studio discussion or our usual part two, where we're joined in the studio by a member of the affected community to dissect the headlines about them. Whereas the investigation was so demanding that it kind of needed more time to be aired.

We've gone to really trying lengths to find. you these voices and they've gone to great lengths to speak to you. And so for most of this episode, you'll be on the road with me and I'll be listening along with you all and see you back in the studio for a quick round-up session to discuss questions and lessons from this media storm. There may be no uglier word in the English language than pedophile. For years he was Scotland Yard's paedophile hunter. On the tale of a suspected American pedophile who has no idea that his every move is being watched. It's so, so easier for a child to be groomed online.

Pedophiles, it seems, are everywhere in Britain today. Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Mallinson and I'm Helen O'Wodier. This week's investigation, unoffending paedophiles. Clinical or criminal? One percent of the male population is pedophilically inclined. In Germany, we have around 250,000 adult, pedophily inclined men. And in the UK, you would have around 200,000.

This is a number. So, if you have the choice, would I like to reach out for this group or would I like to let them do in this demonized, stigmatized field, and I can assure you they will go into the Internet? I've been looking into the lack of healthcare addressing paedophilia as a clinical condition, rather than a criminal act, a sexual attraction that has never acted on. Child molesting is a crime, as is any use of CSAM, which stands for child sexual abuse material.

In other words, child pornography. But paedophilia is not illegal, nor does every pedophile commit a crime. It is defined not by action, but by attraction, and it may well be an unwanted attraction. From that day on, I saw myself as a pedophile. The psychological impact was disastrous. No one was allowed to love me, and I was not allowed to love anybody. I should be buried under the ground as soon as possible. I was certainly suicidal.

I don't know. Sometimes I start agreeing with people, and I feel like I shouldn't exist. I struggled a lot as a teen. Teenagers who have attractions to children end up dying by suicide because of their fear that they are going to be seen as an imminent danger, a ticking time bomb, a predator. Psychologists estimate that paedophilia, the attraction to prepubescent children, or heephilia, the attraction to young teenagers, affect one in every hundred men. By failing to talk about the clinical condition, are we failing to prevent criminal abuse? That is the sound of my distinctly non-German friends

trying to casually communicate to you that we are in Germany, Berlin. Germany is home to a world-only confidential therapy for paedophilia, which began in 2005. Do you mind if we close the windows to reduce backgrounds? Yes, we can do this, but it's better to leave it all because of COVID. Psychotherapist Professor Klaus Bayer founded the program in 2005 under the name Kainte de Verden, meaning don't become a perpetrator. He is an expert in paedophilia and the head of sexology at Berlin's Charite,

one of Europe's largest university hospitals, where I'm meeting him now. now. The sexual preference structure of every person manifest during puberty and remain stable from this point. This is true for sexual orientation towards women and sexual orientation towards men. And it's the same with sexual interest towards children. So our prevention work is reaching out for these persons to help them to control their behavior, not to change their preference. structure because it's not possible. There would be like conversion therapy.

Right. And this is not possible and it's wrong. Is there any legitimate theory around what causes paed phoeuvre? No, there is not. And unfortunately, I cannot explain you either why a male is oriented towards females. It's not solved. It's a puzzle. If I could explain it, you can run a line to the, a Nobel Prize committee.

That might be them calling now. Yes, right. In the course of this investigation, I've spoken to five paedophiles. Each traces their condition back to puberty. I realize this at 14, and that's a very typical common age to realize that you have this particular sexual preference.

I would like there to be something that could be offered to someone of 14 who goes to a teacher or goes to the person responsible for sex education in the school, or their head of year, or their school counsellor or their head teacher or there's this massive constellation of professionals around young people.

They are set up and rightly so that if a young person is abused that that young person can tell someone and then that can be taken further. That's really important that that exists. We also need there to be a similar framework for if a young person discovers they're a pedophile. Coming up is one of the most shocking revelations

of our investigation. It is that young teenagers confronted with emerging people paedophilia, often have nowhere to turn to, but online paedophile communities. Here, they are routinely abused. I've been attracted to young boys since I was in primary school. I found my way onto some online chat rooms when I was about 12. This was helpful in figuring out my sexuality, but I was a naive child, and so I was quickly taken advantage of.

Many adults lied and told me they were the same age as me. One guy managed to trick me for several years, which impacted me a lot when I finally found out his true identity. I was hurt and scared. He knew so much about me, had many compromising images and chat logs. I was helpless and scared of getting into trouble if I had told anyone about him. I lost trust in people after this. I know images and videos of myself are floating around the sites still to this day. I don't mind so much anymore. I like to think that they might have prevented other children from being abused. This source who contacted me under the username Red Marmot and who is being voiced here by an actor, admits to using CSAM himself.

I don't think production of CSAM should be legal and I don't pay for CSAM, so I'm not creating any demand for new content to be made. It is not entirely without guilt, but I have never physically abused the child myself. I opted to use CSAM as an outlet. I wish there were more resources available when I was younger. If I was able to talk to a counselor or a doctor at that age, my parents. Maybe I would have never gone down the route of using CSAM. I think society really underestimates how many people have this attraction. Your 14-year-old son or daughter might be into children half their age. I don't know about you, but I was pretty taken aback to learn that paedophilia emerges at puberty with no known cause or agency. It made me question how we've

been taught to see it, as morally deficient. rather than mentally divergent. So if paedophilia cannot be cured, if you cannot change someone's sexual orientation, what does the therapy involve? First of all, you need to know that there are a lot of disorders. You cannot be cured but can be treated.

For example, multiple sclerosis or diabetes. You cannot cure this, but you can help the person to live their life in a good way. We will help you to control your behavior, and for this purpose we have tools, and additionally we can use pharmaceutical options to lower sexual urges if it's necessary. Are these medications legal in the UK?

They are legal, but you will not find a physician to give it, for example, to a 25-year-old pedophilically inclined man. and the physician had to report him. So it's very sad that in the UK, you cannot use the options available. Right, so the medications are available, they're legal, they're recognized as effective, but because a physician cannot say

that someone is accessing child pornography in order to prescribe it, they cannot prescribe it to people who need it for paed affiliate. Correct. There would be days where I would walk around And if a minor crossed my eyes, all I could think of was how disgusting the sight of me is. A patient on the program told me about his experience.

He apologizes that, for the sake of his recovery, he has asked to be voiced by an actor. I tried to bury my pedophilic and hephilic preference, but it would always find its way like water moving through rocks and bursting out with more pressure than it should have. There was no support. I thought anyone I would tell would start to hate me. I planned my own suicide. However, there was a small glimpse of hope. A close confidant told him about kind Tiet of Veldon, and he reached out.

The moment the lady took up the phone I was greeted with kindness and felt safe. No one made any sign of being disgusted or seeing me for just my sexual preference. Seeing ourselves from the eyes of a human being and not the eyes of a predator is their modus operandi. Sometimes I don't even want to think about my sexuality. It is frustrating at times. However, it is important not to let your guard down, to learn about your risks and triggers every week. By building a kit of tools, I am confident

to be able to lead a fulfilling life and not become a predator. A few things separate Kainte de Verden from other therapies around the world. The program's most significant distinguishing feature is near total confidentiality. They will never ask you for your name. name. You are assigned a number which you can always use as your alias. Honestly, after some time, I felt so safe that everyone knows my actual name by now. The most important thing

about pedophilia is not to confuse it with child abuse. This is the biggest misconception in our society. However, I cannot be angry at society because I have made the same assumption in the past and sometimes still do. Anyone who does harm to a child should be accounted for. It destroys lives and families, and I understand that. I will never be angry at society the way they view pedophiles and he files, but I do urge it to see beyond the sexuality and see the person behind it. I love to read books, watch movies, hang out with friends, go to a pub and even sing in the shower. There is so much more which makes us human.

While some countries, including the UK and US, have therapy programs for known sex offenders, The majority of kind hit to Veldon's patients have never been convicted. That doesn't mean they have never offended. A lot of them offended already. Most of them used child abuse images. And then we have around 20% who did nothing. So they are real potential offenders, but they fear to act out. It's interesting that puts you in quite an ethically complicated situation.

though, if you are speaking to people who have committed offences that are not known to the criminal justice system, have you ever had incidents where you have had to consider breaching your rules of confidentiality? Very rare occasions, very rare. And then we have risk management system. We would integrate acquaintances of the person, partners, for example, or family members. we would separate the person from a potential victim and if the person would not accept it including pharmaceutical options then we would choose to use a kind of reporting but it never happened in 15 years so it's really a last resort yes it's a last resort so you might consider

reporting if a child is immediately at risk but you you don't report abuse just for the sake of reporting abuse. Have you faced any controversy or backlash or obstacles trying to provide a therapy that does that? So in the year 2005, 2006, of course there were some angry discussions, but after three, four years, many people understand that it's a kind of primary prevention. We could show this because there were the numbers. Every months, there are 15 to 20 persons showing up at their office. And this was very convincing for the politicians. The Federal Ministry of Justice supported us from the year 2008. And since the year 2018, it is completely funded by the insurance system, the healthcare insurance

system. Professor Bayer may have won over his own country's policymakers, but the rest of the world is either unconvinced or unmotivated. In the UK, In US, therapy is funded for a limited number of sex offenders, but not for people who are yet to offend and want help staying on track. Even for those who can afford private care or can access free therapy for other mental health needs, their second issue is confidentiality. Mandatory reporting rules exist in many countries, obliging people, including medics, to report known or suspected child abuse. includes watching CSAM. It includes abuse that hasn't yet occurred, and so anyone considered at risk can be reported. It is designed vitally to protect children, but are there cases in which it has the opposite effect? A lot of those people might be on their way to considering something

like therapy, but they would probably, like me actually, have been put off it by the fear of mandatory reporting. You have to bear in mind, this isn't because I was like, I've got a and, you know, I wanted to conceal them. People who are wholly innocent can be ostracized in a way that's akin to it if they were criminals. And the ostracism doesn't just extend to that person. It extends to their family. It extends to their children. I read stories of people getting reported to the authorities for telling their GP or therapists, even when they haven't done anything wrong. It was never even worth the risk. It's difficult because I can't find somebody on my insurance plan who I feel I can really trust because so many people in the mental

health industry can be quick to assume that you are in immediate danger. Given that your findings show this does work, do you think it's irresponsible for countries to not have this kind of confidential free therapy available? I must say yes, we are facing a kind of pandemic at the moment. We have these 100-fold increase of sexual exploitation materials in 10 years. It's incredible. I'm an expert witness in court, so I can really see the difference in the amount of images and in the contents. Younger children, more aggressive actions, combinations with sadism. So you can see there what we would like to prevent. And we know how to do this.

For me, it's a pandemic. So it's necessary to coordinate this internationally. Without access to legal therapy, many seek solace in illegal alternatives. The Dark Web is full of paedophile communities. And their priority is not prevention. Ten years ago, two men in the US decided to create a different option. unofficial but regulated, an anonymous online forum for paedophiles committed to never offending. Today, Virtuous Pedophiles, as the forum is called, is administrated by a user called Bly, who is British.

Prior to the existence of virtuous pedophiles, there weren't very many places that people could go who were in that situation. The dark web communities tend to be organised around the idea of exchanging illegal materials. Virtuous pedophile sits outside of that. We are meant for people who share our core values that the sexual abuse of children is wrong, that the online sexual exploitation of children is wrong, but who, through no fault of their own, have a sexual attraction to children. Since being exposed to this community, have you found it to be a wider community than you initially knew going in? One of the things you don't really know growing up as a pedophile,

because most of us discover this when we're about 14, You don't really know who else is like you, but we're talking about a lot of people. Virtuous pedophiles is a very small volunteer organization group, really, that was set up in 2012, and that since 2012 has had nearly 8,000 accounts sign up to it. So, yeah, so it's a wide group of people. What are the conversations that you see coming up most of the time? One of the big ones is that people want to know, how did I get like this? What was the etiology?

Some people wonder whether it was because of past abuse, although we know. know, and certainly in my case it wasn't because I wasn't abused as a child, people often talk about their sort of what I call on-street experiences. In other words, they might have been out that day. They've walked down the streets and they've seen a child that they're attracted to and they talk about like how did they process that experience and did they feel worried, did they feel relaxed about it? Were they, you know, was it of a concern? Some people will talk about their fear of therapy or their fear of seeking therapy and obviously the potential consequences. A lot of people will talk about their fears related to coming out to family members

or the fact that they have to keep this in secrecy the whole time. Some people plead for a cure and wish that there was a way that they could just not be a pedophile. Is there a risk within these forms of justifying or normalising paedophilia? Normalising paedophilia is a comment that is very frequently made. I actually think they mean acknowledge when you say normalise. I think that's what people actually mean and what they actually object to. But the problem is if you object to acknowledging something that is true and that exists, then you're really preventing any useful conversation from happening. So how helpful has this community been to you? I'd say I'm still alive because of it. At the time that I first engaged with virtuous pedophiles, I was certainly suicidal. I had specific plans and dates

and things like that, you know, and I think in some ways I reached out at the time, Because I was pretty much ready to go. I didn't feel like I had a great deal to lose. To be in that community where you weren't judged, that was critical. And it was a massive relief after years of being terrified. I can simultaneously go, okay, I'm a pedophile. It's not the end of the world. I don't have to kill myself at this point. Is it a lot of pressure for you as an administrator to make sure regulation is done right when you don't have and you can't have professional legal support. We've taken people off the forum because they're not.

Sorry. That's my taxi arriving. Is that something that you have to be on edge about? Is that something that you find yourself on edge about quite a lot? Do you worry about that, administrating this space? To a certain extent, I've let go of certain possible risks and just accepted that one day something not very nice might happen to me. me. I've let go of certain relationships. And therefore, if consequences do ensue simply from what I'm

doing, then at least they won't be visited on people I love. That's a really tough decision. It was. Yeah. I mean, I left my partner because of this. Us being able to have this conversation as a society, why do you think that is important? What is the end goal there? The end goal, I think, is that people can not live in terror, that they are different, and that they're condemned to be bad or seen as bad, regardless of how they behave. Some people would say if you talk of people as if they're bad regardless of how they behave, then maybe their behaviour would change as a result of that. They wouldn't care so much about how they behave.

I don't believe it's quite like that. I don't think any of us is compelled to behave in a way that goes against moral values. But on the other hand, if you feel constantly ostracized, you do become alienated. I've become slightly more, I've noticed, just over the last few years, I've given up a job, I've given up a relationship, I've decreased my stake in society because I've realized it wasn't compatible with being a pedophile who talks about being a pedophile. And as a result, I don't have as much money, I don't have as much company, I don't have as much love, you start to feel less invested. But I don't want to feel less invested. I want to be a participant in society. Let's take a break. Hello, my name is Emma Artless. I am in my late 30s by now, and I'm being interviewed about my unique experience as a female pedophile living in the world. Not offending, by the way.

one of her kind that she knows. Emma Artless, an alias she writes with, is an American woman and pedophile in a celibate, adult relationship. To protect her identity, Emma's voice is distorted in this recording. So the thing is, I've always had an attraction toward girls, but when I was a child, I didn't really notice it. When I was around 11 or 12, that's when I started to think,

well, okay, this means I'm probably gay. I'm probably a lesbian. So I was, I was freaking out about that a little just because in my hometown, in my generation, it wasn't really acceptable to be gay or bisexual. So I was, I was already having anxiety about that. And then I started to gradually notice as I got into my teens, I was always older than the girls that I was attracted to, and that was a pattern. I still sort of at the time expected it to go away, and then it never happened. Were you able to find any helpful resources online, any educational information to help you understand what was happening to you at this time? No. That, yes, no, not at all. So much of the information that I found on pedophilia at the time,

supported just this ticking time bomb theory, that basically if you had this attraction, one day you would act on it in some way and that you were basically like a rapist in waiting. You know, that's scary to read when you're young, that you're basically doomed to become just a monstrous human being. Yeah, I also looked in books. I would go to bookstores and libraries and I would look in the psychology section, there really wasn't anything out there on non-offending pedophiles. And there was nothing at all definitive on women with pedophilia. When I was young, this was so isolating. I mean, I still feel like an alien all the time. Even within our own circles, there are people who doubt the existence of pedophilia in women, even on the support group that I'm in now,

Somebody even said at one point, no, no, the only women here are cops. There are scientists, their actual sex researchers who doubt it as well. So, I mean, I would like to be studied for that reason, to be honest. It makes me incredibly nervous every time I put myself out there in this way. Just I fear it coming back at me. But I want a teenage girl who's discovering that she's having pedophilic attractions to be able to know that she isn't an alien, or, I mean, maybe we're both aliens, but at least there's another one in the universe. So that's why I'm doing this. As you say, you have never acted on your attraction, but it has shaped your life. Can you explain that? It's hard to have high self-esteem, I think, with

this condition. People who I consider my friends, they will just throw out something offhanded about how all pedophiles should be maimed or killed or something of that nature. It's sort of this hatred that everyone who isn't one of us is expected to have. When I was younger, when I was a teenager, I didn't realize how much of a stigma there was. Like, oh, sorry, I was. I'm becoming very inarticulate. I don't know. Sometimes I start agreeing with people and I feel like I shouldn't exist. Everyone wants to be accepting of their friends' sexual identity or their mental illness,

but not when they're overlapping, I guess. And do you think that you are at risk of offending, that any part of your nature is predatory? No, I really don't. And I understand it's different for everybody. Some pedophiles who go in for therapy may be genuinely frightened that they are going to act on these desires. I've never really had that. The hardest part of pedophilia is not keeping yourself from offending. It's so much more this sense of sort of self-loathing. in isolation. I definitely have always had the fantasy of being in an in-person support group where you're actually sitting in a group and talking about this in person. And in the fantasy, I'm not the only woman there. So that's also nice. I think that the availability of programs like that would be very beneficial. And I don't think shoving the issue under a rug helps anybody at all. I think it's a very simple thing to understand, but people just willfully do not.

There are therapists around the world who go out of their way to provide support to paedophiles, and they do so at their own risk. I need to use an alias, so I was thinking Amanda. It's just totally different. And I don't want to say my location. I don't want to say the program. I tracked down one therapist. who treated paedophiles for a decade. A survivor of child sexual abuse herself, she faced such vicious death threats from public onlookers

that she was forced to shut down her practice and reinvent herself professionally. It actually started with a gentleman showing up in my office and saying he was attracted to children, but he didn't hurt anybody. He hadn't hurt a child. He didn't want to hurt a child, but he struggled with pornography addiction, was depressed, and had at times suicidal ideation

and needed support as a therapist, but also as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I thought ethically, why wouldn't I help someone who has mental health concerns? Also, if I can prevent one more child from being abused, I want to do that. So I reached out to a task force that worked with sex offenders. And I got a lot of responses that were very similar, which is you can't help this person until he sexually offends against a child. And I thought that was really mind-blowing. So I just thought, I'm going to do this. I'm going to go ahead and offer therapy to this person. I started advertising because I thought, well, if there's one person, there's got to be more people. And what was the response? The backlash started very early.

on when I first advertised the response from therapists in the community was that these people are going to offend. It's just a matter of time. They're a ticking time bomb and this is sick. The death threats came a lot later when we got bigger, calling us petto apologists and even pedophiles. You know, I'm a child sexual abuse survivor. I can't have my own kids because of the damage done to my body because of the abuse I endured as a child. So did you not see your clients as threatening? They had no desire to hurt anybody, never had and never would. That was their commitment. So many of these humans were saying we are committed to never harming a child. We don't want to do that. We just want help with the depression, the isolation, the suicidal thoughts. So we address that. I really believe that the therapy that is

dictated today across the globe comes from a prevention side and a sex offender research side, and secondary to that is their mental help. And it may not even be secondary to that. In some cases, I don't know that it's a focus. So we took a different approach. I will say, if someone is at risk for sexually offending or has, yes, that is the appropriate treatment. I'm not talking about that population, though. And that's what I want listeners to be really clear on. Through your therapy. Did you see any positive results in your clients? Oh yeah. I mean, incredible changes. Some people were able to share with safe family members and friends. And so there was healing that was happening on a lot of levels. Yet in the end, you closed your practice and you dropped your clients. Yeah, I have a lot of guilt about that

because I really care for the people that we served. The backlash was coming from everywhere at that point. And any time a program or a professional got attacked, there was a domino effect where we would get attacked. I think on anyone's system, it becomes too much where you're constantly feeling like you're in danger. I'm going to ask you just to wrap up. What would you like listeners to take away from your experience?

experience. Everybody deserves mental health support. We live in a global culture that focuses so much on being multicultural aware and sensitive and accepting. And this is a population that is viewed as the lowest of the low, address the mental health issues that are coming up with this. This is not going away. I may have gone away, but these human beings are not going away. When I began this investigation, the question in my mind was whether every pedophile was a perpetrator, or whether some could be prevented from becoming so. But now I have a different question, whether every paedophile is even a potential perpetrator, or whether some are just people with a disorder they did not choose and do not want,

a paedophilia of the mind alone. If so, should we be discussed? discussing healthcare, not just to protect children, but also to protect them, is healthcare just everybody's right? That takes us back to the studio. Thanks for sticking around. Well, that was super eye-opening. Yeah, for me too. I'm sure there's still going to be a lot of questions left unanswered.

Do you want to fire away? Absolutely. I think our listeners will have follow-up questions, as do I. My first question that I'm really interested in is, what does the therapy that takes place at the centre in Germany entail? Is it CBT? Is it talk therapy? Yeah, it's a behavioural therapy. And it involves both one-on-one sessions, but also it has in-person group therapy sessions. So people are able to talk face-to-face with people who have the same.

issues. This is asking them to be very open about the difficulties they face and the temptations that they face so that they can understand their risk factors and understand which tools they need to introduce into their routines to help them live a life in which they're not confronted regularly with a preference that is disorderly to them. So you mentioned disorder there. What is the appropriate way to refer to paedophilia? Because we heard in the investigation about sexual preference, but we also heard about mental health and a disorder. What is it? It's in very literal terms, a sexual preference, but in clinical terms, it's quite complicated because yes, it is frequently a disorder. However, a disorder has quite a specific

medical definition. And so there's two instances in which someone's paedophilia is a disorder. If someone feels uncomfortable with the preference they have, they don't know how to how to accept it about themselves. It's causing them to have thoughts that they don't want, that they don't feel safe with, that they may not be safe if they have these thoughts, that they may be suicidal. Then it is a disorder. It's also a disorder if you act on it. So any paedophilia that translates into action, well, that is illegal. It is also a disorder that's disorderly. However, if someone has paedophilia and they're not at risk of acting on it and they're comfortable with it, they've accepted that about themselves and they can live a normal life, then they are not

disordered medically. Well, I think for a lot of people, regardless of what it's called, it's still going to be quite shocking hearing some of the things that they just heard. And you asked a question in the investigation about the forums for non-offending paedophiles. And if the use of these forums could end up normalising paedophilia, is there a risk of normalising paedophilia as a society? To be very clear, this is not about in any way normalising child abuse or child molestation or any paedophilia that has acted on. This is about enabling there to be a realistic conversation about the existence

and the very potentially prevalent existence of paedophilia so that we can treat it well because you're right, there is a risk of normalising in some spaces. In a lot of the communities on the dark web, where people, who are struggling with their own paedophilia are driven to due to a lack of therapy, there is a conversation that tends towards normalization and justification. There are communities where people who feel quite embittered by how society has rejected them start to have fairly anti-social conversations that breach from social convention, social morality around the protection of children.

And so normalizing child molestation is very different to normalizing a conversation around paedophilia that exists as a clinical and not a criminal situation. And it's actually really important to have that conversation because otherwise people are driven into spaces in which the former is justified. And that's the last thing that anyone wants. You know what? I couldn't help thinking when the word normalization came up was that as a society, we do kind of normalize being obsessed with young girls. And what I mean by that is you can go on any major porn site in the UK and you're very likely to find child abuse or search terms like young teen are trending. We're also obsessed with anti-aging and keeping our youth, especially with women.

You know, men are silver foxes, but women are like decrepid when they get older. Yeah, we're way past our pee. Past it, past it. And, you know, we see older male celebrities dating young women, much younger women, so often. And that's kind of normalized. Body hair. We're expected even at an older age to shave off all of our body hair. And you know what?

Who has no hair? Children. Right. So why are we so heavy-handed to use normalisation when we don't recognise the way that we normalise it every day, all day in our society? Right. I mean, we don't exactly do helpful things as a society to stop paedophilia. Yeah.

So true. So if we were to implement help and solutions for non-offending paedophiles in the UK, what would that look like? How would that even work? So I think there's kind of two policy areas that need work and where there are quick fixes if we do look at the example of Germany. One of them is our approach to mandatory reporting and to confidentiality in these issues. So mandatory reporting rules in the UK are not actually statutory laws. There are loopholes and there is flexibility, but there's such a lack of education among medical professionals when it comes to this issue of paedophilia. that it's often misused. So people who may not be at risk, may never be at risk, will still be very, very vulnerable to being handed over to authorities. This is especially true when there is this kind of ticking time bomb assumption, this mainstream idea that anyone who has paedophilia

is at some point inevitably going to act on it, which may not be the case. And so until we have more education and more conversation within medical spheres, those mandatory reporting laws are likely to do more harm than good in this area. And then the other question is funding, because some people can't afford private care. I mean, there's a lot of reasons that state-funded therapy is going to be essential in this area. And that's going to be very controversial because I can see a lot of people saying, well, I don't want to pay for therapy for paedophiles. But at the end of the day, this is about protecting children and this is about saving lives.

You know, when I was feeling a little bit worried about doing this episode, it's interesting how now I view it in a very similar way to our other episodes. And what I mean by that is that previous episodes we've done have shown how we have all this evidence, but we're still due to a lot of things, but including stigma, not acting on the evidence. In our episode about drugs, we found out that all the evidence points to decriminalising drugs to save lives and to bring an end to needless criminalization. And in our episode about sex work, we found even organizations like Amnesty International support the full decriminalization of sex work.

and the stigma makes it so hard for sex workers to thrive. And again, changing the rules would benefit everybody and changing your mindset would benefit everybody. And it's the same here. Yeah, policy is so often not driven by evidence. It's driven by the mainstream social conversation, which is why maybe the end goal for today's investigation and today's episode is to encourage people to have this conversation.

So to listeners, if you have been surprised by things you've heard, and if you do think that this is an important conversation, please share the episode or please start that conversation because yeah you might get raised eyebrows as I've learned because I have been talking about paedophilia way too much lately but it will always be an interesting conversation at the end of the day and it's a worthwhile one too

thank you for listening check out our new crossover miniseries with the guilty feminist called This Is How You Do It uplifting change makers fighting for social justice Next week, we'll be speaking to Jamie Wareham, the founder of Queer A-F, about how he's supporting queer creatives to change the media. And we'll be back with a new episode of Media Storm on masculinity and body image out on August 4th. Follow MediaStorm wherever you get your podcast so that you can get access to new episodes as soon as they drop. If you like what you hear, share this episode with someone and leave us a five-star rating and review.

It really helps more people discover the podcast and our aim is to have as many people as possible hear these voices. You can also follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helena Wadia and follow the show via MediaStorm pod. Get in touch and let us know what you'd like us to cover or who you'd like us to speak to. MediaStorm, an award-winning podcast from the House of the Guilty Feminist, is part of the A-Cast Creator Network. It is produced by Tom Silinski and Deborah Francis White. The music is by Samfire.