We need to incorporate an anti-pedophilia ethic into our movements

In the past ten years, we’ve made some really significant progress in defining clear movements and also using theories and foundations from other movements to create more complex, detailed, overlapping, or intersectional analysis. 

That has meant being able to take a very detailed, multi-dimensional view of an issue: you can take the idea of prison abolition and relate it to womanism, to feminism, to communist struggle, to economic justice, to digital surveillance and intelligence agency threats; we can take the idea of police violence and analyze that with an eye for sexual violence, with a lens of class struggle, with the system of anti-Black racism. We can take the idea of reproductive rights and look at maternal death rates for women of color, we can look at abortion rights and access, at sexual health education, etc. 

We have these lenses that we bring to each of these movements. One has been consistently missing though: pedophilia. Even within the rape movement itself, pedophilia is a marginalized topic; when you extend analysis to areas outside of sexual violence specifically, pedophilia ceases to exist at all, even as it functions as a foundational system in society, through which a leftist analysis is not possible without also examining. Child sexual abuses are one of the first places where we see systems of oppression truly manifesting, and you can see how its patterns accord, often very cleanly with the profile of oppressive violence just overall; it is part of the same continuum. For example, LGBT youth are assaulted at higher degrees, because they are marginalized in society; young girls are more likely to be sexual abused than young boys, because of misogyny. I would argue that the picture of society and capitalism and social justice, is catastrophically incomplete without including pedophilia.

Pedophilia is very much a force of structural oppression, and it interlinks in both direct and surprising ways with other focal areas. By leaving pedophilia out, we’re leaving children behind, pushing them out of our anti-oppression work, failing to center them in any meaningful way. One mathematical and structural principle that we talk about is focusing on the most marginalized in any given scenario, that that is the ethical and material way to address oppression. And often the most marginalized person of all is the child victim of a pedophile. Without not only including them but making them core to our response, we sabotage our movements, often for no better apparent reason than avoiding the discomfort — an unacceptable cause. In this post we’ll look at a high level at how pedophilia can relate to a few of the different core movements operating on the left, what this analysis can add, and how it can be incorporated from a tactical perspective. 

I’ll start off with a pretty straight forward and topical connection, which is the abortion movement. The interesting thing is that the abortion movement does look to address teen pregnancy — however, it is rarely explicitly acknowledged that huge amounts of that teen pregnancy is coming from pedophiles, and that a huge pillar of reproductive rights is protecting children from pedophiles. Even when child sexual abuse doesn’t result in teen pregnancy, victims are more likely to experience teen pregnancy after an attack. 

Reproductive rights are impossible to address without the frame of child sexual abuse; reproductive rights locates RAPE as something of importance, but not necessarily rape from pedophilia specifically, even though it is in its own distinct category of reproductive violence. The Planned Parenthood website talks about sexual assault, but doesn’t specifically mention pedophilia and underage victims. It discusses college campus rape, which is a start — but as far as overall approach it suggests… sex education, “public policies” and “a culture of consent”. This is very typical of movements that talk about child and teen victims while making it look at if there is no material perpetrator — a common practice for how we talk about pedophiles. While pedophilia is not explicitly excluded, it’s clear that there is no clear anti-pedophile effort as such; much less one that is foundational to this entire field of practice. 

Concerning, whenever there’s a big fundraising effort for these abortion non-profits, they always, always, bring up some atrociously young pregnant rape victim as the reason why support is needed — but these pedophile victims are used as horror stories to drive donations, rather than the basis of a path towards justice. Most of the time, no one talks about them.

The most fundamental reason to have abortion rights, is for victims of pedophiles. That is the foundation on which the entire argument for abortion ultimately rests, it is the case which supplants all other cases in importance. No abortion is more urgent. A lens of pedophilia propels the movement into a direct confrontation with predators; the non profit industrial complex is happier to deal with this after the rape and pregnancy occurs. 

Another area that we should see a much greater focus on pedophilia, is in the LGBT community. It is almost not even in evidence as nearly 50% of bisexual girls are getting raped before the age of 18, many by pedophiles. 12% of transgender youth report being sexually assaulted by peers or TEACHERS in the school setting. Pedophilia is the *first* site of corrective rape, and often happens in the home. Early age sexual abuse experienced by, dominantly, trans and bisexual children, is a preceding factor in the problems that trans +/ bisexual people will face throughout their lives; childhood sexual abuse predicts a host of problems later in life, including a number of negative medical outcomes and continued sexual violence, resulting in PTSD among other significant mental problems. It should be those children we are fighting for more than any other LGBT priority, but you cannot claim in earnest we have been. 

The LBGT community spends a lot of time fighting the conception that gay people are pedophiles. We are understandably cautious around the topic, as of course, the enemy uses this same construct as a pretense to oppress and abuse us. However, that is not an excuse for us to put aside a.) how many queer youth are being abused by pedophiles, and b.) the fact that there are absolutely pedophiles in the LGBT community, and we are not any less likely to be pedophiles than any other group. The fact that we are falsely stereotyped does not mean that it is okay to avoid child sexual assault as a topic, because, for example, it would mean admitting that some members of the LGBT community ARE pedophiles, that we have a responsibility to police that within our communities, and like every community, must make sure that we are not harboring pedophiles.

Once you put the reality of child sexual abuse on the table, you can start working from the foundation of a lifetime of trauma as queer people. It also lets us think more critically about community “traditions”, such as that young gay people new to the scene take on an older partner, who serves as some kind of “mentor” and ostensively offers all kinds of benefits to the younger person; in reality, this is merely old men praying on teenager boys. 

Pedophilia of queer and trans youth is off the charts, particularly for bisexual children. Not wanting to play into societal tropes about us, is actually not an excuse to ignore pedophilia that IS happening; it is no justification for us as queer adults and elders to abandon our queer youth even when it is members of our own community who are committing these violences. When queer children are able to get to adulthood without being raped, their chance of living goes up, their chance of having a good life goes up, their chance of being able to enjoy life as a queer person goes up. Rape is sometimes the first material experience that queer children have with oppression, that is most formative, that sets the stage so deeply for a lifetime of abuse and trauma. Never, ever forget that when children and raped, they are more likely to, in the future, be sexual assaulted, to be raped, to be beaten in their relationships; these are the stats that are most likely to be focused on, when we talk about IPV in the community… but so much of this is originating much earlier.  

Domestic violence advocacy similarly, needs to recognize that a lot of women in domestic violence relationships, were disproportionately pedophile victims first — victims of pedophile attacks are far more likely to be in abusive relationships in the future. And, for many of these victims, pedophilia IS a part of domestic violence in the home; we must never forget or leave behind the domestic violence that happens to youth and how that often intertwines with sexual abuse. If children are safe, it is far more likely that all other populations will also be safe. Potential child sexual abuse is something we need to be looking out for in conjunction with domestic violence with adults in the home. 

Moving onto economic justice, where we find that pedophilia as a lens also widens and deepens our praxis. First, we have to start looking at how money functions as part of societal pedophilia; this of course, means recognizing that child sexual abuse is actually big business (CSAM, human trafficking, sex slavery, etc). And that to stop systematic sexual exploitation, one of the places to start is analyzing and deconstructing where pedophilia is actually a driver in large parts of the financial system. This is something we have seen most clearly and recently in the Epstein pedophile ring, where it was very clear that this was a business involving enormous amounts of money. 

When you are talking about the elite parts of society, how are you to understand them in totality without looking into the huge global pedophile rings and trafficking of young people? How will you understand how the people with the most power in society, are producing, through media outlets, political interference, the shape of criminal proceedings, legal shielding, etc.,  an overall culture of child sexual abuse?  Do you think that the sexual violence that we see playing out in our communities has no connection to the elite superstructure, has no connection to rings of pedophiles operating at the heights of wealth and power?

When we are looking at economic justice, we also run into the need to materially compensate victims of pedophile abuse. This also becomes a legal issue; the Give Your Money to Women movement, founded by my colleague Lauren Chief Elk, provides a valuable framework for looking at how to achieve justice for abuse victims, as well as defining the cost to them in material terms. There is a lifelong cost of pedophilia on victims: that includes the cost of physical and mental health services, the loss of income in the future due to trauma, the cost of having sexual violence continue throughout their lives, as it does for many victims. It is estimated that close to $300,000 of costs accrue to female victims of child sexual abuse; there is not only the need to provide this funding, but there is the need to provide victims with much greater economic support, where they can focus on their care and healing and have the option to participate in society in a way that doesn’t require them to keep working, for example. 

An economic justice standpoint also requires we re-examine the laws and statue of limitations around child sexual abuse, so that we are legally facilitating civil and criminal processes that allow pedophile victims to seek justice, including financial restitution. By the time many victims are prepared to proceed with legal and/or criminal efforts, the statue of limitations has closed; when I was trying to proceed with action against my abuser, only one civil firm I talked to would even take my case, because the laws around everything are so fucked up that the likelihood of plausible legal grounds plummets after a relatively short period of time. This indicates the need to make it possible for child victims to seek damages when they are ready to, even if that happens at a much later date. 

Pedophilia  implicates the legal system, the criminal justice system on many levels: What is more important in the pantheon of human abuse than pedophilia? And yet, every step along the way we see that this system is failing victims. 

Consider the criminalization of children, the outcomes we see from victims who are then more likely to end up within the system. The system serves to push victims into a criminal justice system where there is ALSO huge sexual violence against children. The criminalization of pedophilia victims is enormous; one-third of girls in juvenile detention are the victims of IN-HOME child sexual abuse, and not only that, the pedophilic abuse continues in the juvenile justice system; in spring 2022 a lawsuit was filed by 20 former inmates of a LA juvenile detention center, alleging repeated sexual assault by at least 10 staff. When you talk about criminalizing women for various types of abuses, this is among the absolute most egregious examples, and is the foundation of criminalizing older women for self defense; many of the pedophile victims end up in juvenile detention because they are running away from home where abuse is happening, from school where abuse is happening, and/or are significantly more vulnerable to things like drug use and other ways of “acting out” due to the abuse and trauma they have sustained, or even as a result of direct physical altercation with abusers.  

On the other side, prison abolition and proponents of rehabilitation strategies for offenders, must contend, foundationally, with what is to be done about pedophiles — which are serial predators who commit the same crime again and again and again. The question is if these movements can come up with a reasonable approach to these situations; how we deal with pedophiles is truly the basis of a legal system. These are not rehabilitatable offenders, as medical survey after medical survey shows, these predators will offend no matter what unless they are stopped. In my mind the only response to pedophilia that is remotely ethically viable is immediate citizen’s death penalty on first known offense, but if you agree or not, that is a truly basic conversation we need to be having as we look to systems of justice outside of the state. 

And of course as we wind our way through the various institutions of society, we most confront education justice. We first have to recognize that proper education for our children will never be possible until we have removed pedophilia from our schools. Pedophilia is a structural part of the school system; pedophiles gather wherever there are children. A lot of the data on the overall prevalence is very outdated, which is incredibly concerning - suggesting that this information is being not collected or it is being actively suppressed by the establishment — but studies show that more than 7% and even up to 10% of students experience sexual misconduct by staff in the school setting - and that number leaves out the last year of high school, of course, because “age of consent” — as if it suddenly isn’t pedophilia for a teacher to sexual abuse their high school students as long as they have turned 18. 

The issue of pedophilia introduces a new framing into education, which is that predators are not only operating in schools but are being enabled by the broader school system. School staff offenders can have as high as 73 victims — like all pedophiles, they are serial perpetrators that in the right setting are able to rack up HUGE numbers of victims. 

The fact that schools themselves are consistently, consistently, consistently a site of significant amounts of child sexual abuse, proposes that the school system itself, fundamentally, is set up in such a way as to continuously feed kids to child predators, and that this is the natural result of the way that schooling is being arranged in society. I am not willing to enter a debate over whether or not the ongoing presence of child rape in school, points to a completely fundamental problem that requires a full examination of the entire system, a full deconstruction. The school system must be fundamentally destroyed and rebuilt, if you are operating with the (correct) reference point that we need to stop the sexual abuse of children as the number one priority; that as long as children are not safe from these predators in school, schools should not be operating. 

So, in the past decade, we’ve seen a lot of momentum around school lunch drives, censorship in schools, funding for charter schools, the effects of districting and how that leads to unequal odds of education; where adding pedophilia into the mix makes it crystal clear that this is the fundamental issue in the schools; child abuse and sexual abuse. At this point, you begin to see that the power differential between adults and children is the foundation for the sexual abuse we see in schools; we see that this is basic power dynamic which enables this abuse and is the basis of the school system. 

Outside of the school environment itself, one of the #1 places that children are preyed on and exploited by pedophiles is on the internet. Digital justice has so many applications for an anti-pedophilia lens. So much of the way that children are stalked and groomed by pedophiles is on the internet; pedophiles look at tens of thousands of pictures of children online, maybe even more; they are driving significant traffic numbers to tech companies. It is where they hang out and congregate and even form communities, even communities for attracting children. Check out online groups like the MAP movements; and obviously, its where they distribute child pornography to each other. 

When children are safe online, everyone else would be as well. Thinking about pedophilia as a function of the internet also brings up ideas around how children are being surveilled online by not just pedophiles but the platforms itself; it brings up why children are under surveillance while adult perpetrators aren’t; it brings up how tech companies themselves are profiting off the enormous amount of sexual abuse and grooming that occurs on these platforms. It is, once again, one of most important structural factors in how the internet and the tech industry are functioning overall. 

In sum : 

Pedophilia is perhaps the greatest of crimes in oppression’s arsenal. We must start to see it an a tool of oppression, and thus, something that should be put into every pillar of movement — you will find pedophilia as a significant foundational force in all of them. When you start looking at pedophilia, it opens entirely new lines of inquiry into our movements. Such as how these systems of oppression add up to result in child sexual abuse, and how child sexual abuse precedes so much of the material indicators of oppression that will unfold throughout life. 

It becomes clear that no revolution will form or succeed without an anti-pedophile ethic, seeking to protect children for sexual abuse, getting justice and support for victims, and serving severe and final punishments to these abusers. On the Left, we must, no matter how uncomfortable, bring this into our worldview and our material actions; it is not only necessary for the change we seek but it is mandated by all ethical and natural law.