Reframing Pedophilia: Towards A Material, Permanent End to Pedophiles

When I was in high school, I met a man on the internet. 

He was a pedophile, and he kidnapped, physically abused, beat, raped and terrorized me for more than two years. I was 16 when we met… he was 45. 

Earlier this year, I attempted to file a civil suit against him and found out that he is in a non-extradition country, while he is hunted by the FBI for a murder he committed while he had me in his grasp. I never even knew he killed someone, and most likely, immediately came back to his home and raped me. 

His abuse of me has been perhaps the defining factor in my life, and he will always haunt me. I will never see justice. I will never even know if there are other victims. The desire to pursue a civil case against him, a goal of mine ever since I was 19, kept me from doing more public work in this space. But now that my justice is certainly denied, I can go on to try to stop pedophiles who hurt girls like the girl I was, before he killed me. Many pedophile victims say that it feels like a death, and it’s true. But what people don’t realize, is that forever more you are your own ghost, dragging your own dead body around, into bars and beds, into new broken homes. One of the anonymous Epstein victims said: “my soul is broken and so is my heart.” I have never known, nor will ever see, peace, until what he touched and broke is in ashes. It never leaves you.

Pedophilia inflicts you with a wound that never heals; it was put in your mind so early in your brain’s development, that your entire consciousness wraps it. There is stays, the gnarl in the tree.  

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen major and horrific outbreaks of child and teen sexual abuse. We have evidence of systemic, organized pedophilia in the Boy Scouts, US Women’s Olympic teams, the Epstein teen trafficking ring, in college football, and of course, in the Catholic Church — a multi-generation, incredibly sophisticated pedophile ring. There is a constant drum beat of the horrors, the agony of victims, the scale of it: In France alone, we recently learned that the Church had over 330,000 child victims since 1950, and a total of 2,900-3,200 abusers. That’s almost 5,000 victims each year, part of the perpetual churning of the global pedophile machine, a never-ending drumbeat marching to victim torture and agony. 

The one thing that is perfectly clear from these revelations is that we are not protecting our children from pedophiles. At all.   

Rates of child sexual abuse are incredibly high — according to the CDC, 25% of girls experience child sexual abuse, and some experts think that is probably way under the actual numbers. No child should experience rape and yet it is the experience that so many are condemned to. Huge numbers of children are sustaining incalculable trauma daily in the schools, sports systems, child care, on the internet, and at home. And there is not even an organized movement that materially addresses the fact that all of these areas are infested with pedophiles; that organized pedophiles are massively active and protected; that we have millions of victims that require social support, trauma and medical treatment. There has been no acknowledgement that we are failing to protect children from pedophiles, nor making any fundamental shift in how we understand and work against pedophiles. 

This is a long article. That is because it presents an updated framework for analyzing pedophilia, and how those findings may inform anti-pedophilia efforts. It looks at myths and fallacies about pedophilia, lays out a model of pedophilia and how it works on a systems level (I.e. How it functions in society and culture). We’re going to go soup to nuts, even all the way back to update our understanding of what a pedophile even is. It is absolutely imperative that we have a clear understand of what a pedophile is and how it operates; that’s the only way to successfully fight them, prevent them, protect our children from them, and make sure that pedophiles are dealt the consequences that are required. 

The most significant departure of *this* work from much work on pedophilia you see in the world, is in bringing a materialist lens to pedophilia. The vagaries of our frameworks and approaches have so twisted popular notions of how pedophilia works, that they match in almost no way how this is functioning systemically.                                                                                      

What Is a Pedophile? 

This seemingly straightforward question is in fact ground zero for many of the erroneous beliefs that exists about pedophiles.  What we believe a pedophile *is*, forms the basis of how we model the pedophile, its crimes, its operations, and how we stop it. Our existing model of a pedophile is full of erroneous assumptions, faulty logics, stereotypes and outright lies from pedophiles themselves. If you don’t even know what you are looking for, hunting, and what they are like, you have little hope of designing effective MATERIAL anti-pedophile strategies. 

The fundamental crack is where society, culture, media, law enforcement AND the medical establishment collude to obscure, minimize and distort the nature of the crime and criminal by calling this all a “sexual orientation”. 

As I talked about in an earlier article on organized pedophiles online, pedophilia is NOT a sexual attraction to children. It is NOT a sexuality, it is NOT a sexual orientation and it SHOULDN’T be protected under this guise. “Wanting to rape children” or “raping children” is not a sexuality. It would be appalling to hear that rapists comprise a sexual orientation defined by a desire to, or a tendency of, “raping women”. We would never allow that a serial killer just has a different kind of sexuality. 

We have developed in critical modern feminist thought, the idea that rape isn’t at all about sex; it is about power and control. And yet if we are talking about *child* rape victims, rape is suddenly about sex and sexual attraction. And if you asked your average person to define a pedophile, they would say, someone who is sexually attracted to children, or someone who wants to have sexual relationships with a child. When it comes to pedophiles, a “sadistic desire to torture children” becomes a sexual orientation that is naturally stratified somewhere along the human spectrum, perhaps even alongside marginalized sexualities such as gay, lesbian and bisexual. 

This is also, to a *point*, what organized groups of pedophiles such as NAMBLA and MAPs say to justify their existence, to demand acceptance from society, to minimize their abuses, and to gain access to children. These are talking points that *pedophiles themselves* came up with, use, and work to spread. In their telling, they suffer from an unwanted sexuality that is actually an imposition on them, that *they* are the victim of, that their theoretical outcast is some kind of social oppression that makes them offend. This construct is utterly to the pedophile’s benefit and none at all to the victim. It extends societal niceties to the pedophile that only allow it to *continue* to act in society and abuse. The idea of pedophilia as sexuality or attraction brings up social and moral concepts like the need to support LGBT groups. It conjures up attraction or romance, not rape; it suggests that it is the society’s rejection of the pedophile that produces the pedophile itself .  

Pedophilia groups, the media AND the medical establishment posit again and again that stigma against pedophiles is the real problem, that its only when they are isolated from society they become a danger. This is considered a “liberal” perspective on pedophilia, and it almost allows the culture some sort of self congratulatory effort, that taking a “complex” view of a pedophile as “part of spectrum of human sexuality” is as an innovative, liberal, humane, enlightened perspective, and actually, the only ethical route. It is presented to society as an ethical issue IN WHICH THEY FIND THE PEDOPHILE needing support. There’s almost a quality of rebellion to it, of being edgy or taking some enlightening perspective on an issue of such gravity.  

Parading the most heinous crime of all, as a sexuality or sexual preference, instead of an organized sadistic effort to violently destroy children’s lives, expresses how deeply coddling and enabling of pedophile runs. As I wrote on this blog in July 2020: 

A persistent desire to rape children and teens doesn’t express an “attraction”, but rather an ongoing fixation and obsession with sexual abuse. The use of terms like “attraction” and “sexual preference” covers up the sadism and violence that is inherent in the desire for sexual activity and sexual interactions with children and teens, and diverts attention away from the essential nature of sexual abuse. “Attraction” also suggests that [pedophiles] have positive feelings towards children, while of course the desire to rape children and teens, represents the greatest extremes of hatred and abuse of children…. typical manipulation and distortion from a group of people who often claim they are targeted by the “seductions” of children….

Acting like raping kids is a sexuality is an absurdity so far beyond reason that it’s difficult to take seriously; and yet, this is in fact the cultural understanding of the pedophile. It is not about the pedophile trying to HURT the child, it is about the pedophile acting on a “sexual preference” that they have no control over. And perhaps most importantly: a sexual attraction has no victims. As we’ll cover more in the piece, most ideas we have about pedophiles are also designed to make pedophilia seem like a victimless crime with no perpetrator.  

To call it pedophilia sexual is in fact fetishizing pedophilia itself, literally projecting sexuality onto this crime where there is none. People assume that because the crime implicates the body and often genitalia, that it is sexual. Such thoughts also ignore that these body parts are in fact very specific vectors where specific and extreme damage and pain is done. In fact, its particularly absurd to focus on “sexual attraction” of a pedophile while not focusing at all on the sexual/intimate damage that *is* done to children, due to the impact on the brain and due to the formative stage of the child. Just because the pedophile receives sexual pleasure as one component of the crime, that does not mean that it is somehow in the realm of “sexual orientation”; they are using “sexual” strategies because those are the ones that cause the most harm to the CHILD.  

The medical establishment has operated with nothing but full complicity in these highly dangerous, pedophile-enabling frameworks. Over and over, medicine exhibits an almost obsession with promoting this as a sexual interest or mental health issue. The DSM itself defines pedophilia around pillars such as “arousing fantasies”, “sexual desires” and “sexual attraction”. The DSM goes even further to break pedophiles up into “types” or categories; attraction to boys, or girls, or specific attraction to children ONLY, as differentiated from pedophiles who are attracted to a mix of adults and children. This is again, grounding the understand of the pedophile in the framework of sexual orientation, as if weather someone wants to rape primarily boys or primarily girls is materially relevant, that these are, in fact, the primary features of the pedophile, is its sexual proclivities. 

The DSM does not mention sadism, it doesn’t mention pedophile rings, it doesn’t mention bodily injury and permanent harm to victims, it doesn’t mention violence. It doesn’t talk about the fact that pedophilia hurts children, and that this is in fact the material goal of pedophilia. Because THIS is the REAL definition of a pedophile: someone who wants to violently harm and destroy children. 

We find a comparison as the DSM describes things like anti-social personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, sexual sadism disorder and ever borderline personality as incorporating harm to others as a core component of the disease. The official position on pedophilia, however, does not go into abuse, about sadism, about harm, about crime, about conspiracies and rings; no, merely some kind of uniquely irresistible “attraction”. This is a profoundly anti-materialist view of pedophilia, that expresses nothing other than total callousness towards victims. Pedophiles are in the DSM, yet we don’t even a have a name for the trauma that the children themselves endure and how it will effect them for the rest of their lives. 

Painting pedophilia as a mere “sexual interest” is not only a materially incorrect description of the pedophilia, but doctors themselves validate this as a MEDICAL issue. This medical contextualizing of the pedophile does not meaningfully take into account things like the fact that pedophiles don’t feel remorse for what they do, they don’t care about children, that they are singularly devoted to this cause, that they proactively seek to be around children and make hunting children the priority of their lives. The “medicalized” version of a pedophile suggests some kind of known and treatable illness, the pedophile is simply “sick”, not sadistic, and he can be cured and the proper course of action is to cure them. This creates sympathy for pedophiles as well as the myth that “something is being done” about pedophiles through science, that someone else is handling it. If a medical construct was effective, we would see way less pedophilia, which is not the case. *Any* excuse is made to keep the pedophile in society; a hospital is not a jail or a pit in hell. It is a path of rehabilitation to wandering around free in society once more.  

The total misclassification of this as some kind of paraphilia, the way someone has a foot fetish, instantly puts ANY material effort to confront pedophilia on the wrong track. For example, medical researchers jump through hoop after hoop to find some sort of definitive proof that this is a brain phenomenon that the pedophile cannot control. Which they have not been able to produce in decades of study. And have found consistently there are not notable brain differences between pedophiles and other criminal groups. Medical differences proposed to distinguish pedophiles that have been offered include: they are shorter, more likely to be left handed, and to have slightly lower IQ. They state the fact that a pedophile’s reward center “lights up” when they see a naked child is evidence that this is mental illness; and not just the feelings that pedophiles have when they, predators, spot their pray.  

Some studies have attempted to show differences in brains that may or may not account for some features of these crimes, but many of these are inconclusive, contradicted by other studies, consist of very small groups, etc. This is also something that they’ve tried to do with rape, to medicalize it as a brain malformation that the perpetrator has no control over; even as these pedophiles engage in highly coordinated attacks, rack up serial victims, and work in groups to forward their sadistic ends, all indicating very serious and purposeful intent.   

Compare all this medicalization to the fact that, unlike pedophiles, most pedophilia victims *will* go on to develop massive mental problems and mental disorders from this attack -- including PTSD, eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, body dysmorphia and sexual dysfunction — yet we don’t meaningful look at pedophilia as inflicting mental disorders on victims. The experiences of victims doesn’t exist uniquely in the literature; these attacks as something that creates a chronic medical condition, and maybe even its own mental illness, as I will advocate for later in the piece. But no. 

Again, the pedophile and what it needs and requires is the focus.

The medical model invites pity for the pedophile and views the pedophile as a victim of a random genetic accident, a curious outlier. We are taught, through this model, to actually identify with the pedophile, put ourselves in his shoes, be aghast at how horrible it would be *for the pedophile* to have pedophilia; to struggle with the moral complications; to consider how awful it must be to never be able to realize your sexual ambitions; meanwhile, in reality, pedophiles love raping children and there is literally no evidence that they experience this as a torture; in fact, these are violent sadists; it is their victims who experience torture.  

Disturbingly, and additionally pointing to competency issues in the APA, much of what doctors “know” about pedophiles are things that the pedophiles themselves have told the doctors, responded to the studies/tests, etc. Pedophiles are known to devote their lives to manipulation, have shown themselves to be,  and anything they give doctors as far as self-reports of offenses, “relapses”, etc. Is by no means trustworthy. It is reminiscent of research on serial killers, where we know they are psychopathic criminal liars, at yet medical researchers who want to make a splash continually survey them. The inappropriate fascination that is similarly expressed by the medical establishment towards the pedophile is disturbing at best. 

They continue to insist, FOR THE PEDOPHILES, ON BEHALF OF THE PEDOPHILES, that this should be treated at a medical level, instead of at a social, legal, and material level; an approach that doesn’t literally minimize, distract from, and cover up their crimes. Cultural ideas such as “not all pedophiles are bad”, “many pedophiles don’t offend”, “pedophiles can seek medical treatment and thus aren’t a danger to the community, rather, we should pity them” “pedophiles need support” “I mean, you really have to feel bad, can you imagine…” — all of this is a common refrain, and it plays right into their playbook. Pedophiles WANT you to pity them and see their crimes with empathy and support for them.  

The medical framing and framing pedophilia as sexuality, orientation, desire, attraction, leads to the direct conclusion that *stigma* against pedophiles — stigma for their “harmless” “sexual attraction” “sexual orientation”  —  is in fact one of the reasons why pedophiles *do* offend. Offend because they don’t have a “support network” or they don’t want to talk to anyone about it, or there’s no one to talk to, or because society will cast them out. Everyone and everything in the world besides the pedophile itself is at fault. 

The idea of stigma against pedophiles playing a role in their RAPE OF CHILDREN shows up in social constructs like “instead of neutralizing pedophiles, we have to instead accept them, and provide them with child sex robots and child pornography, and make sure they have community resources, support groups, etc.” The framework is just more pedophile coddling, at the same time that medical research itself suggests that the ONLY thing that causes a pedophile to stop offending is fear of personal consequences; one study emphasized that one of those fears includes fears of a humiliating, grisly death. And to an animal that fears only that, you want to offer support groups and “acceptance”? 

On the other side of the crime, because it is modeled as a mental illness, when it comes time to deal with pedophiles who have been caught, reform and rehabilitation is dominant. It’s funny how much you see about “rehabilitation” of the pedophile with very little concern for rehabilitating pedophile victims from the extreme abuse they have endured, isn’t it? Again, we see this reversal of victim and perpetrator that spans then entire area of inquiry. The fact that the medical establishment continues to support these ludicrous ideas while doing nothing to better protect CHILDREN (as evidence in abuse rates), is disgusting. Validating pedophilia as a mental illness or sexual interest, by an entire profession that should be at the core of the pedophilia response, is instead participating in an ongoing national pedophile cover-up job. 

The “sexual orientation/sexual attraction/mental illness” model also leads to assumptions about what should or should not be done about pedophiles. It puts us in the realm of therapies and support groups and “reducing stigma” and “education” and harm reduction, not in the realm of: capital punishment, mass-scale efforts to dig up pedophile rings, not in terms of RICO lawsuits, of public punishments and turnover of assets to victims.

 Medicine, despite desperately jumping through hoops to make this about sexuality, hasn’t been able to come up with any  plausible “treatment” strategies; of course, how could they treat something that they show almost no understanding of? Doctors continue to insist FOR THE PEDOPHILES, ON BEHALF OF THE PEDOPHILES, that this should be treated at a medical level (despite no definitive medical treatments being available), instead of at a social, legal, and material level.  Cultural ideas such as “not all pedophiles are bad”, “many pedophiles don’t offend”, “pedophiles can seek medical treatment and thus aren’t a danger to the community, rather, we should pity them” — are common refrains, and incredibly dangerous. 

Pedophiles WANT you to pity them!!! They WANT us to think they have a harmless sexual attraction, that they need help and support, I.e. Support groups when they, as known group predators, are able to meet and support each other. Oh, you mean a literal place that is signed off on by medical professionals where pedophiles can meet each other and make friends and organize and hang out and start a …. Pedophile ring?! 

Of all the negative impacts the medicalization has had, the one that troubles me most is the idea that victims of child sexual abuse BECOME pedophiles later in life, that the reason that people commit pedophilia is because they, themselves were pedophile victims once. 

This has the air of medicalization, sure, in that it has a sort of seeming cause and effect and, everyone assumes, is probably substantiated in the research. But we have proven that this is simply not the case! And yet, this idea structures public perception. The misinformation makes pedophiles seem pitiably, understandable, and even victimized. It’s also very clearly abusive towards victims, who get assaulted as a child and then are told over and over that they might become child abusers; or worry that people will think *they* are a pedophile victim because they were attacked. Society agrees that this is some cyclical violence and inevitability. It also suggests that the pedophilic wound makes you indelibly malformed, that it is inevitable we will then become sex predators; and hey, doesn’t it also suggest that they will grow up to be a pedophile too, and thus guilty in a way, or at least considered a predator perhaps even above what the actual pedophile is. In some ways the “pedophile victim becomes pedophile” idea almost retroactively justifies the abuse, makes the victim also guilty for inevitable future crimes and justifies throwing the child out as forever tainted. 

The predator is redeemable, the victim is damned.  

No, it is time to move away from these made up, non-sensical, unsupported notions of pedophiles, these frameworks that minimize, coddle and enable abuse, these ideas of justice that center the pedophile’s best interests and not the victim’s, that are based on 25 years of shoddy research depending on the word of psychopaths. No, it is time for a material understanding of pedophiles and what they do.                                                                                        

What is the Crime of a Pedophile

Just as we ask “what is a pedophile” we have to ask, what crime is actually materially being committed, what are we talking about when we talk about pedophile victims, and what does it mean to be a pedophile victim. 

Societally we have an understanding that pedophilia can cause sexual trauma, confusion about sexuality, depression, shame, intimacy issues, etc., which are all important facets of the trauma to the victim and the effect of the attack. However, it is NOT a common understanding that pedophilia is ATTEMPTED MURDER and MURDER: that pedophilia victims die as a direct result of the crime and that that is a predictable and common impact. 

It is an object study in the extraordinary psychopathy and vileness of the pedophile that you can be raped as a child and die from it years later. 

Suicide is an obvious result of pedophile attacks: suicide rates for pedophilia victims are 3x higher than for the general population. That is an absolutely enormous amount of suicide. Think about the loss of life that is involved when 20% of girls and and 1 in 20 boys is a victim; and the particularly alarming rates we see around bisexual girls where nearly half of them have been sexually abused by 18.  

While these numbers alone are alarming, there’s reason to believe that they are higher and perhaps astronomically higher. One problem we have with getting a full picture of pedophilia, is that it is so stigmatized, and so shameful, that many never report, not to doctors, family, religious figures, cops, etc. (Of course, these very well are the same ones who are abusing them). Many victims will not participate in research studies, and can be unlikely to even tell doctors. The shame of pedophilia is so extreme that many victims have never told *anyone*. Even when they do, there’s no reason for their suicide to be counted as consequence of pedophilic attack when the case ends up in the system unless there is a record gotten to the right people. Like most researchers, I think we cannot rely at all on official stats, and should, in every regard, assume them to be much higher. You see how the blanket social stigma around being a VICTIM — not a pedophile, a VICTIM —  results in a massive suppression of information even here. This is what happens when pedophiles actually has less stigma around them than the victim themselves.

What we see in the statistics, is what has made it through a thicket of suppression, shame, silence, medical neglect and incompetence, and certainly, pedophiles working behind the scenes using their powerful rings. We simply cannot discount the ways that pedophiles are able to act in systems like the criminal system, health care system, etc. To protect themselves and other pedophiles — we’ll talk more about this later. 

That is an enormous amount of suicide that is churning out of the pedophilic mechanism. It is more than possible that prolific pedophiles may even cause multiple deaths over a lifetime of offending, making them true serial killers. 

Outside the most obvious lethal result, suicide, multiple OTHER ways in which victims are also a result of the crime. Many of them develop addictions to drugs and alcohol. It gives people a way to numb or escape their feelings; it is also a way that people who can’t have sex because of trauma from pedophilia are able to engage sexually in their intimate relationships. Of course, alcoholism, drug addiction and the risk-taking behaviors that often accompany them, are often deadly. We have to ask ourselves just how much of the addicted population is made up of child sexual abuse victims. The extreme stress of child sexual abuse can also trigger mental illnesses that there might have been a pre-existing genetic propensity for, which is manifested in an environment of extreme stress; this could include bipolar and schizophrenia. 

 Especially where there is so much focus on the pedophile itself, and especially what their “redemption narrative”, the narrative of the victim melts into the background; a pattern you’ll see again over and over in this piece where pedophiles are foregrounded again and again. 

I think the long-term effects of pedophilia on victims, where you see throughout life clusters of symptoms that are directly related to the trauma, invites us to perhaps consider a medical framing of the VICTIM. Direct results include, of course, PTSD, higher rates of abuse, depression, anxiety and other mental illness, eating disorders, intimacy challenges, physical pain, chronic fatigue syndrome … If we are going to medicalize anything, it should be what victims experience, which is a predictable cluster of understood symptoms, that perhaps we should be looking at through the lens of a syndrome, chronic condition or mental illness. If pedophilia is a traumatic injury from which a suite of symptoms arises; we might look at those clusters as a syndrome, like how you would look at concussions and post-concussion syndrome. This is a MATERIAL medical analysis, unlike the one applied to pedophiles, which are very much speculative, with vanishingly little evidence that pedophilia is/should be classified as a mental disorder. Meanwhile, sitting very clearly, very clinically and very consistently, is some kind of post-pedophile syndrome that actually puts a meaningful container around the rash of symptoms we see associated with this again and again. 

  If there is a medicalization angle on pedophilia, it should not be medicalizing the pedophile, and offering comprehensive medical care tailored to that specific trauma. When I was kidnapped and violated hundreds of times by a pedophile and murderer, I sustained a wound or injury that will be with me for the rest of my life. I do think its possible that some victims will in time feel that they have healed and recovered, but for many others, the medical, physical, emotional and intimate effects of this will last a lifetime. As a pedophile victim, a framing like this puts an actual meaningful construct on what has otherwise been this huge range of effects and health consequences I have suffered: PTSD, anorexia, intimacy and attachment problems, nightmares, physical pain… I think its very much possible that it helped spark my bipolar 1 disorder.

Taking a life-long view of pedophilia’s effect on the victim is the only reasonable way to look at the crime. The overall failure to recognize the true severity of the crime is warping, profoundly, how we conceptualize and deal with pedophiles. 

Severity is very much a factor in how we rate the importance of a crime and in how we prosecute it, either societally or via the legal system. And in our legal system, the severity of this crime is in NO way reflected in either how the crimes are conceptualized in law, in the scope of a criminal procedure, or in its punishment and restitution required. 

This is yet another reason to abolish the criminal justice system. A criminal justice system that doesn’t protect children, via coddling pedophiles, cannot be saved, and must be dismantled and replaced with a People’s tribunal system that takes pedophilia deathly seriously. The status quo of justice when it comes to victims of pedophiles is: no justice. This perpetuates harm: justice is, by natural law, a part of healing. 

Deep Dive on Effects: Eating Disorders, Pedophilia and Culture 

Before we move on, I wanted to really focus in on one area of the pedophilic wound, one that I think particularly illuminates the cultural enablement of pedophilia and the obfuscation of the crime of pedophilia, as well as the experiences of it victims. 

Eating disorders. Most people don’t know this, but eating disorders are *directly* and significantly caused by pedophile attacks. There is a direct link from a pedophile attack to the development of an eating disorder. We see that 30-50% of patients with eating disorders have actually experienced child sexual abuse of some form — an absolutely staggering number. And yet, anorexia and bulimia and body dysmorphic disorder, have been presented to the public as a sort of a natural phenomenon of adolescence, caused ephemerally by unrealistic beauty standards, youthful self-consciousness, the drive for perfection in an increasingly American society, a commentary on a society that is predicated on consumerism, ad nauseam. 

Let’s just pause on that for a moment: Eating disorders are directly caused by pedophilia, and pedophilia victims make up a significant amount of people with eating disorders. Having been a victim of a pedophile is a leading indicator that someone will develop an eating disorder. And yet eating disorders are NOT recognized in association with pedophilia, not at all! Even though it a disease that we factually know is caused by pedophilia. 

Weird! You literally almost never hear it mentioned. This is akin to , for example, talking about lung cancer without ever mentioning cigarettes and pollution, or talking about concussions without ever mentioning the head injury. It SHOULD be widely understood and known that eating disorders are HIGHLY correlated and in fact casual. 

 In the 90s and the early aughts, there was a huge anorexia outbreak accompanied by an absolute glut of media. I have said this repeatedly in public, but I want to go on the record again as saying once again that I believe that one of the major early causes of the anorexia outbreak of that time period was a direct result of pedophiles joining the early internet at the same time young girls were adopting early social media platforms, including instant messaging and chat rooms. I was a victim of that crime wave; when me and my friends and kids across the world were coming online en masse and driving the dot com bubble straight to the top of NASDAQ, someone else was coming online too: huge numbers of pedophiles who could now hunt, surveil, contact, manipulate and pray on a captive audience of young girls. I’ll discuss this later in the piece, when we look at technology as a force multiplier for pedophiles and their crime rings, but for now, I will just say that the matter requires much deeper investigation and is utterly relevant to what is going on with social media platforms today. I’ve been seeing anorexia more and more on the streets and online, indicating that we are heading into yet another hell cycle of sexual abuse and ED.  

Perhaps one of the most disturbing factors in the “aughts” anorexia phenomenon, is that it was turned into a titillating public show and also a cultural phenomenon. All of a sudden celebrities on red carpets, in movies and TV shows, were extremely emaciated. 

The eating disorder (and yes, the pedophilia behind it) was presented as this shock and grotesqueness mixed with sexuality, that was fully reveled in and backed by corporations and media despite being conducted on the supposed “raising awareness”. Just as tabloids doubled down on fake concern, on the runways and TV shows, girls were almost skeletal — purposefully chosen or manipulated or given eating disorders by an industry that decided to make anorexia its primary aesthete. You have to wonder if that has anything to do with rampant sexual abuse in Hollywood, but that’s a matter for a different expert. 

 The obvious illness of the celebrities and musicians and fashion models became the centerpiece of the show more than any of the clothing or the events. There was a shock and a titillation there. It continued with the development of “heroin chic”, a goth, dark version of the anorexic, rock and roll, tragic, living fast and dying young. Entire fashion brands rose to a new level of prominence: Alexander McQueen and Calvin Klein most prominently. Some stars became a kind of celebrity eating disorder billboard. Then the TV exposes came out that went into eating disorder clinics, filmed extremely thin young women, and got huge distribution. To take it from culture, it was a romantic tale: the ruined possibilities of a young beautiful girl. Death and the maiden, again thematic here; where death is played by the pedophile. 

The cause of anorexia in this case was of course posited as being, vaguely, “society”, “internalized misogyny”, “self-hatred”, “beauty standards”, when the medical reality is that a decent part of this “trend” — in Hollywood or in broader society —  was emerging materially from child sexual abuse. Here, the grievous and deadly, and often life-long battles that result from pedophilia, are portrayed as being the product of young girl’s vanity, something frivolous, silly, narcissistic, and self serving… on the other side of that hand,  eating disorders themsleves are glamorized, made desirable, and also tragic/sexy.  

The absolute pop culture obsession was particularly alarming because anorexia is, in fact, a contagious phenomenon as well, so doing this type of glamorous showcasing of anorexia is in and of itself harmful to teen girls; especially if they were already vulnerable due to sexual attacks. 

 Far from just taking over the bodies of young girls, via the cultural machine, anorexia became omnipresent in society as its own infecting, blanketing ephemera. It is also a weapon. When you consider that what is being packaged and sold here is, in fact, the artifact of pedophilia, the image of it, the thing that comes from it, from the wound of pedophilia, it gets pretty scary to think about. Every part of the pedophile attack is enshrined in pop culture and in every part of it, the victim is re-victimized. The societal grooming, once again, is so holistic, that people don’t realize that, down to a detail, our society is full of pedophilia. Anorexia is in the very fabric of pop culture, art, fashion and health: the mark of the pedophile. It is pervasive, functioning as some kind of meta-pattern in society. 

I think there’s so much more to unpack here, and I hope that work will continue to be done. I think there are lots of these meta-patterns operating in society, and it deserves study. 

Most importantly, eating disorders carry a really significant death rate. Yet another area where we see that pedophilia has very mortal consequences, and pedophiles are very much murders and even serial killers.  

PEDOPHILES AT SCALE

Scale. 

If I could identify just one area that is the least understood, it would be in regards to the actual scale at which pedophiles operate. Our societal sense of scale as far as the impact and magnitude of pedophiles is completely, totally fucking off: the amount of sexual assault and rape that their victims are actually experiencing, the number of victims they have *overall*, the amount of grooming and engagement with pedophiles that victims and especially teen girls experience… 

The pedophile problem has been pitched as an occasional, rare and isolated tragedy, when really, pedophiles are operating at a much higher rate, a much higher scale, and much more aggressively,  than ANYTHING that is being discussed and portrayed in any forum. 

Number of Attacks on a Single Victim 

When you have all of these cultural ideas about an opportunistic flasher or someone who just had a moment of weakness in their “sexuality”, one of the take-aways is that pedophilia probably consists just the one singular act of assault. We tend to envision this as a short-term event; the stranger/opportunistic attack mythology is something that we also see in broader work about rape. Note throughout the piece, that one of the primary functions of pedophile myths and stereotypes is that it obscures incest and abuse that is happening *inside* the home. 

In reality, a pedophile attack often occurs over and over, and over time. If given the opportunity, the pedophile can continue the abuse for years and years. Let’s say that you have a pedophile who is in close proximity to their victim and has frequent access, and can abuse anywhere from several years to 6 or 7 years. A parent, teach, coach, family friend  — these are frequent pedophiles. So, you have proximity and trust…  what does the material weight of that and severity of the crime look like?  

Let’s just work out a quick scenario that, while disturbing, illustrates the issue of scale at the heart of it. It is definitely possible that under these circumstances, a pedophile could abuse the child once a week for two years  — that would be 104 rapes of a single victim by a single perpetrator in just a two year period. Even if you significantly lower those numbers to say, even, two attacks a month, you’re still looking just a staggering number of discrete instances of rape. And you can just take this sort of perspective and extrapolate it out to all kinds of scenarios which can add up to literally hundreds of abuses. And that’s like, you’re having a child who is getting raped hundreds of times during the most formative years of a human…. It’s unspeakable.  

We also see this very much in rape more generally, where the public views rape as a singular incident and not an ongoing thing that adds up to just an incalculable level or torturous and unimaginable suffering and violence over time; I.e., Think of situations like a marital rapists over the course of a 20 year marriage.

 Even one rape is awful and scars victims for life, but a materialist analysis and legality also requires that we include these pictures and understand that these are the crimes that are being committed, that this is the reality of brutal attack after brutal attack, that in no way accords with the suggestion that pedophiles are “virtuous” with occasional “slips” rather than calculated, vile, depraved predators with bottomless sadism.

 I’m not at all convinced that we have a clear picture of what the overall violence profile we are dealing with when it comes to pedophilia. Facets of the crime get simply flattened and condensed into “# of victims” statistics. But this leaves out key features and information that indicate that pedophiles are sadistic, very often repeat offenders who literally torture their victims over and over and over again, sometimes for years. 

People “avert their eyes” to the grotesqueness of pedophilia, what a pedophile is capable of. It’s alarming that people seem okay with attacks as long as they are only once in awhile, and out of sight, and then disregard even a high-level analysis of any other attack patterns. 

The fact that pedophiles categorically rape or sexually abuse children and teens dozens or hundreds of times in discrete, separate instances, totally blows out of the water the idea that pedophiles are somehow these innocent figures afflicted with the burden of an unwanted sexual desire who sometimes “slip” in a world with no support; no, these are people who knowingly and repeatedly, over and over, commit these crimes. There is literally no evidence in this or any other place that pedophiles actually fit the profile of very occasional, moral “lapses”. If pedophilia is about romance and love and attraction, that doesn’t really square with, say,  committing possible hundreds of thousands of rapes systemically over the course of decades, does it? What is hidden underneath the idea that the pedophile is driven by love or affection or “falls in love” with a child, is the enormous scale and spread of this crime.  And by focusing on just one profile of attack — one that is extremely culturally loaded and stereotyped  — we cannot possibly hope to understand enough about these predators to stop them. 

Victims at Scale

The same scale problem that applies to number of attacks on a victim, fans out to encompass the number of children a pedophile might attack over a long time period. 

For thought experiment’s sake, let’s take a coach who teaches maybe two different school sports teams, and during school hours teaches 3 different sections of PE. Thats five total discrete environments that may or may not have literally *any* other supervision. Perhaps the total amount of children the he has access to is 70 in the physical education classes and on the teams, plus another 40 on the football team and 30 on the basketball team, so you’re talking about having access to 140 children in a year, again, most likely without any other adult supervision many times. Let’s say even out of all of those children he manages to offend about twice a year on average. S0 over a 30 year career, that’s 60 victims, some of whom could easily be raped dozens of times by these predators. And I mean, that’s a very conservative estimate of the number of children that someone who is in a position of power over them and is there specifically to prey on children would able to attack.  

“70% of child sex offenders have between one and 9 victims, while 20% have 10 to 40 victims” — Darkness to Light.  

Pedophiles are not particularly presented as mass criminals or even, necessarily, people who offend more than once or twice, even though that it’s their MO. If you asked how many victims the actual child sex offender has, I don’t numbers like “40 victims” would even come to mind. 

 When people think of pedophiles, they don’t necessarily think: someone who has raped 75 children, or 150 children. The unit that is thought of is: one pedophile, one victim, one attack. We need to be looking at : one pedophile, dozens or hundreds of victims, many repeated attacks on each victim. 

 The idea that pedophiles aren’t, by nature, mass offenders is actually reinforced when prolific pedophiles like Epstein, Nassar, Sandusky, and Saville are presented as extreme outliers;  with the assumption that some kind of special and extreme, superlative, outlier circumstances are operating here and these are in no way reflective of what “normal” child sexual abuse looks like. The concept of extremity and rarity and exceptionality justifies the media circus of titillation and consumption around them, and also contributes to the idea that these are outlier scenarios, when they are absolutely not. 

Pedophiles are serial offenders. People underestimate the degree to which pedophiles  orchestrate their whole lives around getting near children, getting near vulnerable children, becoming more successful in their attacks, getting away with these crimes, etc. The pedophile is obsessed with their desire to hurt children. They become school teachers, parents, sports coaches, juvenile detention officers, professors, doctors, priests, anything that will give them access to child, put themselves in a significant degree of power over them and allow them to become serial rapists. Considering this and the advanced state of pedophilia in our schools, it must ALWAYS be questioned why men feel the need to have jobs that give them unsupervised access to children, as so many pedophile attacks tear though the school system. Their safety must come first.  

The serial nature of the pedophile supports the absolute *material* imperative of tracking pedophiles and stopping them as soon as possible in their offending careers. People tend to think of pedophilia as this very ephemeral thing that is hard to combat because it is random and fleeting, when in actuality you have this down to specific individual predators who are sitting in environments of enablement and might be parasitically consuming from a school, a team, juvenile facility, etc., plenty capable of hurting many, many children, even at the same time. 

In light of these facts, our approaches to stopping pedophiles cannot be open-ended, immaterial strategies like “education” and “stigma” and “orientation”, but must emerge from the *material* understanding that these are predators silently leaving a large victim trail in our communities, that need to be found and neutralized ASAP. 

A material analysis injects a new sense of urgency into the situation; in general we think of perhaps getting post-facto justice for the victim, which is absolutely vital, but it is also vital to stop anything that needs a “post facto” period; the requirement is to interrupt a fucking monster from continuing to feed on whatever child source it can find.   

 It is a material analysis that pedophiles are knowing, conscious, predators who, like other criminals, are constantly looking to better and forward their crimes. Through this lens we can understand that a pedophile can actually ‘IMPROVE’ over time, becoming more effective, be able to gain more and more victims and hurt them worse and worse, and become more and more sadistic, and get away with it all indefinitely. 

Pedophiles build up their numbers of harmed children, like serial killers, with consistent, uninterrupted, steady progress over time. We understand as a culture that serial killers are a type of serial predator; and serial rapists, but we don’t really think of “serial pedophiles.” (I would argue that the serial killer is the most analogous to pedophiles than even your standard serial rapists; they occupy an entire new extremity of narcissism, total lack of empathy, sadism, depravity, appetite and ties to death and perhaps mass death.) 

It may seem very ghoulish to model this out, but that is because these *are* ghoulish crimes and the framing of pedophilia in society, in media, in the criminal justice system and in the medical system, is completely manipulating the actual picture of what is going on with these pedophiles and how prolific they are.  

When I was being attacked, I, like many other pedophile victims, didn’t even CONSIDER that there might be other victims out there; that just wasn’t how I understood the crime even when I came to realize what he had truly done to me as I got older. I always thought that no matter what, it was just that there was something fucked up with me. Many pedophile victims don’t realize there could be other victims, thinking that it is their lone and isolated fault. This keeps you from trying to find and organize with other victims; you don’t even know they exist. 

When you start really getting a clearer view of the attack patterns that pedophiles have, the scale that they operate on, and the effect they have on children you see very clearly that you are dealing with an absolute fucking animal, one of the most dangerous predators that exists, and a type of predator who is uniquely capable of creating a mass disproportionate harm.

I’ve been working on this idea of the “super weapon” within the framework of oppression and radicalization; that in marked contrast to how we might think of oppression as kindof nebulous mesh of constant low level violence (micro aggressions, unconscious bias, stereotyping); we have these places of significant hyper-concentration of violence within individuals. You’re looking at a highly concentrated, incredibly prolific, exceptionally sophisticated, predator, that creates essentially massive explosions and “blast radiuses” around it. At it can STILL be  positioned as an isolated or outlier thing! 

A super weapon: It isn’t about one pedophile raping one child one time; it’s about pedophiles raping many many children many many times. Again, you could take the (false) perspective that pedophiles ARE outlier cases, or you could take the perspective that the system is continuously and PREDICTABLY producing these super predators, is continuously producing not only the pedophile itself but is producing the conditions around the pedophile that is going to allow it to make a disproportionate violent infliction. 

Up to 5% of men are pedophiles. 5% of men who are raping dozens or hundreds of children dozens or hundreds of times. 

I can conclude nothing else than that pedophilic system aims for full coverage of child sexual abuse. As in, every, single, child  harmed by pedophilia in some way. 

THE SCALE OF GROOMING 

What we really want to explore is the idea that pedophilia is a systems failure. That it requires a whole cascade of failures to happen, much less happen over and over and over and over. One area that we see that cascading failure show up is in grooming. 

Grooming has been more and more a topic in social justice circles. Unfortunately, it’s often been turned into some kind of political football that has ended up really watering down the notion of pedophilia, and moving it away from material conversations and into fighting about LGBT issues and so on. Many of the discourses today are distracting from the core points around grooming, and worst of all, suggest it is some kind of conspiracy theory. Notable, no cultural discussions on grooming seemed to have moved us any closer to a material understanding or approach to it.  

Where we do have a notion of grooming, yet again, we see the assumption here is that you have essentially one predator preying on one child, and the grooming unfolds over time in that specific context as the predator. But if you look a little more broadly, we see that grooming is happening really through particularly teen girl’s lives, and that grooming is happening on multiple levels of society, and that pedophiles actually work TOGETHER as a group to groom children even when they aren’t part of the discrete “grooming rings” we’ve been hearing more and more of lately.  

Let’s think about, let’s say, your average highschool-age girl. By this age she has likely already experienced sexual harassment, sexual teasing, street harassment, unwanted touch and sexual bullying from both adult and teen males. As #FastTailedGirls described years ago, many teen girls, especially Black girls, experience male sexual grooming from a very, very young age. By the time a girl is in high school, she more than likely has been consistently looked up and down on the streets for years, with older men hitting on her, making lascivious remarks, probably yelling at her for “turning them down”. She has probably already been encouraged to stay away from certain members of the family — older women in a family will even warn young girls about these predators, while doing nothing to remove them from the actual environments. There are all kinds of examples; a teacher’s sexual comments at school, an older brother’s friends trying to hit on you… dozens of strangers commenting on your Instagram photos with sexual content.   

The point is, by the time a pedophile is able to successfully attack a young girl, she has been “groomed” by dozens of other older men — acclimated to being approached by older men, desensitized to following their whims, normalizing contact… pedophiles also will “groom” someone up to a point and might not actually make the attack, probably for fear of being caught; yet the grooming it harmful *in and of itself* and still persists beyond that specific event. Other pedophilic sexual harassers, abusers and groomers have “weakened” her to attack many times before. 

Teen girls are America’s #1 enemy, and I don’t think I need to go through the list of harms they are subject to that make them so vulnerable to predation in the first place. Bullying at school, body dysmorphia and eating disorders, parental neglect, dating violence, conspires in many ways that may ultimately serve the child to the pedophile. It makes her insecure, low self esteem, unable to assert boundaries, desperate to escape, in need of resources, traumatized — it takes so many different facets to combine to “produce” a teen girl that is easy for a pedophile to attack. The constant downward pressure and abuse of teen girls in society overall, makes her perfect bait for sexual predators. The world is orchestrated in such a way that it produces victims that are “ripe” for the picking. By 18 years of age, 20% of girls have been sexually abused. That doesn’t happen, again, without a vast system around the teen girl making it possible. Vulnerability and access are among the biggest factors that appeal to a pedophile. It is the context of a society that hates teen girls that provides the platform for pedophilia. 

Same anti-pattern here where the model we have is 1 pedophile grooming 1 girl; when we need to be looking at this more as 1 girl, and possibly 100 distinct grooming events that have occurred across her lifetime. And with the internet, we bring in a whole NEW level of grooming. 

One of the most under-reported stories in computing history is the mass waves of pedophilia, the enormous SCALE of pedophilia that have been enabled by these apps. For just one example: when news broke that Chris Delia was a serial pedophile and sexual predator, over *500 girls* reached out with stories of him approaching them online. 

And that number is made up of the girls who heard the story, AND reported it to this specific outreach, so the actual volume is more than likely much larger. 

This provides another example of how what many perceive as a 1:1 crimes is in fact a 1:1000s, potentially. This shows a pedophile operating essentially as a spammer, sending huge numbers of contacts out to teen girls and seeing who responds, what they have to say, if it seems like he might be able to manipulate them. From that he might be able to get some percent of those girls to send him photos, from there he will set up a certain number of girls he can meet up with while he’s on the road , and from there he might be able to sexually assault some of them. Chris D’Elia was operating as a standard *sales* funnel - literally how marketers work to generate leads and eventual secure a desired action.

This again demonstrates how pedophiles are not passive, opportunistically attacking children, but rather that they are devising and using very sophisticated strategies for honing their craft and criminality over time. Over time he would have learned what types of questions and messages were more likely to yield a result, which specific age of girl was most vulnerable, what the profile of a vulnerable girl would look like, maybe socioeconomic status, family composition, any mental issues…. They, like all sadistic psychopaths, get better and better at the work with experience. 

Let’s work some basic math. If 500 girls reported Delia, and let’s guess, extremely conservatively, that there were 2 girls for every one that wasn’t reported, we are looking 1500 total girls reached…. But how many girls did he *look at* to even get to the ones he decided to message? 

He probably looked at tens of thousands of young girls’ accounts. Another place where social concepts of grooming suggest 1:1, when in reality we have one pedophile reaching potentially 10,000s of people over a lifetime. 

 This brings up a pretty significant question, which is why Chris D’Elia was able to operate *on these platforms* for so long, when you are seeing a data pattern from the account of a man in his late 30s sending out thousands and thousands of messages to specifically teen girls, where you see grown men spending thousands of hours and hours online browsing young girls, where you are seeing huge numbers of older male viewership on these girls? 

Is it because this pattern is part of the very fabric of these companies? Tech wants us to think that there’s nothing we can do about pedophiles on the internet, that its just a statistical inevitability that we have pedophiles on these platforms rather than something that in inherent to the design and operation of the tech platform itself.

When we talk about grooming, we think about the pedophiles who are doing the grooming, of course, but less about how tech platforms like Instagram and Snapchat sexually exploit teen girls. The internet has exponentially increased pedophile’s access to children, and has done very very little to stop it. Many men are on platforms with a young demographic, like Snapchat and Instagram, exclusively to look at girls. In fact, teen girl adoption is the #1 vital thing to consumer companies, because it drives a whole lot of users, traffic, and interactions on platforms. It is well-known in the Valley that teen girls are more valuable than any other target audience. Which means that the platforms in and of themselves are predicated on *at minumum* mass consumption of teen girls. Studies have long shown that most of the traffic on Facebook is just people looking at girls and women. “Capturing” the women and then providing the access to them — that is the *actual* basis of these company’s financial success. Protecting teen girls is anathema to those goals, and its concerning that both pedophiles and platforms have a shared interest in teen girls’ bodies and in things like capturing their sexuality, sexual expression, and other normal things that teenagers are going through, but that shouldn’t be fodder for social media companies and pedophiles. The internet has given pedophiles the ability to be able to be around and contact 1000s of children, and it has given them new tools for exploitation — things like blackmail using digital images, catfishing, hacks of major platforms like SnapChat, grooming rings, coerced web cam shows, etc. 

 I think people don’t really realize the extent to which the design of the early internet and subsequent versions of its social media platforms gave pedophiles an entirely order of magnitude of change to how they operate. With the scale of the internet came the scale of pedophiles. But studies about this have typically ignored the function of scale. Asking someone if they’ve ever, for example, been sexually harassed by an older man, is a different question than “how *many men* and how *many times* have you been approached”. Most stats provided on child sexual abuse online are heavily caveated by institutions as likely to represent only a small fraction of what is actually happening. 

The fact of the matter is, is that its not just that you have to worry about a *single* contact with a child, but the far more likely reality that NUMEROUS pedophiles are engaging with teenage girls online, all of the time. Again you have this perception issue where you think a child would, only on an outlier basis, have the misfortune of meeting a pedophile; rather, it’s highly unlikely over the teen years that a teen girl *hasn’t* encountered a pedophile or many of them. It’s totally within the realm of possibility that teen girls have been approached by even dozens of pedophiles online. During the days of the early internet, in AOL and Yahoo! Chatrooms, I interacted with pedophiles all the time. You would give them your A/S/L, and they would say that they were looking for a girl just like you. I was asked for cam shows, given phone cards to call them, engaged in cybersex, etc. By the time that a pedophile was able to physically sexually abuse me, I was already very used to talking to older men online and interacting with the on a sexual level. If there is a continuous onslaught of pedophile activity, and essentially pedophile “attempts”, then to some vantage points it’s only a matter of time until the right constellation of vulnerabilities align.

A girl online starts writing back to a few of the pedophiles, just here and there, then blocking and moving on; but then the next time she talks a little longer. Maybe one weekend her boyfriend at high school dumped her and she’s feeling angry, and then she sends pictures of her boobs to a “cute” “successful” 35 year old that’s been in her DMs, like he asked, and he sends her $200 and that is like literally twenty weeks of allowance. And then the next time it’s easier to take the photos. And then it’s easier to show more and more of your body. And even if that’s where that particular predator stopped, another predator has an easier time in the future because of that progressive breaking down. Each of these steps is, on its own, a damaging sexual violation, and they lead to greater and greater harm, often ending in child rape.  

Looking at all of this in totality, we see a few things emerge. One conclusion that we can come fairly easily to is that grooming is actually a group process, that *multiple* predators will participate in grooming, and that over time, this makes children and teens more and more vulnerable; and that the culture itself grooms teen girls to be pedophile victims.  

How Pedophiles Work Together 

The next place we arrive at when looking at grooming as a group process is, of course: if pedophiles are in fact group animals, what other sorts of ways are pedophiles functioning as a body? 

Far from the picture of pedophiles being isolated, solitary predators, these are people who recognize and support each other. The internet is not only a way for them to find targets, but also for them to find *each other*. 

This is nowhere more evident than in the MAP “community” online where pedophiles openly gather. MAP stands for “Minor-Attracted Person”, a group which promotes social acceptance of pedophiles and claims they are not predators, but rather have a different sexuality. Surprise surprise, the same talking points we see from pedophiles are the ones that are expressed in the dominant press, society and medical systems. The MAP pedophile ring emerged on Tumblr, where it stayed until Tumblr changed its ToS to exclude “adult content”, after that, they all moved onto Twitter, which, far from acting swiftly against the incoming ring, updated *its* ToS to explicitly allow MAPs.  Twitter is yet another tech company that hosts many many children and teens, yet puts pedophiles first. I’ve heard that Twitter has since updated its ToS to be less welcoming to MAPs, but that their *first response* to the mass migration of pedophiles onto their platform was to welcome them, offers yet more proof of how tech companies coddle pedophiles and see them as an audience worth protecting and platforming. 

This very much to me is worth looking at through the lens of other online groups such as 4chan, 8chan and Kiwifarms, where you must worry about a radicalizing element, where contact, group bonds, social dynamics, and sheer access produce increasing extremes in viewpoints and actions. What is the radicalizing function of allowing these groups to flourish online, protected by tech companies? 

Pedophiles are group animals. They work together. The Epstein ring formation isn’t rare; this how they have operated through time and continue to operate. They are congregating in clubs and groups, producing propaganda to minimize pedophile, making it seem less dangerous via medicalized framings, using “MAP” as a platform to engage with children themselves, spreading child sexual assault material and trafficking children and teens. They are sharing conquests and trophies and hunting grounds and strategies and tactics. The high level of organization here, that pedophiles as standard practice operate as a ring, removes all doubt that this is some kind of unwanted sexuality, that they function as sophisticated, cold blooded opportunists who organize very deeply to benefit all of them.   

The idea of the pedophile ring is again suggested to be rare and extreme outliers, something rarified that you perhaps see in these very affluent communities, or some shadow group that exists on the dark web. But what if they aren’t the outlier case at all, but  that the ring formation is a core part of how they operate? Without understand the ring, we aren’t even able to address what  type of predator we are looking at.  

Pedophiles have had to organize for a long time, if in nothing else but their need to obtain child sexual abuse material; obtaining the pedophilic material has historical required a level of coordination that’s pretty significant, to deal with distribution, payments, security, etc., and to avoid being busted. Things even before the internet needed to be mailed, passed around as video cassettes and photos. So farrrr before the internet, there were already huge child sexual assault rings functioning. 

Many efforts on all sides of the political spectrum have been made to make the existence of significant rings with significant influence over society seem like just a conspiracy. But there is just an overwhelming amount of evidence that rings are standard operating procedure. You see it of course in the high-profile cases; most significantly the Catholic Church, which is undeniably a mega pedophile ring, and you see in Epstein, the Boy Scouts, and the Sandusky attacks, where significant collaboration has happened. You also see tons of evidence in the busts of child pornography rings on the dark web, and even groups that work together to sexually abuse and then blackmail young girls. The recent Netflix documentary, “Cyberhell: Exposing An Internet Horror”, covers the later in disturbing detail. 

You also see evidence of rings as SOP in how pedophiles are frequently forming various organizations and collectives, to variously advocate for them to be accepted, to advocate for their “right” to abuse young boys (NABLA), the “virtuous pedophile” movement, and most recently, the “MAP” (Minor-attracted person) “movement”, yet another attempt to paint pedophilia as a sexuality. MAPs on Twitter very openly groom children. Pedophiles also have a number of website and chat groups as well to “support” each other in what is sold as a a kind of therapy group that supposedly is to keep the from “stopping offending”. But really it just allows them to find each other and gain the benefits of operating as a ring. 

Pedophiles identify each other as easily as we can detect people who share our interests and personality traits. Indeed, we see that pedophiles want to, and do, find each other, they identify each other, that they organize themselves into groups and then forward their abuse through those groups and formations. And these groups are trivially accessible to pedophiles through a Twitter account or other platforms which also have a large audience of young people. These communities are someplace pedophiles can always go to “link up” with various other rings and parts of rings whenever they want. 

Outside of internet activity, the Catholic Church has been a huge refuge for pedophiles, and pedophiles have specifically flocked to the Catholic Church because it has been, multi-generationally, a giant pedophile ring and protective entity. Perhaps one of the more frightening aspects of the Catholic Church incidents it that it means that literally any pedophile on earth can go there and be protected, and be in some kind of sick devilish brotherhood with other pedophiles. That is a level of access and institutional protection that very few other predators could ever access. 

Pedophiles always have a home in one of the rings; they have a support system. They know where they can find a safe place, where they will be able to offend unobstructed and work with other pedophiles on raping children. We can’t underestimate the degree to which a ring provides safety and security for the pedophile while allowing the overall conspiracy to continue. When you look at just how dangerous a lone pedophile can be, we can barely fathom how dangerous it is when they get together. The ring actually provides a platform where they can quickly bootstrap their offending off of, as well as protect themselves from consequences. 

Far from “just” distributing child sexual abuse materials or chatting online with each other online, rings exchange money with each other, commission child sexual material,  share information on specific children as well as tactics for more effectively hunting them, work to blackmail and harass victims. This is a way for them to pool resources, such as money, legal assistance, drugs, locations for molestation, intelligence on hunting grounds, strategies,  and undoubtably, children themselves. 

I theorize that there are very few pedophiles who are not connected to some form of pedophilia ring, even if it’s “just” an online child porn distribution ring. They detect each other easily, and benefit enormously from each other’s company. Among themselves, they discuss such things openly, share trophies, etc. The benefits to them are enormous, and they have a shared obsession and problem set, so they have no reason to quarrel.  

Based on all of the numbers, extrapolations, and facts about the level of organizing that is occurring, it’s my personal belief that there is no single child in America who is not being watched by a pedophile in some way at all times, whether anyone is aware of it or not.

It is absolutely crucial to understand that THIS IS THE NATURE OF THE CRIME. Understanding that pedophiles organize this deeply has serious implications for how we address pedophilia as a community. First of all, where there is one pedophilia we should assume there are others, and then attempt to dig the rest of them off. The capture of a single pedophile should be treated as the discovery of a crime ring, not just the conclusion of an individual case. They must be hunted as rings because they operate as rings.

Rings also have a built-in protective function in that, because society sees pedophilia as a 1:1 crime, if one pedophile is discovered, it’s an almost guarantee that no further efforts will be made; not to find other victims, and certainly not to locate other pedophiles. When an individual member of the ring is taken up on child sexual abuse charges, for example, the ring very much remains intact, it is simply as if a starfish losing one of its arms, and there are no further implications for the rest of the ring. The ring is also able to learn from the ones that got picked off. We see this with Epstein and Maxwell; they were clearly but a part of a very vast ring which itself as gone almost totally unpunished. In fact, there have been almost no efforts whatsoever to dismantle the ring; and thus, it continues to operate. This effects how we see these cases and frame them from a legal perspective. 

Law enforcement is very aware that pedophiles act in rings; however they prosecute on a case-by-case basis and almost never open investigations into other potential members of the ring.

People, especially of late due to things like PizzaGate, tend to view the idea of international pedophile rings as patently absurd, even though we have before us in plain evidence established rings in the Catholic Church, which again, is one of the most powerful and monied institutions in existence. Dismissing ideas about pedophile rings while it is in evidence that that is how they operate and that it is often integral to the crime, is absurd. Especially because the implications are that if you find one you could in most likelihood track them to other parts of the ring; viewing pedophilia through the lens of a ring provides a much more solid legal foundation as well as an investigative strategy for finding and neutralizing pedophiles. 

Where there is one pedophile, there are others. All evidence suggests that they are very much group hunters, and at this point, it is grossly irresponsible to pretend otherwise, or take a single chance of a giant ring of pedophiles getting away with only one of its members getting what is often a small punishment. 

It is my personal belief  that every pedophile in the world is connected to other pedophiles, and that blanket coverage of abuse of children is their #1 priority — an objective they pursue as a organized criminal effort.  

The Never Ending Attack: The Cycle of Abuse 

Pedophile kicks off what is known popularly as “the cycle of violence”. The cycle of violence is how we explain what happens within a domestic violence relationship, as well as the phenomenon of serial abuse across multiple partners, where a woman ends up in relationships with abusive men over and over. The latter is chalked up to some nebulous, armchair psychology in which a victim “seeks out” violence and violent men because that’s “what she knows”, or because that she is trying to repeat it, to make it better and prove that she can fix it. 

This is fucking ridiculous. Instead of jumping through hoops to explain why women end up being serially victimized,  and pinning it on psychological issue in the victim, we need to start calling it what it is: predators deliberately target previous victims of abuse, victims that have already been harmed. This is very typical of their cowardice. Someone who has been so grievously wounded is infinitely more vulnerable. 

The way that pedophile victims are described as being in a “cycle of violence” again positions the victims themselves as the cause of it. These concepts about “wanting to fix it” are poetic and fanciful, and certainly, trauma we have endured does impact how we behave in relationships. However, this type of putting responsibility right onto the victim should be ringing some alarm bells. In this vision, the implication is that IF SHE CHANGED, if she healed, if she… moved on… if she stopped wanting to be abused… she could change the course of her future. 

 We tend to view this as really about being the behaviors of the victim, as opposed to the behaviors of the predator itself. When pedophile victims who are attacked by other abusers later in life, it’s presented as if victims are nebulously and intangibly going through some psychological journey of ever trying to figure out some solution to their trauma, to “have another chance” to do it right; I think these explanations are compelling in a limited way, but they leave out the more more obvious and materialistic factor, which is that predators are over and over converging on the same victim. 

The National Center for Victims of Crimes says that children who had an experience of rape or attempted rape in their adolescent years were 13.7 times more likely to experience rape or attempted rape in their first year of college. 

A moment just to consider the insane proposition that girls who are attacked by pedophiles in high school go on to be raped *in their very first year of college*.

Further, studies indicate that predators are finally tuned instruments at sniffing out potentially vulnerable subjects. They can SPECIFICALLY tell the difference between victims and non-victims *without even needing to speak to them*, they can tell, in particular, *by how a woman walks* (seriously), if she’s previously been a victim of violence. And those are the women they will attack. (Of course, the study authors go on to recommend that victims *change the way they walk*, a classic example of science around sexual assault victims always winding back to victim blaming.)  

We know that predators specifically target victims that they think are weak, submissive, or won’t fight back. Repeated victims of crimes, especially pedophilia, make targets more isolated, to already have trauma reactions, to be easier to manipulate and control, to be acclimated to sexual and physical violence, and to have distorted ideas of what is “normal” or “okay” in a relationship.   

The “cycle of violence” as it is accepted in society is a fundamental misrepresentation of what the cycle of violence actually is. What it REALLY is: PREDATORS serially attack victims. Pedophilia is often the very first step in what will sadly be a lifetime of sexual and domestic abuse — and that is one consequence that we don’t talk nearly enough about.  

Like many abuse victims, my pedophile attack was not only devastating but also started a, thus far, life-long series of attacks by other abusers. Immediately following my “relationship” with the pedophile, I very quickly got into a severely physically and emotionally abusive relationship with another man, yet another serial offender who had also beaten his prior wife and girlfriends. Over the next 15 years after the pedophile attack, I experienced blackmail, sexual assault and rape, extreme neglect, serial cheating, “revenge porn” and more. Even though nothing could ever surpass the rape I experienced as a child, it also condemned me to many, many attacks over the years. There have been times when I thought I would actually die under a man’s hands. And, sure, my original abuser didn’t personally, physically commit those acts; but he did put a bullseye on my back for many other predators to come; he put a mark on me that would attract other psychopathic abusers forever; his actions are linked directly to what happened to me afterwards.     

We need to incorporate a lens of how predators are working together in both very *explicit* ways, such as child pornography rings, as well as how they work together more *implicitly*, in that their actions benefit each other and they benefit from prior attacks on their victims. 

I am coming to think of this as, rather then the cycle of abuse, a “chain of violence” which forms around the victim through their life. Pedophiles provide a platform for an entire lineage of abuse to begin, it kicks off this… pattern that is going to benefit other abusers and that is also going to drive an increasing torture and growing trauma around victims. Sometimes, they are killed by other predators down the road, another way that pedophilia can be directly linked to murder.  

If the pedophilic abuse is the very first wound, than to his “brother abusers”, all the abusers that will come later, the pedophile is a highly prized predator in the system, essentially creating the foundation for future abuse. Imagine not only the pedophiles out there working to cover up for each other, but all manner of wife beater and rapist who receives those fruits, also being complicit in it? *This* is a societal function that pedophiles have: producing victims for others. 

When you start to look at the chain of abuse that will unravel across a victim’s lifetime, it becomes uniquely horrifying in magnitude. You have an initial instance of rape by the pedophile, which could be anywhere from one time to hundreds of times, then goes on to be targeted by other predators, who may then add on more, dozens or hundreds of other attacks. By my estimation, between the pedophile who attacked me and the domestic abuser who came after him, I was raped several hundred times and beaten almost 100 times, all before I turned 22.  

While this of course sounds horrific, it is 100% bourne out in the long-term outcomes of pedophile victims; horrific abuse of pedophile victims throughout their lives is not at all an outlier result from pedophilia, but rather a near-guaranteed, direct outcome. 

The full horrificness of pedophilia, as something that we are looking at chronologically, at scale, and with a material model, is simply not reflected in the societal framing of pedophilia. When we look at the criminality around pedophiles, it is insufficient to look just at a limited notion of what happened in the space of the offense, but rather what happens after as well. Pedophiles are inflicting not only the damage of their abuse, but potentially an entire lifetime of other abusers. Some go on to be raped and beaten their entire lives, to go missing or be murdered. And pedophiles are perfectly aware that that is what they are doing.  

Of course, when people hear about the “cycle of violence” when it comes to pedophiles, one of their assumptions is about people who are abused grow up to be abusers. As we touched on earlier, although this idea has been profoundly debunked by research, the idea still exists in the culture: that pedophilia is caused by child sexual abuse. This is actually a really core component of how the case for mistreating and marginalizing victims is made by society; by this logic, the victim will grow up to be a pedophile, and so is lost and guilty; and the pedophile was victim of child sexual abuse, and so is redeemable and innocent. The pedophile victim is absolutely doomed, and there is nothing that can be done by society; just one more facet where the idea of pedophile victims as “forever broken/malformed” shows up. The fact that people believe pedophiles are themselves victims, is actually just a pedophile lie that is purposefully designed to evoke pity. In fact, they’ve found that serial killers and child sexual offenders repeatedly and commonly lie about having been sexually abused as children, a reflection of their sociopathic ability to deflect and gain pity and acceptance; they *themselves* are the source of the myth that victims become abusers. This is yet more indicator of how pedophiles are manipulative on much larger than the 1:1 level of their victim, that they as an organized body go so far as to build and feed the myths and stereotypes that promote society’s coddling of them. 

Pedophilia as Community Crime

As we’ve established throughout the article, in order for an event like pedophilia to occur, there has to be a very significant matrices of things that have gone wrong, break downs in society, cultural, law, home life, in church and schools. You do not arrive at somewhere like “child rape is endemic in our society” without many things having broken down that should have. Vulnerabilities are created by home abuse, by bullying or poor esteems, by lack of appropriate vetting and supervision of adults entrusted to care for children, by negligence in the school system, by complicity through silence, and of course, by the abusive cultural and societal constructs about sex that prime young girls to be pedophile bait. 

Again, we are very much used to looking at pedophilia as something that is happening only with the perpetrator, acting alone, on a singular individual. Time and time again we find that *many* people KNOW when there is a pedophile in the community, that they KNOW when a child is being attacked. We see over and over again both in “tabloid” cases and in small case studies that again and again and again, people knew that the pedophile was a pedophile, that the pedophile was offending, and even that a specific pedophile is abusing a specific child. Sometimes multiple members of a family, a congregation. Children’s own parents will know that the child is being abused, perhaps by their own spouse, and still do nothing. 

We’ve had a few examples of complicity through silence in recent years. DSA members have stated that the fact that Virgil Texas of the Chapo Traphouse was a sexual abuser and pedophile, was an “open secret” in leftist organizations who were aware and did nothing. Everyone around him knew Epstein was an abuser, and harbored him anyways; years after the first conviction in Florida, Ghislane Maxwell was invited to the holiday party of the one the most powerful venture capitalist firms in the US. A few years back, one of the VCs there “leaked” that “everyone knew” what Ghislane was. How many people total knew that Epstein was abusing and trafficking teen girls? Thousands, certainly. Sandusky? *Everyone* knew. In cases like R. Kelly, thousands of people who personally observed this over course of *years* averted their eyes, not to mention the music community and pop culture overall. When I was kidnapped by the pedophile, he introduced me to several of his friends, all in their 40s while I was 17. None of them asked me if I was okay, or pulled me aside, or warned me, or tried to do or say anything about it. 

Again, society has this “revulsion to pedophile” myth, and that leads to the myth that, when they become aware that child abuse is happening, they will somehow leap into action and make sure that the child has been saved; this is simply not the case. One of the biggest myths about pedophilia is that someone will do something about it when it happens. It is a myth that ALSO provides the diffusion of responsibility: of course we would act on it if we saw it happen, therefore, SOMEONE (read: someone else) will intervene. 

We ascribe the complicity of the community in sexual abuse, where we admit it, to the shame and taboo around sexual abuse, and then conclude that reducing the taboo is what is called for. That is absolutely fucking insane assumption. First, there is no taboo against pedophilia in society, as we clearly see here. Seeing a child or children be sexually abused and allowing them to continue to be is itself participation in the pedophilia itself. It is material collaboration. Any “taboo”, real or perceived, is not an excuse to depart from the ethical and humanitarian demand to end pedophiles. 

Families, schools, churches  —  in addition to knowing and not doing anything, will even try to REPRESS the child. Children will be shut down and shamed, told not to talk about it, or to “stay away from your uncle.” Almost immediately upon attack, the child is in fact thrown into an incredible isolation. It’s not unusual that a child DOES try to report an offense and is ignored, told to shut up, threatened, etc. We even see situations with mothers and daughters where the mother is in fact angry with the daughter for “seducing” a boyfriend or husband who is raping the girl. Even while the crime is ongoing, the child is being isolated from their support system, or rather, that support system is actually recoiling from the victim. This is a massive amount of culpability and more evidence of the way the pedophile actually requires a whole community vessel in order to function. 

Communities harbor pedophiles. It is often an “open secret” that they exist and are active in a community. There are always rumors or reports, insinuations that someone left the last town under suspicious circumstances, children that are shushed. This is, at a minimum, serious, criminal and grievous neglect, that predators are known to be extremely dangerous and violent, are known to be active in the community, and yet not take the steps needed to defend a community from them — this is, in and of itself, community participation in the attacks. 

There are thousands of checks that should be in place for this. From screening for child abuse, to making sure that adult men aren’t left unsupervised around young girls, to identification of neglect in homes and schools, to more extensive checks around people who are being hired to work with children. In my mind these could and should include things like lie detector tests, psychological profiling, etc. No adult has a “right” to be around a child, and those who are seeking jobs that give them this kind of access to children, should be very carefully evaluated and surveilled. 

It is also the community that participates in what happens after the assault, where victims are often ostracized if they even tell their stories at all. It is the COMMUNITY that makes it shameful to be a victim — to essentially write victims off as ruined or broken, bringing something to light that should be kept in the darkness. When it comes to pedophilia, EVERYONE’s job to keep the secret. It is a lot like what you see in the alcoholic family system, where everyone around knows exactly what is happening but everyone has a major investment in the denial that is holding the entire lie together. 

Pedophile victims are seen as being too damaged or too much work to be in any kind of relationship, e.g., people don’t want to date someone who is a pedophile victim. You are “tainted;” just the unfortunate consequence of an outlier event. Meanwhile, pedophiles themselves are regarded as rehabitable and worthy of reform. It is almost as if the pedophilia is a permanent mark on the victim, but committing the crime is not a permanent mark on the perpetrator. 

Community harm also comes with the issue of justice and the legal system. Pedophile victims rarely, if ever, see justice served. The majority don’t report, for obvious reasons; when reported, authorities don’t follow up; cases are thrown out of court or charges are not filed, or in the rare even that case like this *does* move into a court of law, they won’t necessarily be found guilty, or required to serve a significant amount of time. A lot of pedophile victims don’t begin the search for justice until later in life. It was only as I got older and older and realized that, in my early 20s, I would *never* date a high schooler — to imagine a 45 year old doing so was repellent. That phenomenon — of over time, getting closer and closer to the age of the pedophile at the point of attack and thus truly realizing the grotesqueness of the crime —  is something that gets worse and worse as you get old; for me, the closer I get to the age that the pedophile was when he attacked me, I became more and more horrified. I was attacked at 16 and he was 45; it has been 16 years, and at 35, I am still ten years younger than he was when he abused me. Oftentimes by the time you really come to understand what happened to you, the statue of limitations has expired and you aren’t even ABLE to file criminal or civil suits.  

I could cite a thousand more sources, but I think we all know that sexual abuse victims rarely if even get any meaningful justice. Denying justice to victims interrupts a very sacred legal process and keeps victims away from things that are vital to their healing. And despite knowing that very few victims see justice in the court system, there aren’t any community mechanisms, such as community trials, community punishments (like banishment), physical punishment, etc. Denying justice extends the crime, and it is another way that the community conspires to make sure that the crime of pedophilia does what it in intended to do: cause permanent injury. 

There’s a whole other host of ways that the community continues to neglect and provoke the pedophile victim even after the attack has ceased. For example, the lack of considering pedophile victims as an important and also marginalized group, and not recognizing the health needs they have as a unique group, means there is lack of needed health care for psychological and other health needs. Not to mention the way that, more broadly, they are continually triggered and re-traumatized by a pedophile-soaked culture. 

The consequences of a pedophile attack are *artificially sustained* in the victim via neglect, shame, lack of resources to address the health consequences of the attack, lack of justice. The community carries on the crime before and after the physical attack in and of itself.  Gaining victims fundamentally depends on community neglect, indifference, and coddling of child rapists. Community is a critical part of the pedophile’s actions. 

If you want to fully dismantle the system of pedophiles, you have to include EVERYONE who was involved in that process; and not only do they bear responsibility for that specific child but any other children that the pedophile might go on to attack. Regularly, people allow pedophiles to continue functioning; this is to allow a man eating lion into your school, daycare, home, and is a deadly sin.  

Sometimes I do work on identifying and stopping pedophiles active on the internet, so I want to tell you about one incident in particular. I identified a pedophile operating within the MAP pedophile group on Twitter, and worked to gather evidence of his activity. I then looked up associates, employers, clubs or organizations, etc. He was affiliated with to serve notice. I reached out to maybe 10 different people; I didn’t hear back from a single one of them, in fact, many of them blocked my contact. And the pedophile then went onto his feed and posted proudly that all of his friends and business associates support him; even as he is openly writing songs about molesting little girls, engaging in an active pedophile group, doing interviews with other pedophiles on his blog, etc. 

This was particularly eye-opening as to how communities, very much knowingly, harbor pedophiles; and worse than that, they will actively defend the pedophile. Unless you make it punishable, and people fear an offense for direct enablement, harboring and coddling of pedophilia, nothing will change. People who know about child sexual abuse and do nothing should be severely punished. The world needs a reminder of what natural law demands we do with regards to pedophiles, and the punishment that should naturally follow. 

In a community crime, EVERYONE is guilty and EVERYONE must receive a penalty that is equal to the magnitude of the crime: again, we are talking about rape of children and ANYONE who forwards their cause knowingly, fails to act on pedophile reports, or fails to sufficiently protect the children in their care, has committed a grave offense. 

Pedophilia in Pop Culture  

Let’s zero in on another area that pedophilia is a group process, and that is in pop culture. I’m going to focus for the most part on teen girls, my area of expertise, but also one of the most telling case studies: the ways that teen girls specifically are targeted in the culture in ways that make the vulnerable to pedophiles. 

Let’s start with a pervasive cultural concept: the gold digger. The image of the gold digger is *always* a younger woman, and not just younger, SIGNIFICANTLY younger. We think of her as being poor, young, never had the chance to make any money, doesn’t want to work, so now, she devotes herself to getting money out of me. This plays into the “role reversal” that is consistently done of pedophiles and their victims. In the role reversal, pedophiles are *victims* of a teen’s sexual designs on them, a victim of the young woman’s vapid desire for material objects. It is sacrosanct that young girls *go out of their way* to get older men — who are often portrayed as being vulnerable *because* of their age while the girls themselves are not. The girl is calculating, untrustworthy, “in it for the wrong reasons” — meanwhile no one asks themselves what the man’s motivations for being in a relationship with a teenager or young girl, at ages, where most girls have never lived independently and are in their first years of college; these are not “adults” in any realistic or honest sense, but rather girls in a formative transitory period. 

People see the economic view of the gold digger, they see this as something about consumerism and money, but ignore the fact that the gold digger archetype is literally based in the notion of a predatory age gap. People always say: “no way she would be with him if it wasn’t for his money”; but they never say: “he wouldn’t be with her if she wasn’t young and exploitable.” 

One of the seeming cultural justifications for this is that the older person imparts some kind of special knowledge or mentorship onto the young girl. In reality, pedophiles and people exploiting age gaps are again, in it for the exploitation and sexual abuse. There is nothing to be “learned” from a psychopath, and believe me when I say the pedophile has zero intention of providing ANY enrichment to their victim; they are in it specifically for sadistic reasons. 

The gold digger stereotype, straight up, is a cover for pedophilia and age gap abuses overall. At the same time as these girls are seen as users, they also fuel a pedophilic or ephebophilic  cultural fantasy, where in fact the young girl is the “reward” and even the justified property/treasure of an old man. There’s a clear insinuation that this man is somehow “winning” in life or is ahead of the game if he is dating a young girl. A young girl is  something that you gain access to because of your career success, or because you are well-established, or your money or your property — again, most of the cultural content about pedophilia is directly tied to consumerism. 

People love the gold digging story because it reinforces a number of our ideas about wealth, power, or fame. Part of the lore here is that because of these rarified traits, such as wealth, power, or fame, men have earned or deserve pedophilia, which is “the prize” and “what every man wants”. 

 The fact that it is taboo, that it seemingly alludes to money and fame and accomplishment, positions the pedophile as superior to other men. For example, in the case of Hugh Hefner where multiple teen girls he was “in a relationship with” just enhanced his “playboy image” and his reputation as a publisher and business man. Meanwhile, many of these girls have since come out and described that, in fact, the pedophile did what pedophiles do: traffic and rape and exploit them. These were very young girls, teenagers. And PlayBoy regularly featured teenagers as well. This is one of the main “products” of the PlayBoy brand: the normalizing and glamorizing extreme age gaps and sexual exploitation of young girls.    

Hugh Hefner was *specifically* beloved and admired for access to the “fantasy” of the Playboy mansion. And what exactly was that “fantasy”? The “reality” of sexually abusing teenagers on reality shows? America absolutely has eaten it all up. It shows not only predators at their apex, but demonstrated that as a society we seem to long for pedophilia, to enjoy it voyeuristically; and when it plays out in our own lives, we also merely watch. 

In Hollywood and music culture, pedophiles are allowed to openly attack teens, and this is treated as some kind of unique, but normal and acceptable relationship pattern. Leonardo DiCaprio is an example who always has some “young new girlfriend” that Hollywood is glamorizing on red carpets. Jake Gyllenhall is another in the same vein. Jerry Seinfeld met his wife when she was 17 years old and he was 38. A lot of the story line on that was “look at how lucky this girl is, she was just living a boring normal life and the next day she was the girlfriend of a rich, famous, handsome older man.” Tabloid stories like this are presented as every girl’s dream; a Cinderella character of sorts; pedophilia is literally presented as a present to the girl. Jay Z met Beyonce when she just 18. Celine Dion met her “manager” when she was just 12 years old — he became her husband years later — just incalculable levels of grooming and manipulation in that case. Scott Disick has had a number of public relationships with teenagers. Coming from that toxic family, the Kardashians allowed Tyga to prey on Kylie Jenner — he first met her when she was 14 and (at least the public story is) when she was 17 they begun a romantic affair. This goes way back in Hollywood — a lot of people don’t know that Elvis Presley met Priscilla Presley when she was just 14 years old. 

One of the most disturbing public displays of pedophilia has been Trump’s Miss America contest, which was very transparantly about forcing young women to compete in the eyes of old men. This disgusting charade organized by known rapists, were viewed as “healthy All-American tradition”. The theme of which had a lot to do with the girls representing values and purity,  virginity and charity and religiosity, against the knowing eyes of pedophiles. Yet everyone knows that old men are the ones running this entire production, and that the girls are there for the entertainment, control and maybe even trafficking of teen girls. The stories of assaults and rapes that have come out Miss America are absolutely consistent with what the entire production was: a pedophile venture and pedophilic display for the masses. 

The fact of the matter is, open displays of pedophilia are something that the public enjoys, consumes, spends money on, strives to emulate, etc. Etc.. We are invited to look at these young girls as desirable, to indulge in the pedophilic lens itself.  Pedophilia, far from being hated in the cultural frame, is glamorous, is wealth and success incarnate, is manifest destiny and entitlement, is tittilation and group sport and entertainment. And in this framing, the pedophilia is not abuse, and teen girls are not victims. 

Here we again run into the phenomenon that while everyone in society would CLAIM that pedophiles are most reprehensible,  the most vile on earth… that we find them so vile that to even bring it up is unmentionable. Yet there is literally no manifest evidence of this; pedophilia is openly celebrated, seen in all major media, on every red carpet, in magazines and fashion shows. 

Even in the grossest displays of pedophilia are enshrined in Hollywood. There’s an entire category of shows that regularly feature extreme age gaps; shows like 90 Day Finance and Marrying Millions regularly feature age gaps of 30+ years. Courtney Stodden was abused terribly by Doug Hutchison, who “married” them when they were 16 and he was 50. And by the way, Courtney was absolutely tortured by the media and talkshows and social media while Hutchison got by unscathed. The fact that Courtney was treated as if they were an adult and ruthlessly and near mortally bullied and harassed, also sent a message to pedophile victims everywhere. How could you come forward about anything, when you’ve watched teens, in real time, be absolutely destroyed *while* being preyed on? Blaming Courtney had other messages for teens: that 16 is old enough to consent to a “relationship” with a 50 year old. Under these conditions, you produce the idea that teens *can’t* be pedophile victims; it is reminiscent of the structural arguments and logics we see in conceptions that “sex workers can’t be raped”.  Courtney’s public abuse was a way for society to indulgence its hatred of teens. I was a teen pedophile victim myself and from everywhere from the magazines in the checkout lane to the talk shows to the radio, the message was clear.  

 The Courtney Stodden case is was a strong study in how pedophiles get gratification from parading their predation around. The public element in is part of the thrill for them. This, of course, is entirely consistent with other criminal profiles where they like to see just how much they can get away with, to flaunt it in front of others (serial killers do this as well). Narcissism is always a part of the pedophilia story, but that is another part of them that gets submerged under the false notion that pedophilia is about sexual attraction. 

 This is part of a much larger social conspiracy to convince teens and especially teen girls that abusive relationships with pedophiles are in fact “consensual”. Sewing this confusion, trying to brainwash teens into thing that these are appropriate relationships. If you are 16 years old and you are attacked by a pedophile, but you’ve learned in society that this isn’t abuse, what are you doing to do? I remember how confused I was for so long after the attack on me, agonizing over whether it was my fault, if what he did was criminal or not, if there was something wrong with me. I didn’t even recognize how my life started to spin out of control until it was too late. I remember distinctly thinking to myself, over and over, that no one would think he did anything wrong, and that it would ruin me because of how people would think of me afterwards. These weren’t ideas that I was getting out of nowhere — they were omnipresent around me. 

A more recent trend that also leads to confusion and manipulation is the  “age gap relationship” concept; this has hugely opened the door for people to apply the frameworks of consensual adult relationships to what is actually a pedophile attack. The terminology obliquely borrows frameworks of kink and sexuality; it suggests in and of itself that we are obligated, as open minded people, to accept these relationships; it seems to try locate pedophilia somewhere in the realm of polyamory, ethical non-monogamy, that type of thing. Supporting the pedophile is, yet again, seen as the right thing to do — after all, isn’t it all about acceptance? Shouldn’t people get to choose what love is going to look like for them? Who are we to hate on someone else’s relationship? 

 Just one more place the criminal lie that pedophilia is really about sexuality or lifestyle or acceptance, not violent sadistic rape and limitless cruelty. An entire cottage industry has sprung up around this; there’s advice articles for age gap relationships, a TV show called My Age Gap Relationship, endless social media chatter, people in age gap relationships creating TikToks, there’s even medical articles that discuss, get this, how age gap relationships are totally healthy. Teen Vogue even published an entire article that talked about the virtues and benefits of age gap relationships. Their target audience is from 13 to 19 years old, which means they are framing, to children, that their relationships with pedophiles are just an age gap relationship. What “gap” within these target audience ages is appropriate? A 13 year old dating a 19 year old, for example, is totally, 1000% unacceptable, and yet in this case would be framed as an “age gap relationship”. Meanwhile, I was unable to locate any articles that meaningfully discussed pedophile in the magazine. Absolutely shocking considering that 20% of girls are sexually abused in childhood and teen years. Yet another example of how the teen girl is always in the crosshairs, with even the magazines that are supposedly “for” them doing absolutely nothing, or worse, about one of the biggest and mortal threats facing every girl in the country.  

Perhaps one of the most unsettling aspects of this is that, these efforts totally disguise abuse from the girls themselves. When my abuser flew from New York to Minnesota to rape me in a hotel room, he laughed about how he had expected the National Guard to greet him in the lobby of the hotel. I remember, when I attained age of consent in my state, thinking that now, my relationship with the pedophile was a consensual one — that it was fine now. I was 17; he was 45. It is the ultimate level of brainwashing to tell a pedophile victim that they are in a consensual, reasonable, and safe relationship with pedophiles. The framing of pedophilia is designed exactly so that teen girls themselves don’t recognize they are being abused.

 Considering pedophiles have absolutely and irreparably impacted the teen girl experience in America, as well as being one of the number one causes for eating disorders, PTSD and suicide ideation in girls, it is frightening that a population that has been so deeply abused BY this phenomenon is being told that… it’s not even abuse at all.  

We think the “taboo” around pedophilia is because of how despicable people find the crime; but the more and more we look at it, that taboo simply does not exist. The idea that things are kept under wraps BECAUSE of the taboo conveniently leaves out the fact that society is actually fine with pedophilia and does not exhibit any sort of strong drive to end it. The reaction to seeing these things in public should be absolute disgust and horror. Instead, it is celebrated and enshrined as “gold digging” and “age gap relationships” and “rags to riches” and “unusual romance” . Pedophile victims… are not considered victims. And pedophiles are not considered perpetrators. I think it’s pretty obvious how this also functions to put teen girls knowingly and directly into the hands of pedophiles. 

One final point here — when the media is absolutely forced to be honest about a pedophile ring (such as the Epstein and Weistein cases) —  media reports love to make rich and/or famous pedophiles sound utterly exclusive, as if it is only possible to get away with it at that scale. That the reason why the Epstein scandal happened is because it exists in this very rarified world, something that isn’t a common, at least not at that level of grotesqueness. 

And sure, in the major cases, there are elements of superlatively. Jefferey Epstein had money, yes, and he knew a lot of famous people (other pedophiles), but it’s not like there aren’t literally tens of thousands of people in the world who had the same level of money, etc. There’s a lot of extremely rich men out there (many of whom were in the ring with him, but will never face justice). So it’s not like “being rich and connected” is truly so implausibly rare that we should be discarding it as an isolated case. Rather, we should have taken that as a cue to go aggressively after rings at ALL levels.

We can see this in other celebrity cases, this idea that these are  extraordinary circumstances and that the pedophilia wouldn’t or couldn’t have happened without that. Yes, Nassar was an Olympic doctor, but there are literally tens of thousands of Olympic coaches and support staff and team coordinators and so on. Yes, Saville was a media figure, but there’s many, many celebrities in the world, at every level. These are not people who  had something so incredibly and uniquely rarified that the scale of their attacks should be considered irregular or unattainable, and/or that this horrificness is not present in how pedophiles generally operate. Even in cases where “regular” victims aren’t able to rack up as many as someone with a private jet and presidential protection, they can still be very significant and prolific predators, as we’ve seen in other parts of the piece. 

Stereotypes About Pedophiles

Now that we’ve covered pop culture perspectives on pedophilia, let’s take a deep dive into other conceptions about pedophiles we find in culture. 

Like we see in rape more generally, the predominant “stereotype” of a pedophile is a stranger who has very very brief, opportunistic, sexual abuses of the child. This is reflected in cultural concepts such as ‘man in a van says he has a puppy in the back’ or ‘the stranger who offers you candy’ or ‘creepy man in the park who exposes himself to children’. These concepts are even reinforced in ‘Stranger Danger’ programming and safety campaigns. 

Of course, as we see in rape more generally, this obscures that the pedophile is often known to the child; family, other adults, to teachers, coaches, doctors. In particular, the “stranger danger” version of pedophilia moves the perpetrator away from the home *in particular,* which is where mass amounts of pedophilia occurs. There is nothing perhaps so far away from “parent” as “stranger,” so this in particular covers up the incestual pedophilia, something that is NEVER brought up except as a horrifying outlier.  

“Stranger Danger” also puts the scope of the crime into a very narrow window — something that happens very seldomly, very suddenly (and thus unpredictable, and impossible to stop or intervene in), and only once — it happens through a fateful window of events. To some extent, it removes the idea of pre-meditation and supports the “uncontrollable sexual urges” narrative. The pedophile is doing its best not to offend, but just happened to be passing by the park, and so on.  

 Surely, some attacks are like that, and surely, this is likely the attack pattern of a number of pedophiles, while simultaneously leaving out that “stranger danger” attacks are serial as well, even if they are opportunistic. Regardless, these concepts only express one, and a very hypothetical, part of how pedophilia overall operates. 

Rather than being confined in any way to single opportunistic assaults, pedophilic abuse is something that often goes on for years and consist of dozens or hundreds of “discrete assaults” unfolding over days, months, years… in some cases even decades. The idea is that pedophilia happens very seldomly, by very few people, very few times, is totally out of touch with a reality in which the people who are around that child are the ones doing this repeatedly. The phenomenon of the pedophile is considered “random”, not something that is being designed and perpetrated by a system of enablement or that exists over time. This performs a minimizing and distorted perspective much like we see happening in the concept of “stranger rape”. 

This conception of pedophilia of always being brief, opportunistic, combines with the medical models of pedophilia as a sexual attraction issue to produce the idea of the “noble” pedophile — who fights hard against its own twisted desires,  or “attraction to children”, and is a shining example that a pedophile can actually be a positive contributor to society, can even serve a positive function to children, etc. 

In this model, of course, the noble pedophile is presented as an otherwise totally normal person who is afflicted by some freak accident of a mental disorder and unwanted sexuality. It is presented almost as an epic arch; the man who desires the one thing forbidden to him, who exhibits the greatest restraint and high moral character in resisting.  Flowing from this, when pedophile occurs, it is a “slip” of a strong morality to the devastating attraction, maybe even inevitable, that will be deeply regretted and haunting. This almost makes the pedophile pitiable —  a totally understandable victim of some kind of irresistible desire, where the need to rape children is so extreme that it demands satisfaction; that the pedophile itself is actually innocent because this was a medical issue, and can’t possibly be blamed. This also makes the pedophile seem sick, weak and alone — which is exactly what the VICTIM is. Again, that reversal is something that diminishes the severity of the crime, explains and even justifies it. 

It frankly makes the pedophile look like another tortured man we are supposed to coddle; and frankly, it proposes pedophilia as a “slip”, and a “slip” isn’t really worthy of capital punishment, isn’t it? It also invites the public into this mock, performative moral horror: “omg, what would you *do* if you were “attracted” to children?” “Honestly it really must be horrible” “I would chemically castrate myself, like if I couldn’t just be attracted to women”, “Think of what it must be like. I can’t even imagine.”  These are bizarre, almost preposterous speculations — but they are literally people putting themselves *in* the pedophile’s shoes. These questions require empathy for the predator, the possibility that “a pedophile could be any of us”… which considering how many pedophiles there are (up to 5% of men), is actually an uncanny statement. Again, these are talking points which ONLY benefit the pedophile — its treatment by society, its ability to hunt, what sort of legal parameters and consequences are implicated, etc. Etc. It should be highly concerning that it is a regular past time for people to “imagine” themselves as pedophiles; it is far more rare to hear people talk about *the actual victim* in the scenario: “what do people who are attacked by pedophiles go through?” “it really could happen to anyone, we must be vigilant”, “how do we STOP this”, “what would you do if someone… you know. Your kids.” These bring up themes like caution and justice and community organization and empathy for victims and caring about children.  

It is impossible to discuss the “noble pedophile” myth without analyzing the web of enablement that envelops the Catholic Church priest — he is still upheld as a holy man, who has simply given in, perhaps, to homosexual tendencies that God has given him to bear; that transgression is simply a crisis of faith, a battle against lower instincts; a reminder that even the most holy are tempted and fall down. We see the pedophile actually through a lens of purity, innocence or piety. “The devil possessed them; it is not unusual for the Lord to test us in these ways.” It essentially presents the situation as “pedophiles don’t actually want to harm children” (when harming children is literally ALL they want to do), they are just “fighting Satan”.  In fact, there have been numerous arguments forwarded that the Church should allow priests to get married, as if this is about sexual repression manifesting as pedophilia. 

All of these logics are predicated on something very deeply disturbing: the idea that of COURSE there is temptation, there is desire for young people. To empathize with the pedophile on this level demands that you in fact see children as a sexual object and “understand” the “temptation”… it asks for everyone who hears to themselves view the child as some kind of seductive trap, a desire we can relate to or at least imagine; again, we put on a pedophilic lens. And of course what all this empathy and relating and understanding is for? … child rape. Wow. 

It is absolutely mandatory to understand that these ideas, of pedophiles as conflicted, moral, virtuous, struggling, victimized, come from pedophiles themselves. There is literal group called “Virtuous Pedophiles”, and the “Minor Attracted Children” pedophile ring is full of all of these logics. To see these talking points as the only ones that come out of the culture is hugely disturbing and should also give us pause as to exactly HOW integrated into and organized and powerful pedophiles are in the culture, that they are the ones who dictate what people say about them. As we’ve seen EXTREMELY organized and effective pedophile groups in media, medicine, schools, art, sports, online, etc., pedophiles are involved in some of the core institutions of society and operate there within their “interests”.  

Of all the stereotypes about pedophiles that exist, perhaps the most egregious to moral sensibility is the image of the pedophile as romantic. This is very specific to teen girls: for example, the college student and the professor, the rich man and his intern/administrative assistant, the unexpected romance where “she keeps him young”. You have a depiction of these people as not predator/victim, but  a story of star crossed lovers, a teacher who falls in love against all odds with a high schooler, or a boarding school student, or whatever it is. In the gay community, there’s a heavily romanticized “tradition” that when a young man just comes out and starts going to gay bars and so on, that they are chosen by an older man and that he provides guidance and sexual awakening. In many gay circles this is considered simply a rite of passage, and in fact a rite that is beneficial to the victim… that this isn’t pedophilia at all.  

The key transformation in these models is that CONSENT is superimposed on the relationship, where there is no consent possible. You cannot “consent” to pedophilia, and it certainly offers nothing to the victim except a lifetime of trauma and suffering. 

A theme we go back to again and again is the societal idea that young girls, who are in fact pedophile victims, either give “consent” (as if you can “consent” to child sexual abuse), or can’t be pedophile victims at all. Under the “star crossed lover” theory, what SHOULD be looked at as a clear pedophile attack is instead pitched as just a quirky romance, a hurdle that only love can overcome. “Age ain’t nothing but a number” is repeated again and again as if it represents some kind of deep folk wisdom or transcendental insight into love, rather than being seen for what it is: a highly effective cover for child rape that has been designed and used by pedophiles forever. I.e., this phrase was enshrined forever in the song “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number” , by convicted pedophile R. Kelly and Aaliyah, one of his many teenage victims. He started dating her when she was 14. This is another proof that pedophiles are vile psychopaths — they LOVE to flaunt their soul-destroying abuses and get pleasure from getting away with their crimes and parading them in the open. 

A pedophile is not about romance, morality in the face of “temptation”, it is not about mental illness — a pedophile is a highly organized , serially offending, conscious-less animal whose rings have a choke hold on the children of this country, ensure that no child is safe, and literally cause children to die. They are sadists with a bottomless appetite for pain and abuse. The things they do to children and the impact that has on them for the rest of their lives is absolute ghastly and unique among all crimes in its depravity and inhumanity . Pedophiles are responsible for millions of ruined lives, for huge numbers of deaths, broken relationships/impacted sexualities, and things we see in association with trauma in general, including life-long risks for heart attack/disease, for stroke, for eating disorders (also deadly).

All these stereotypes of pedophiles as loners, tortured, romantics, sick boys that need help — do a fantastic job at totally obscuring both the crime and its nature. These images distort and lie about the true type of predator we are dealing with, and how they operate.

Pedophilia as Gender And Structural Violence

One of the interesting things about pedophilia is you rarely ever hear about in the context of a systemic oppression. Here again, the culture positions pedophilia as such an outlier that it isn’t part of the system and structure of oppression. 

Broadly, we understand that rape has to do with misogyny, that it is a tool to further patriarchal agenda, that it has a direct relationship to the systems of oppression that exist in the world and the lives and outcomes of all women. But when it comes to pedophilia, suddenly this structural analysis falls away. Pedophilia seemingly exists out of the systemic analyses that we apply to other types of violence, where we might examine gender, race, orientation, mental health as factors in that violence. 

In fact, there are VERY direct lines between pedophilia and gender, sexuality and other forms of oppression. For example, girls and teen girls experience SIGNIFICANTLY more sexual violence than boys and teen boys, showing a clear bend towards misogyny as a driving force in pedophilia. 1 in 5 girls are sexually abused, vs 1 in 20 boys. So we see in this example, that pedophilia really produces a disproportionate effect in ruining the lives of girls and teen girls.  

With a framework of pedophilia as oppression, we can see how child sexual abuse falls along the lines of hate crimes. #FastTailedGirls has also discussed at length the way that race intersects with pedophilia and the devastating cost to young Black girls. Bisexual and trans children experience child sexual abuse at a much higher rate. These are very clearly hate crimes and even corrective rape, I.e. Bi girls experience child sexual abuse at a much higher rate than any other sexuality category, with close to 50% of teen bi girls experiencing sexual abuse by 18. Additionally, we see higher rates of pedophilic sexual abuse in trans and gender non-conforming people. Yet, pedophilia is never thought of as misogyny, corrective rape, biphobia, or transphobic abuse. 

These realities and statistics show that, rather than being some random event, pedophile is about enforcing social norms and lines up very clearly with overall patterns of oppression in society. That makes it clear that this is not about “sexual attraction” or some form of “sexual orientation” or just freak outliers of society  —   those conceptions of pedophilia are not grounded in any materiality — rather, pedophilia is deeply intertwined into systemic oppression. For many children, this is their first taste of the oppression that they will endure for a lifetime. 

The fact that rape is seen as a gender violence issue but pedophilia is not is highly suspicious until you realize that teen girls are the most hated and most endangered group in America, and that pedophilia actually performs a key function of misogyny, as well as key functions of corrective rape, targeting queer and trans youth, etc.. 

I did want to open up a line of inquiry here, which is why societal focus on male victims of sexual abuse is often placed as a priority above girls. Of course, males are more important in our culture, but also, because sexual violence against males is considered “deviant” —  for a male to be sexually attacked strips masculinity and thus is looked at as a more grotesque crime. There can be a sense of extra violation because the child is presumably straight but “forced gay”; as a long-time observer of reactions to highly publicized pedophile rings, sometimes it seems like people locate the violation in that *straight boys are forced into homosexual encounters*. It’s not only that males SHOULDNT be sexually abused, but that they shouldn’t have homosexual “encounters”; and homosexual “encounters” are unacceptable to society. There’s a lot going on here. One is, again, how this is being framed repeatedly through sexuality, rather than the gravest manner of sadism and psychopathy.  Another of course, is the homophobia implied in this worldview. There’s insinuations that pedophile victims have the sexuality of their abuser, that it can “make you gay”, or that pedophiles are attracted to children because they *are* gay, making it the queer youth’s fault. The worrying result is that concern for boy victims  is often expressed via harmful social constructs of gender, sex, abuse, emasculation and homophobia. Even where male victims sometimes get more attention in the press, the framework doesn’t really mean that they are actually being platformed in the interests of the boys, or in a way that is materially relevant to stopping pedophilia more broadly. 

As we see with the lattice of oppression more generally, you end up with groups of people who are experiencing just highly concentrated child sexual abuse; such as in bi girls, where almost half of them have been abused. HALF. That is such a serious blow to that identity group *before even finishing high school* and has implications for the totality of the bisexual community that are just devastating. The damage to bisexual girls as a category is catastrophic. What are the implications for their health, longevity, quality of life, for the ability of bisexual women to organize to fight for more access for things, to assert themselves as a class? Bi women have the worst outcomes across the board, and it starts so young. The myth that bisexual women are not oppressed because they have “straight privilege” is again seen here, covering up for sexual abuse of bi girls. Bisexual girls are *the* highest ones with the rates of rape across the board — and it starts with pedophiles.  

By connecting pedophilia to the structural pillars of oppression, you see the profound magnitude of pedophilia as a social and political force, and how it shapes, at mass scale, entire populations and groups of people, with generations-long consequences. You can also see that pedophilia is where structural oppression leaves its first marks. In pedophilia, you see what might very well be the *first places* that a child or teen experiences those systems manifesting very violently, and it is a permanent effect on the child, a permanent wound, that makes them more susceptible forever to other, related violences. 

The fact that societal oppression is directly and proportionately reflected in child sexual assault, is one of the most dramatic examples yet of how our view of pedophilia in society is incredibly simplistic, and has little to do with how it actually functions. This is literally *ground zero* for HUGE surface areas of structural oppression; this clear fact makes it seems absolutely insane that we aren’t building a lens of pedophilia into literally every single part of the movement. Practically, we have a clear need for unique planning and safe-keeping for these endangered populations, as well as significant programs to make sure health care is being provided to survivors. 

If you look at violence against children as something valuable in some way, societally, culturally, pedophiles are the greatest weapon in that arsenal. They are able to achieve mass scale, and to damage people at a critical point in their development, to inflict a very distinct injury that leads to a chronic condition over time. And that is where you have to start asking questions about what are the REAL reasons that so little is being done about pedophiles? What are they accomplishing for the system that is so important to preserve and produce? We’ll touch on this more at the end of the piece. 

Age of Consent

Well, we had to get to it eventually. Yes, age of consent. 

The thing about age of consent is that so many of our *ideas* about pedophiles and who they are and what their crimes encompass, is built around Age of Consent. 

Age of consent is the ultimate arbitrar of what is right and wrong, of the difference between pedophilia and a consensual relationship; age of consent is used as a metric for if a teenager was “legally” violated or not; and society uses the same rubric and is in lock step with the laws of a criminal justice system that has continually itself harmed teen girls (through incarceration, where they are regularly sexually abused, by cops themselves being pedophiles, by denying them legal representation and the tools and money and resources to pursue justice, etc). The age of consent is accepted, universally, as the arbitrator of record. 

 It is also used continuously to justify why pedophilic relationships are actually okay: okay, she was 17 and he was 45, but she was at age of consent! In fact, she was OVER age of consent! Well, she’s of age… 

The public usage of age of consent as a moral barometer is constant, even though it is the artifact of an incredibly broken system that throws child sexual abuse victims to the wind near continuously. In this way it is actually used AGAINST justice for teen victims and not for it; it is a construct that permits sexual contact of any kind with pedophiles of teen girls as long as those teen girls are 16, 17 or 18. For teen girls, age of consent means essentially, when they can be raped by pedophiles without consequence or recourse.   

I see age of consent less as a protective measure for children and teens but one that instead ensures that teens will be left *outside* of protection. As soon as you hit it, you’re on your own. Nothing that a grown man does to you as a teenager will ever be a matter of justice in either a civil or a criminal court. 

 Of course, the ages that  “age of consent” stops at is RIGHT in an extremely important part of a child’s development. If age of consent is 16, you’re talking about saying that a girl who just got her driver’s license isn’t being abused if a pedophile decades older than her finds her. These are girls who haven’t left their parent’s houses, who are just entering college, maybe even living outside of the home for the first time ever. And it is an important phase in their intimate, relationship and sexual development, where many girls are starting to be active in their first relationships. Moreover, the massive public hatred of teen girls is also functioning on a number of levels at this key juncture to make them particularly vulnerable. 

 And yet at this point of perhaps gravest vulnerability to predators, that is exactly the point at which both law and society says “you cannot be violated by pedophiles” and in fact “there is no way for you to even BE a victim of a pedophilia.” At this exact juncture — even as MANY pedophiles prefer teen girls — they are suddenly made impossible of being the target of a pedophile. 

This is another place where we see the message being hammered again and again, that teen girls can’t be victims of child sexual abuse, that if this is happening to them or did happen to them, it was their own fault, or it was consensual, or they should have known better, or that’s what they get for being gold diggers. It also makes teen girls even more vulnerable, making it so they themselves don’t view themselves of being even CAPABLE of being the victim of a pedophile, and thus, are in the position of not being able to even recognize it or look out for it. And then assume that these relationships are totally fine and normal; it’s not “pedophilia” it’s an “age gap relationship”, he’s not a “pedophile” he’s mature, he’s not “exploiting me” he just respects me as an adult, it’s just “normal” for a teen girl to want a more experienced man.  

 Culturally, the concept of age of consent is treated as a titillation, starting with such hideous cultural rituals as “counting down to when a girl turns 18”; there are always countdown clocks for child stars online. When I was growing up, I saw the ones for Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen — them turning 18 was considered a huge cultural milestone; the little girls people loved on Full House are now… old enough to have sex with without going to prison. The basis of these jokes is, of course, that now men are able to “legally” approach, pursue and engage in sexual abuses of the girls; they can finally access what has been held back from them by the law: pedophilic sexual abuse. These jokes are predicated on the idea that these underage girls were highly wanted but forbidden; upon reaching age of consent, it is suddenly open season on them. These jokes are predicated on the KNOWLEDGE that there is something wrong; that age of consent allows them to “get away with something”. Subjecting teen girls to such constant jokes about this makes it makes it seem unserious and unharmful, that being preyed on by men, your youth being fetishized, the power gap, the sexual exploitation, is all just part of being a teen girl growing up into a woman. But who was shaping these notions the whole time? Pedophiles! It is pedophilic thought that leads us to the absurd conclusion that 17 is “old enough” to be the victim of a pedophile.   

The thing is, is that teen girls are not considered to be children, rather, adults, even though developmentally, socially, experientially, etc. they are far from adults. They are absolutely still children and their brains will continue to develop for many more years. The critical state of brain development they are in, with regards to social skills, pattern matching, executive control, setting boundaries, maturity, self-regulation, impulse control, are totally different than that of a grown man. Yet the model of “age of consent” that they have been brainwashed with by society, is telling them that they are able to consent to relationships with men 5, 10, 20, 30+ years older than them. And yes, a five year difference is a lot when you are talking about a fucking high schooler. 

In this way, age of consent is actually a tool to deny and cover up harm, because after all, you’ve reached age of consent! It can be really confusing for victims, who are trying to figure out why they are so wounded or hurt by something, or figure out why they feel wrong about something, or why sometimes they feel afraid and like they can’t say no. I used to look at the laws about age of consent over and over, trying to figure out if what happened to me was a crime or not. The very arbitrary nature of age of consent is reflected in the fact that state laws vary, federal laws look very different from state laws at times, one state what a 45 year old man did to me as a high schooler was a crime, in the next state over it wasn’t, and in another state it would be illegal only if he’d been a teacher or someone else in a position of power over me, and in other states it would require certain specific sexual acts to be present or for state lines to be crossed… it goes on and on.  

 There are probably hundreds of thousands of pedophile victims in this country who see absolutely no reflection of the abuse they endured in society OR law. In law, being raped by a pedophile is suddenly not a crime when it comes to teen girls, enemy #1 of America. And simultaneously as experiences of these girls are deemed not a crime, society is openly parading pedophilia as gold digging, age gap relationships, glamour and romance.   

Rather than being some kind of protective barrier, its a loop hole that allows pedophiles to get away with crimes. People also don’t understand how pedophiles are able to USE age of consent, conflicting laws and confusion to their advantage. Pedophiles will transport minors to places where the age of consent is lower, move to areas where age of consent is lower, use it to confuse victims about criminality, lie to children about what age of consent means. They will groom a child even years prior, but not actually make a physical assault until age of consent is reached. Again, these are highly effective, highly sociopathic, highly organized and extremely serious predators who are often very savvy at avoiding legal entanglements and know how the laws can work in their favor. 

The current justice system, and the culture at large, significantly harms teen girls with these notions of “age of concept” - another area where people often just assume, with no evidence, that justice is being done, when it simply is not. 

There is No Protection from Pedophiles

So yes, we have this belief, as a society, that pedophilia is being handled… probably way out of the way in the underworld, on the deep net; perhaps where teams of hackers work diligently night and day. There are many reality TV shows where “crack” teams of hackers and camera men and surveillance teams pretend to be a child online and then “trap” the pedophile when it shows up at the supposed rendesvous location. Sometimes you hear about a large FBI bust of a child pornography ring on the news.  We have some notion of the vigilante who kills a pedophile who assaults a pre-teen girl, usually a relation of the vigilante. How often have you hear something along the lines of “I’m going to shoot anyone who touches my daughter”? This is an extremely prevalent concept in pop culture, images of dads with shot guns scaring off a pedophile in the night. It is very popular, in fact, to propose that if, on the rare chance one showed up in *our* community, someone would swiftly handle in. 

People believe, without ever really examining it, that something meaningful is being done, something is being done by someone or something or some part of the government or some part of the church who is taking on this responsibility. We think that parents pay attention to what their kids are doing and who they are with — they don’t. We think the teachers are safe to be around — they aren’t. We think that children will tell someone they trust — when often the child has absolutely zero reason to tell the adult and is in an unsafe environment. They think that there is some kind of task force that is tracking them down, when you have at most a few busts here and there, and much of it is put on as a television show, yet more profiting on the titillation of pedophilia. 

People assert that “we would know” and “it could never happen here” because “I would *** a pedophile who hurt *my* child”. People fancy themselves that pedophiles are so rare that it couldn’t possibly happen in their cute quaint little community, as if you could, with literally no effort, possibly outsmart or detect a psychopath who had spent its entire life learning how to pass among people and earn their trust, to gain access to children, to cover up their crimes under a social veneer. Schools don’t actively screen for pedophilia in any way outside of a standardized background check. Lots of school teachers are pedophiles, and this is a system that has consistently harbored pedophiles and overseen massive amount of child sexual abuse, and yet we delusional believe that the schools are doing something that is actually preventing their schools from becoming a pedophile feeding ground.  

How many times have you heard some man INSIST that if someone touched their child, nicece, sister, whatever, that they would just fucking go shoot the pedo, consequences be damned? And yet, compared to the number of child sexual abuse that actually happens, there’s the absolute bare minimum of vigilante justice. So, this “social safety net” that people perceive, the fundamental idea that there are all these men who are protecting the community and their kids and families and would DEFINITELY do something, is totally false. Men are absolutely not protecting their children even preventatively or upon discovering an attack. Again, its not at all unusual for fathers to do this to their own children; nor is it unusual for families to KNOW when a child is being abused and do nothing; nor is it unusual for families of teen girls to be totally fine with their child being attacked.  

Yeah so… 

basically nothing is being done here. At all. ESPECIALLY compared to what we have seen is the huge degree of reach that pedophiles have, the amount of energy, resources, urgency and organization, the number of organizations they have fully infiltrated (Boy Scouts, Catholic Church, college football). Our response, in comparison to what pedophiles are doing each and every day to further their own agendas, is absolutely pathetic and in my opinion more or less statistically close to 0 effort at all. 

The pedophiles are allowed to organize nearly openly, nearly totally freely, their rings continue to operate, and they continue to abuse, at very minimum, 100,000 children each year.  

When you line up the sheer significance of the impact on children, the number of victims, the extremity of the injuries they sustain, the number of people who die because of this — it’s terrifying what our infrastructure for dealing with this actually is. Our response amounts to a vague fantasy of pedophile hunters you got from late night cable shows. And we have to start to ask ourselves, how and why we have literally corralled out children into digital and physical open air hunting grounds for pedophiles? 

And how we can act urgently and with force to rip out the pedophile rings up, to keep them from harming any other children, and to send a message to all of the pedophiles who hold our nation’s children in a chokehold that open season on children is fucking over? 

What Function Does the Pedophile Play in Society?

Think about it: 

Pedophilia is a problem that literally infects every part of society. We can tie pedophilia directly to the schools, to human trafficking, to large tech companies, public health , rings in every major sector of the world. It impacts suicide rates, drug addiction, mental illness, long term outcomes, the very composition of society is changed because of pedophilia, its health profile is warped, our media is warped, our medical institutions are spitting out, word for word, talking points from pedophiles. We have absolutely giant portions of the population who have been the victims of pedophiles or have been groomed in some way. That is a mass scale public health crisis. And in certain segments of children, I.e. Girl children, bisexual children, trans children have even HIGHER rates than any other, so you have entire identity groups where up to almost *half* of them will be attacked before they even turn 18. 

Pedophilia is not only a individual crime, it is a social and a cultural crime that shapes inalterably huge percentages of the population. Many people recoil from the assertion that pedophilia serves some kind of function for society, even when it is abundantly obvious that it does. The myths about the rarity and exceptionality of the pedophile serve to obscure the fact that this is even systemic at all, and in being systemic, is performing some key role for the larger social structure. 

I don’t know all the answers, frankly, because I find them sickening. In particular, the operating methods of pedophiles and their success in society points very directly to some extremely monied, large multi-generational pedophile rings that are very much ongoing; as follow-up with the Epstein, Boy Scouts, and Catholic Church has been absolutely minimal. We have only a fraction of the full pictures of these rings and who is in them. The Epstein case hasn’t led to any additional arrests outside of Ghislane, even though it goes without saying that that was a GIANT pedophile ring that has been allowed to continue uninterrupted — the starfish quality of rings we discussed earlier. These are an organized group of people that have power in some of the highest and most powerful and monied areas of the world, all the way down to small towns and parishes. Pedophilia is literally foundational in society because it is a ground 0 of abuse from which massive consequences emerge, both individually and in the larger society. 

I’ve spoken a bit before, about the idea that systems such as, the collection of Meta software (Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram), produce such significant injuries in girls (body dysmorphia and eating disorders) that it drives a lifetime of consumerism (addiction to the app, plastic surgery, fillers/botox, diets, beauty products, etc). It made me think about this idea of permanent wounds, permanent wounds inflicted on children. Of which pedophilia would be the absolute worst one.

What is the function of that wound, that chronic illness or syndrome we discussed earlier? We’ve covered quite a bit of that when we talked about serial abuse; one function of the wound is to also support additional predators in the future.” It also has something to do with how musch it will cost so many children, the loss of their time, energy and health. It puts a load so heavy that they can’t even defend themselves, much less stand up against them. There is this idea that “what you go through makes you stronger”, but that just materially is not the case when you track the actual outcomes for pedophile victims. You weaken them to such a degree at such a young age; that they are more vulnerable to probably every sort of cultural, social and interpersonal manipulation imaginable. 

 I’m still thinking about what all of the different societal functions are, and I invite additional comment from the community. What is the effect of having so much of the population literally raped at a young age? What does that mean for relationships in America, for consumerism, for intimacy, for schools, for the drug trade, for the medical system? 

And then again… it’s the cruelty. It is the cruelty itself, the cruelty is a point. 

Particularly so soaked in pedophilia our culture is, and knowing now how deep that wound goes and how expansive it is, it is hard to envision what life would be like without pedophilia. 

We don’t even know what humans even are without pedophilia. 

Implications 

Now that we’ve worked through some of these ideas about pedophiles, I wanted to discuss some implications and ramifications for how we materially address the pedophilia problem. 

I think obviously one of the biggest take-aways here is that the conceptual model of one victim, one predator, one time, is affecting absolutely every area in which we engage this problem. This model must be updated as quickly as possible across every sector.   

To start, we should not be looking at just individual pedophiles, but take a holistic, ring perspective. Pedophiles do not hunt as individuals by default; they are social hunters and rely on their rings for many of the things they need to offend without interruption. I strongly bet that where there is ANY pedophile or a pedophile attack, there is most likely a ring they are connected to in some way. It might be a tie to an online group, to a church group, to a sports group, or even just other pedophiles it meets out in the world. There are often multiple pedophiles around any group of children. And yet, cases are never pursued as a totality; with the Epstein ring, despite there being significant public evidence of ring members *in the presence of teen girls* *with Epstein*, the ring was left totally untouched. The parts that we see of Epstein and his crimes, inevitably represents only a small fraction of the crime on either a personal or a ring trafficking level. 

We shouldn’t solely be acting as if we have apprehended a singular predator, but that we have a first crucial indication of a ring. The magnitude of these crimes is vast, and can involve many people. As they function, that is how we must hunt them.

Not only should we assume that where there is a pedophile, more pedophiles exist, but we should assume that where there is one victim, there are likely more; pedophiles are serial predators. A full investigation should be immediately launched to try to locate other potential victims, to look at the pedophile’s work and location history, access to children, etc. The assumption should be that there are other victims out there, and that that is vital to an investigation and legal step. 

It can be so powerful for victims to know they aren’t alone. One of my biggest regrets in my abuser getting charged with murder and fleeing the country, is that with him I lost the opportunity to find and talk to other victims who he most likely had, and who experienced the same thing. That would be validating for me, would make me feel less alone, and potentially bring women into my life that could be friends and a support system, and even a political base to advocate as a class against pedophiles. But by the time there was any chance for justice for me, it was far too late. 

Of course, far beyond any individual predators’ victims, there is a need for MUCH broader scale reach out to pedophile victims in general. We have huge parts of our population that are pedophile victims. And yet you almost never hear them talked about as a class, as a meaningful group with shared interests and a public health profile. This is in spite of the fact that fully 20% of women in America have been sexually abused at a young age. That is an absolutely massive amount of pedophile victims who  most likely are NOT getting the ongoing mental and health care that they need, while also being silenced by society at large. 

In society, we continue to see very open discussion of rape; and yet, very little discussion of pedophilia even though most sexual crimes in fact happen to children. This is chalked up to the “taboo” of pedophilia, but in light of what we’ve discussed in this essay, it truly seems that what the taboo is actually around, is admitting that pedophilia *is* abuse and *is* widespread. Even the feminist movements have hardly made child victims a priority, even as they work on rape in the context of adult women. The only time I see the feminist movement talk in a meaningful way about pedophilia is during major news events about pedophile rings. Oh, and when the topic of abortion comes up: when very young age pedophile victims who are impregnated by their abuser are used as shock and awe stories to essentially support the right of adult women to get abortions. Major societal institutions for women’s health care, such as Planned Parenthood, don’t even have an anti-pedophile program. In the case of PP, this is particularly concerning because studies have found that pedophiles are responsible for large numbers of child and teen pregnancies. 

Even though young girls of color were the early focus of #MeToo, when it went mainstream, the focus quickly revolved around adult professional women. Significant work on pedophilia from the community has come from Black feminist work in hashtags such #FastTailedGirls, as well as bringing R. Kelly, an extreme serial pedophile, to justice. Much of the rest of the movement, however, leaves out pedophilia even where it directly intersects with affinity groups and identities and focal areas.  

It is absolutely urgent that the feminist mechanism in America takes on pedophilia — these are the most endangered populations when it comes sexual abuse; and considering the chain of abuse, these attacks will statistically follow them for their entire lifetimes. Women’s rape groups need to really invest in this. Planned Parenthood needs to. 

Compare how much language about there is “rehabilitating” pedophiles, about seeing them not as predators but as people with unwanted “desires”, and the need to provide THEM, the ABUSERS, with support and therapy and services. Now compare that to how often you hear discussions about, say, treating the life-long syndromes and symptoms that come from a pedophile attack. The rights and privileges that are asked and demanded and prioritized for *pedophiles*,  leave out even an equal effort towards victims as a body. 

As we discussed earlier in the piece, we know definitively that pedophiles are serial predators who will try at all costs to get into areas where they have power and access to children. The Catholic Church schools and congregations, the Olympic gymnastics episode, Sandusky, the Boy Scouts  — these cases are visible examples of how pedophiles are attracted to high concentrations of vulnerable children.  

Pedophiles structure their lives around children, they want to be around children, they want to maximize their ability to do a successful hunt. Despite the fact that WE KNOW THIS, the environments that children are in, from schools to day care programs to sports teams and in their own homes, are at this point almost completely unsecured from pedophiles from any angle. We need to move with the greatest urgency to secure environments based on material frameworks.

 Its instructive to look at what anti-pedophile strategies ARE being used: the focus is on cracking down on CHILDREN. That we need to be monitoring their phone and email, putting cameras in the schools, keeping kids from going out, telling them not to wear “suggestive” clothing, etc. The answer to every problem that involves child sexual abuse ends up on children and what needs to be done about the CHILDREN. For example, a major focus is on teaching children how to say “no” if they don’t like how they are being touched, as if this is about some kind of ability to communicate consent issue, as if pedophiles somehow magically respond to “no” when their goal is to violently and sadistically destroy a child’s life, as if the child even had any kind of power in the situation.

Sadly, any efforts to address pedophilia turn into an excuse to get MORE power over children, which is the thing that allows for  pedophilia to occur: total power where the child lacks autonomy. 

This is an absolutely vital context: pedophilia only happens when unilateral control over kids meets total access to children with total enablement from the community. This is truly the fundamental problem: adults have wayyyy too much power over children, and a structure that is based on adults having power and children having none is the exact and in fact only conditions in which pedophilia can proliferate to the degree we see in the culture. 

Pedophilia can be conceptualized as a super-concentration of power over children, within a society that forces children via violence into obedience, that regularly abuses them, that leaves them no privacy and no self-determination, that are under literally constant surveillance, that are trapped in abusive homes, etc. Thus we need to work AGAINST the fundamental structural dynamics from which pedophilia grows: the total unchecked power of adults over children. 

We need to stop responding to the threat of pedophilia by putting children under MORE control and MORE surveillance and MORE adult control. In contrast with how we treat children in this context, there is no emphasis on how we are going to make ADULTS change THEIR behaviors and materially protect children from the predators that are certainly in their mist. This is another classic case where there is a total reversal of what makes sense, a flip that is made between the roles of the adult and the child, which is fully to the detriment of the child. 

The surveillance should fall onto the pedophiles and those that enable pedophiles and the system which protects and harbors pedophiles, not on the children. For example, why are children having their Instagrams surveilled, and there so little anti-pedophile screening? You don’t hear about teachers being subject to anything more than a regular background check, which is obviously woefully ineffective particularly if, like the majority of pedophiles, there has been no case and no charges and no convictions. It is my personal opinion that screening for pedophiles in these environments should include independent psychiatric evaluation, use of other diagnostic tools for things like sociopathy and psychopathy, and lie detector tests. Oh, does that seem extreme? Well, maybe while we are in the middle of an absolute crisis of pedophile rings uninterruptedly rolling through entire generations of youth, we can use some more extreme measures. 

 No one has a “right” to orient their work around children and it should be regarded as a potential red flag, just in general. The fact that any adult is assumed to be safe for child to be around and that adults have a “right” to have jobs, volunteer positions, etc. that involve children, is highly disturbing. Why does this adult want power and control over children? This is something that requires a valid answer. There needs to be much more built into the structure of child care that works to stop abusers, so we can immediately identify and neutralize the many people who go into work with children specifically to harm them. 

While the burden shouldn’t fall on children, it is the unfortunate truth that, under present circumstances, we do need to try to prepare children and teens as much as possible for the war zone of abuse they experience. The near TOTAL lack of warning to children and teens of the truth about pedophiles is just another in a string of absolute neglect of children. 

This is a broader topic that I hope to address in future writing, but it is also important to note that in the vast majority of environments, children and especially teen girls are not being pulled aside to be very explicitly told and warned about pedophiles. They must also be made to understand the grave harm that will come of them. Because they have been been brainwashed societally to believe that these types of relationships are not predation, they don’t have a clear understanding. They should receive education on how pedophiles operate, what they say, what they do, and what the effects are; and that should be taught by victims themselves. How would someone who has not experienced child sexual abuse know how to explain to young girls the danger they are in? Of course, that would mean acknowledging that teen girls are in fact, in grave danger and among the most damaged and targeted groups in America. 

No one is pulling teen girls aside as they enter those critical years for a whole new type of pedophile who is using different tactics on a different kind of prey. Teen girls should be taught and warned continuously of the danger of older men. This should include the signs, the ways that predators typically work and behave, what they say, where they tend to congregate. This includes grooming online as well as understanding all forms of grooming that occur. I wasn’t prepared in any way for the pedophile attack; no one had ever told me anything besides “stay away from strangers”. 

The only way that you can NOT look at our communities and culture as a viper pit of pedophilia is if you don’t view teenage girls as something that is worth saving, protecting, or caring about, someone that deserves to be able to grow and have a youth and have a future. 

Considering the conditions we operating under, the massive outbreaks of pedophilia and pedophile attacks, it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude: Children should not be left alone with men, period, until we have cleared up the pedophile problem and pulled out of the rings from the earth and given them the punishment that is required for rape of a child. 

Men are, as a matter of common practice, left alone with children in classrooms, detentions, sports fields. It can take only seconds for an attack to occur. Never underestimate the wiliness of these predators. It is not that “no men should ever be around children” or “what are you saying, that all men are pedophiles”? No, its simply a recognition that we have a pedophile assault in every major category of children’s activities, and until we have done a much more through job of cleansing pedophiles from our world, it is simply not worth the risk of potentially dozens of children being raped and given a life-long injury or disability just so that a man fulfills his “right” to have access to children. The way men react to having to have a chaperone, something that is already practiced in many medical settings, should be telling — if there is resistance, that in itself is a red flag. Anyone who truly cares about children would have no issue understanding why this step is taken, when statistics so clearly show the prevalence of pedophile attacks and their life-long consequences. Again, there is a societal assumption that any adult has a “right” to be around children, and people react VERY strongly when you suggest anything other. 

The fact that pedophiles operate constantly in the school system, and yet children are left alone with men all the time, shows a complete lack of seriousness about the magnitude of this problem. It also brings into severe relief the question about whether the school system itself is invested in care of the children in any way. It’s a topic for another time, but the handling of things like COVID, mass shootings, and pedophiles shows that truly heinous things are happening in the schools, over and over and over. 

We must assume that pedophiles are in every single environment. Again, the myth that pedophilia is so rare and contained that it represents an outlier, means that we are not constantly vigilant, especially around anything where there are large amounts of children, vulnerable children, supervised by a very small group of people; as we know, where there is one pedophile there is more. 

An updated framework of pedophilia also requires that we update our view of what we see as justice for pedophiles, what IS an appropriate punishment. Our justice system is very much based on the systems we outlaid here — misogyny, surveillance, biphobia, etc., and that culminates in a situation where not only are these predators rarely apprehended but when they are, they are rarely convicted and given a sentence, and when they are, the sentence is often very small, even just a few years.  

Again, I bring you back to this concept in society that “if someone did that to my daughter/neice/etc I would kill them.” But yet, extra judicial executions are very rare. It is once again as if people must PERFORM pedophilia and justice for pedophiles, without actually applying that justice. We PERFORM, at scale, the myth that if pedophiles do this a child, someone will kill them; in reality, the child might die of this and the pedophile will sustain not a scratch. 

And yet it does bring up the fact that we do, understand, as a society, that all pedophiles must receive the death penalty, that that is the ONLY response under natural law. 

Everytime I get to this part, it gets hard to contain the strength of my reaction, which is always: what in the actual fuck, this is raping a child, an act of attempted murder if not murder itself, that results in a devastating and debilitating lifelong chronic injury, from which it is impossible to actually recover, only manage going forward, and may very well lead to a lifetime of additional abuse. Pedophilia condemns the victim. Many pedophile victims wish they were dead, have wished they were dead, or actually kill themselves. 

To kill a child like that, to kill what is inside of a person at that age, is among the most heinous crimes known. The reasonable and natural punishment for pedophilia is immediate capital punishment, on first offense. Pedophiles display an inhuman sadism and spend their lives in offense against natural law. The wages of sin are death. 

I am a true believer of the concept that without providing justice, the community denies the victim the opportunity to heal in key areas. Justice is innate to the human mind. Denying justice is denying healing; it is not only punitive to the offender, it is part of a vital and natural process that affects the victim and is part of their rightful process. The pedophile who attacked me, is now out of the country and wanted on Murder One charges, and I will never get any money, I will likely not face him in court, I will never be allowed 5 minutes alone with him tied to a chair. My justice is gone. My healing will never be complete. This is what is done to the vast majority of child sexual abuse victims, as justice is very rarely initiated much less completed. 

As is indicated by the #GiveYourMoneytoWomen movement, spearheaded by my colleague Lauren Chief Elk, one of the first points of justice for survivors should be a material transfer of money and assets to victims. This is something that can be accomplished through civil suits; one of the major obstacles here is again age of consent and the narrowness of the laws around it, including statue of limitations. In a few states, they’ve opened windows for child sex abuse victims to file lawsuits years after the existing statue of limitations, due to the young age and severity of the offense; but across the board, the laws need to be significantly adjusted to account for the fact that pedophilia is a life-long crime, a crime with much graver severity than is captured in the law, and that victims (as we have known for a very long time) often don’t get to a place of seeking justice until later in life.  

And if the courts won’t do it, we need citizen tribunals for pedophiles. Immediately. 

So, material support for victims, justice for victims, is utterly lacking. Instead, people are obsessed with reforming and rehabilitating pedophiles, thinly disguising their love of pedophiles and their belief in the status quo with some sort of veneer that this is, in fact, in service of justice. If you thought they were worth redeeming, consider studies that suggest that psychopaths do not feel remorse, will not stop unless they are stopped, and the only thing that dissuades them is serious personal consequences, including, literally, fear of a public and grisly death. That this is the only thing that dissuades pedophiles from offending. 

So let’s make it happen for them. 

These are predators without a conscious, who do the most heinous crimes under the sun, and yet have the school system, communities, mental health experts AND doctors jump through all kinds of hoops to “save” pedophiles, even when there is scant evidence that pedophilia is capable of “rehabilitation” at all. The ONLY thing that motivates them to change their actions is fear. If there are no public examples made of such a result, then why would they fear something? Why would they “fear” when there are so few consequences for their behavior? Even if pedophiles are “capable” of “rehabilitation” (they aren’t, this is a persistent desire to hurt children in the deepest way possible, not a mental illness), but even if they were, why should society be under absolutely any obligation to either provide that rehabilitation or even find it worthy of doing? Nothing about a pedophile is worth saving. 

As far as I know after some quick research, almost no one in America has been executed solely because of sexual abuse against children. Yes, some pedophiles HAVE been executed, but pedophilia was not the primary cause; I.e. Serial killers who preyed on children. So, it is fair to say that there is minuscule chance that pedophiles will ever receive capital punishment; it is simply, in our society, not an offense punishable by capital punishment. Nor, as we know, are there many extra-judicial killings of pedophiles… except where we see higher rates of sex offenders in prison being killed compared to other prisoners. Sometimes it is heavily implied that “well, the pedophile will be killed by other prisoners”, but this is truly not a workable strategy at scale. 

So, society PRETENDS that this a capital offense when in fact, they do not act like it is. 

I don’t know what to tell you if you don’t think pedophilia should qualify for capital punishment. There is just no reasonable argument that this crime deserves anything less.

Justice after the fact has nothing on the importance of totally preventing these crimes or further crimes. The framework I’ve suggested outlines the reality that most pedophiles are operating with absolutely no anti-pedophile safeguards in the community. Making pedophilia an explicit thing that we ACTIVELY trying to make sure isn’t happening is critical.  

First, we must engage in a large-scale, community driven hunt to identify pedophiles who are engaging with children in any way, and to hunt up rings. We cannot rely on cops and the legal system or school system to do this. We have rights to this under natural law, as we are entitled to and requires no other authority to act to protect children from rape. We must actively find and purge pedophiles from our communities, and then punish all who harbored them. We should be aggressively and proactively, en masse, going after them, bringing in teams of child sexual abuse experts,  doxxing pedophiles operating online, showing up at their doors, following one pedophilia to its ring or associates in child sexual abuse material, co-abusing, sharing information, protecting each other, etc. 

It is time to provide the mortal fear that pedophiles need, and to dispatch them from this world. Nothing less than a coordinated, extra-legal and forceful, full-on attack of pedophiles and their rings, is required by moral law. 

Out of all of these implications, the greatest one to me is the issue of child autonomy, of the relentless abuse children experience, where children are taught, often violently, to obey, and brainwashed by society into pliable victims. They have almost no control over their lives; the adults around them control their lives to the finest detail. They are under literally constant surveillance, they are humiliated, punished excessively (no “punishment” of a child is acceptable.) They are often hit and beaten at home. They have no recourse if they are being abused. It is my belief that  child sexual abuse is actually a structural pillar of oppression that we should look at alongside other pillars such as gender, disability, race, fatphobia. It, too, is an organizing base of oppression, where it begins, a place where children by default sustain great damage, have the oppressions impressed upon them. I would feel very confident at this point making the argument that child sex abuse and pedophilia is actually one of the foundational driving forces that creates the structure of oppression we see all around us. 

Of course, the fact that children, by default, are made completely helpless, are totally dominated, and are in fact taught, by default, to be submissive to adults, this entire set up is a recipe for child abuse. In fact, it is these conditions that make pedophilia possible, and that is community crime in and of itself. Crushing children and subjecting them to harm makes them more vulnerable to predators. And pedophiles rely on the helplessness of children in order to carry out their crimes. 

 Children are told they can “say no”, but there has never been anything in their life they were ALLOWED to say no to. There is just no way that someone whose entire existence is predicated on having almost no self-determination, is going to have any tools for resisting abusive psychopaths. The idea that children should “stay away from strangers”, “tell an adult if you feel uncomfortable”, “learn to forcibly say no if someone is doing something to you that you don’t like”, is absolutely delusional and also once more is requiring the CHILD to be in some way responsible for the abuse.  

 This is typical of the utter unseriousness with which we take our responsibilities to children, especially in the face of such a clear and documented threat. As we see in other situations of great unequal power, abuse flourishes. Every situation where there is this unequal power, must be examined, as this is where cowardly pedophiles flock. It also explains a lot about why, as a society, we coddle pedophiles: their ability to hunt and prey is fundamentally reliant on a substructure or mesh of complete domination and maltreatment of children.  

There are many ways to address the issues of adults having so much power over children and relentlessly abusing it, but for now I will just say that the issue of pedophilia in this country fundamentally implies that core institutions and practices — such as schools, children’s health care, sports, parenting — all require SUBSTANTIAL changes if not full abolishment. One question I have is if schools should even exist at all if they are demonstrably, again and again, hiring pedophiles, giving them control and access to children, and then harboring and covering up for them so that the pedophile is able to keep abusing for years or decades.

In closing, I think we should take a moment to think about what it means to be a pedophile victim. An Epstein victim described it as killing your soul. As a pedophile victim as well, there are no words that fit in this essay that adequately describe the torment of the attack and its aftermath. Many victims describe the feeling of parts of them, or who they were, being dead, or that there was a life and a version of them who is dead.

There are some things that people can do, that are so far beyond redemption; raping a child is in that category, and anyone who argues differently should be looked at as a pedophile collaborator and traitor to the human race. There is no need for pedophiles to live among us; they gave up their right to life the second they laid a hand on a child or conspired to do so. The fact that it isn’t even considered a *reasonable* perspective that adult male predators should be neutralized immediately, is perhaps the greatest reflection that society simple does not care about pedophile victims. 

There is only one response to pedophilia: the very death they hope to inflict on a child. 

A similarly harsh judgement must be brought upon the institutions that harbor pedophiles. We now know that the Catholic Church has, multi-generationally and systemically, sexually abused hundreds of thousands of children. I bet the actual number goes into the millions. The Boy Scouts alone had *at least* 82,000 cases. 

The fact that institutions whose most fundamental and sacred ethical responsibility is to children, were in fact mass-scale child sexual abuse rings, and yet STILL CONTINUE TO OPERATE, is absolutely sickening. It is the most repugnant of all is that *literally hundreds of thousands of child rapes* are not enough to cause people to want to dismantle institutions that have provably functioned, across generations, as the most hellish and brutal rings of devastating child abuse. 

The very clear solution in these cases is to give the death penalty to the pedophile, all fellow pedophiles and enablers, and then to every single system and institution that harbored them.

Our world is infested by them. And the hour is long past due for us to rip them the fuck out of it and dispatch them into the depths of hell. 

Organizing as Pedophile Victims

I think one of the most important things that is suggested by alternate framings and approaches to pedophile, is the possibility of the huge number of pedophile victims in this country developing into a political class that organizes against these systems, pedophile rings, individual child rapists and their collaborators, and the institutions that have harbored them. 

Shame drives us away, as pedophile victims, sometimes from even admitting to our own selves what happened to us. There have been some important shows of solidarity between victims in cases like the US Gymnastics case, and the Epstein victims working together. Although these girls shared a predator as an organizing point, it gives an example of how we might model a broader political organization going forward. 

I believe that, with a mass effort of pedophile victims, it would be possible to uproot every pedophile ring in the country within a matter of months if not weeks. If we find more ways to connect with each other, we will inevitably learn about other victims of our same predators and of their rings. 

We can work to expose pedophiles who are active online: just as a side effort, I have found male coaches, in high schools, who were pedophiles and gotten them fired; I have reported MAPs to their communities, families, friends and jobs. Most recently my long-term colleague, Lauren Chief Elk, and I have been focusing on digging up rings; earlier this year, we discovered and began mapping the Andy Warhol pedophile ring, which implicates children as young as 14, and connects directly to the Epstein ring. Just on our own, using publicly available archival sources, we were able to come up with a preliminary map of the ring and its victims and patterns and members. We’re hoping to provide a brief on that in the coming months.  

I have a theory, based on all the numbers involved and the degree to which pedophiles work together, that from most individual pedophiles, we can find allllllll the other pedophiles in the world. Keep in mind that pedophiles have never faced a mass reckoning; the default is that they are able to operate almost unimpeded.  

One umbrage that people may take is that pedophile victims have gone through enough, and can’t be expected to also fix this while being victims of it. This is beyond sympathetic. However, the material reality is that *we* are the ones who know the most about how to save children and who can best execute this plan. 

I know we hurt, but imagine if you knew that every pedophile in the country had been located and neutralized. Imagine how it would feel to know that every institution that has harbored child rapists is wiped from the very face. Imagine what it would feel like to know, for the first time in your life, that children were safe from these monsters. 

So, to my family united by this torture: I had a vision, and in it I saw pedophiles in the streets, and the streets were full of their blood. 

I hope I see you in my dreams, there with me, very soon. 

You can contact me regarding this article via Twitter DM (I’m @shanley) or email me, shanley.kane@gmail.com.