Pedophile Activist on BBC Radio 4 Behind The Crime

I'd fully support young men, recognising inappropriate urges, being able to seek help.

And if people disagree with this I'd like to know what they propose as an alternative solution bearing in mind I'm talking about young men/boys (below 18).

I suppose it’s difficult because I don’t think peadophilia should be destigmatised, but I can also recognise that the stigma associated with paedophilia might stop some people seeking help/intervention to prevent them offending. Not sure what the answer is there.

I believe that there is some research that suggests that the urge towards sexual attraction to children/minors begins in the adolescent years and is a result of a range of complicated factors including childhood abuse.

Not much is known about it because researchers are afraid to research it for fear of being seen as sympathetic.

I'd fully support young men, recognising inappropriate urges, being able to seek help.

FlorettaB · Today 11:38
There is such wilful ignorance here of what these psychologists do and what they’re looking to achieve. They are working to lower the risk of reoffending which is essential because the vast majority of those convicted are going to be released into the community at some point. Would you like them to sit there and tell the offenders what awful people they are or do you want them to actually do their job.

Re: Would you like them to sit there and tell the offenders what awful people they are or do you want them to actually do their job.

As part of this, did they ask him what he now realised the effects of his behaviour on the children has been? That would be part of the job too, I should think, even if it is done in a non accusatory way.

I did not hear, but other posters seem to be saying there was an absence of mentioning this.

Given anyone who has been the victim of csa could have been listening, I think it would have been important to get him to admit unequivocally that he had caused harm.

Wouldn’t he need to understand this and understand himself in order to have a chance of not reoffending?

I can't speak for anyone else but my issue is not with the nature of the psychologists job but with the way the BBC presented the information. The show was split between clips of an interview between Ian and the psychologists and their commentary on the interview, the overall impression was that of "poor Ian" and I felt there were questions raised which the psychologists did not attempt to answer in their commentary.

There is definitely a push by paedophiles to normalise adult/child sexual relationships so it's hardly surprising that people would question the motives of a program which was entirely sympathetic to the experience of a child sex offender.

There is such wilful ignorance here of what these psychologists do and what they’re looking to achieve. They are working to lower the risk of reoffending which is essential because the vast majority of those convicted are going to be released into the community at some point. Would you like them to sit there and tell the offenders what awful people they are or do you want them to actually do their job.

I am commenting on your report of the programme notes. It is telling of itself that they suggest societal disgust is the only harm; that it didn't occur to the writer of the note that there were children who were victims of this abusive behaviour

I agree with @ToppCat

It is run by sneering, sanctimonious wokesters. How anyone can claim the BBC is impartial and not burst out laughing I don't know. The only reason for its existence, so far as I can see, is to promote high culture. That was the original goal. In other words, to give us a break from Love Island and The Sun. Instead, it is now a kind of propaganda unit for woke activists. They are obsessed with diversity, almost to the point of hysteria. I'm all for having more female and gay and disabled and asian presenters, etc. But that shouldn't be the priority. The priority should be intelligent, high-brow content. If the best presenter happens to be a gay, disabled black woman, then great, that's a bonus.

They now seem utterly incapable of producing anything good. The focus is always on inclusivity and diversity, and to hell with quality. If they make a Radio 4 documentary about, say, Jane Austen, they can't just make it about her novels. It has to be about her attitude to slavery. I'm utterly sick of the BBC. There are only four things now worth the licence fee: University Challenge, QI, In Our Time (on Radio 4) and Rutherford and Fry (also on Radio 4). But I'm sure they will get around to ruining them as well.

I listened to this last night before reading this. One thing that struck me is that Ian said that he knew he'd get arrested that day. He said that was because he needed help and he believed that was the only way he could get it. I thought it was far more likely though that he knew he was going to offend - his impulse was so strong - and couldn't help himself offending and also that his fantasy involved being shamed by being caught. If he really wanted help, he would have to know there were other avenues he could go down.

They mentioned the police went to his home - presumably they would have searched the place for computer files? There was no mention of whether anything was found - that would have been quite telling either way.

Only harm was feelings of disgust by society? No mention of his victims?

I've explained that I've not 'listened' to the programme and don't feel that I can comment until I have. Have you listened to it and come away with a very different impression than that given in the notes or Toppcat's report?

Thank you for mentioning this OP. I just happened to hear a little but will listen properly later.

I was a bit troubled to hear what I thought was a sweeping statement about the causes of paedophilia, in that the psychologist said they thought people were just born that way.

I know from things I have read, including testimonies from paedophiles, that certainly some have an arrested development at a young age, and very often some sort of trauma adversity that froze them at that age. There must be a range of complex factors driving their paedophilia. Let us hope enough will be learnt to try to intervene much earlier.

I was trying to find an article about it I once read on this board. I couldn’t came across this most extraordinary information: that Germans in the earlier part of the 20th Century were brought up following a book by a child care theorist with very unpleasant form of cold, brutal fathering. Some think this may have influenced Nazism. German society was also as a rule very governed by strict societal rules about the family.

After the war, in the 1950s and 60s, people
began to look for reasons and came to think a reason for Nazism was repressed sexuality. A certain academic began to combine ideas about this repression, and children - the last taboo.

There were actually experiments where children were made to be naked and stroke each other. He was an academic in sexual studies (?) o high standing, who had had a vicious father himself, set up fostering of children taken from ‘bad’ families and put to live with paedophiles. It is almost unbelievable! Here is the article:

^Letter from Berlin
The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles^

With the approval of the government, a renowned sexologist ran a dangerous program. How could this happen?
Rachel AvivJuly 19, 2021

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles

They are indeed responsible for their actions; but that does not preclude attempts to curb that behaviour, either by incarceration or by trying to prevent it happening by looking at why it happens.

I agree that those working in this field can get manipulated, and even desensitised, but that is an argument for proper supervision, or rotating duties that take them into other roles as well. I think the same applies to social workers in children's services - they need to take on other social work roles at times to maintain their perspective.

Lack of impulse control/spur of the moment compulsions seems an odd argument for people who may spend months or years getting themselves into positions where they have access to children, where their victims and often their families are carefully groomed.

Your last paragraph makes total sense to me. This isn't about compulsion it is the usual power and control.

As with others; I'm done with being kind.

Fuck centring men's feelings over those of children.

If they can manage not to sexually assault large, beefy men, they can manage not to sexually assault children.

I've worked with people who have literally no impulse control; who will rub themselves uncontrollably and indiscriminately against people and objects. That's something else.

If someone is able to not assault one person but chooses to assault another who is vulnerable or unable to give consent, then they are able to exercise impulse control. And are thus entirely responsible for their actions.

Or alternatively...

In today's episode we learn from Ian how he justifies his crimes and the efforts he went to to try and reduce his sentence. He has not be convicted of any further sex offences for the last ten years.

cause harm through shameful acts that cause disgust to society

Only harm was feelings of disgust by society? No mention of his victims?

The full programme notes read more like they're in line with what ToppCat reports. I'll need to wait until they provide a transcript to comment unless I use some automated captions with it.

But, it sounds like a very difficult topic, and it looks like it will need some careful listening.

[As forensic psychologists their] role is to help people who have committed crimes to look at the harm they’ve caused to other people, understand why, and work out how to make changes to prevent further harm after they’ve been released.
…
In this final episode they talk to Ian, who pleaded guilty to the offence of indecent exposure. Ian received a non-custodial sentence, was placed on the register of sex offenders and was ordered to attend a sex offender treatment programme.*

Ian’s story is one of a compulsion that started early in childhood and continued into his adult years. By talking through the key moments in Ian’s life and upbringing, we can start to understand how he, and others, reach the point where they cause harm through shameful acts that cause disgust to society.

Ian's conviction led to him seeking further help to curb his compulsions, and he has successfully learned how to live safely. His behaviour has been under control for over ten years, and his successful treatment may have prevented further, far more serious harm happening in the future.

I agree we do need to understand this behaviour in order to tackle it.

How do professionals working in this area, or any area with people who are expert manipulators and perpetrators of appalling crimes, protect themselves? Not just from the emotional drain and trauma of listening to the crimes, but of having their perspective towards the crimes themselves shifted? "Rape, torture, child abuse is bad but sexual exposure really isn't up there is it? We shouldn't get wound up about it as there is much much worse"? And when you then bring the discussion into the public sphere you find yourself out of synch with the public who rightly point out that sexual exposure to a child IS bad.

• want to hear...

It seems to me the extent of research for "understanding" sexual offenders including paedophiles is having psychologists interview them and then try to draw conclusions from what they say, including guessing at how much is outright lies and how much is lies the offender has been telling themselves so long they actually believe it.

What's interesting is it really isn't difficult to find out what these men really think - there are crowds of "MAPs" on twitter apparently not breaking guidelines, quite happy to share their justifications about how it's all fine. Similarly with rapists, go to punternet and find out how they actually feel about women, rather than the words they know they're supposed to say if caught.

It's pretty easy to work out what counsellors want to here, and a bit of ego massaging "what I really needed was someone like you to help me" when they get caught doesn't hurt either.

One of the key messages for me is the need to control what exposure to sexuality children have.
Sex is a really powerful reinforcement of behaviour, a feedback loop. Getting aroused by 'the wrong thing' in your earliest experiences cause so many problems.

I was given inappropriate reading as a youngish teen (groomed by an older guy) and it's stayed with me forever. I hate that my sexuality was formed by his fantasies.

We need to protect our kids from early sexualisation.

Those defending the programme - and I did hear it - I must say my first thought when I heard it was the SOTP story as investigated by the Mail on Sunday and which goes back years. In that programme, it was revealed that sex offenders were basically swapping tips and learning how to appear contrite and go on to reoffend.

Who knows with the individual concerned but I personally didn't think they did a good enough job at the start. The reason I think that is because of the ways in which offenders learn to cover their tracks. I think it needed more context - but that's because of the failures in treatment programmes.

I do think more needs to be done to understand sex offenders. But it seems it's never done well and the digging done by the MoS showed that we are right to be cautious about what we are being told.

Ok, I misremembered. It's interesting, none the less.

They say "they do not accept violent offenders or serial offenders, nor minister to pedophiles, which they define as "someone who can only become sexually aroused by a child""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiracleVillagee_(community)

Thing is these people exist. How do we manage them?

One of the way society manages this behaviour is through stigma and cultural barriers.

I can see that living away from children may seem an easier way to live. The problem is without the stigma within that society (the town) what may start off as a reasonable position may slide into group think justification.

I endorse this post. The programme was very clear that it was not in any way minimising the effects of his crime - indecent exposure. And the man himself said that he now understood how damaging his actions were and that he had no way of changing that or offering an apology.

If there is to be a way of reducing these crimes then understanding what the psychological make up of perpetrators is is important. Why do some men feel a compulsion to do this?

The man on the programme had a strict only-child upbringing, and was bullied at school and had no friends. An occasion of him being exposed as a child resulted in the attention he craved - a positive reward for a negative behaviour. He knew that what he was doing was wrong but it became a strong compulsion which he found hard to resist.

He said that if he had been able to find counselling and help to resist he would have welcomed this. He deliberately got himself caught in the hope that this would get him the counselling he needed. But it resulted in group sessions with strangers where he felt unable to open up, He sought help in many places but none was to be had until he found a voluntary organisation who helped him to stop his compulsion.

Any other compulsion would be treated with counselling and it is in everyone's interests for this to be available for sexual offences - they are in the grip of a compulsion and this needs treating - unless we are to say that all sex offenders are inherently evil and there is nothing to be done except lock them all up.

Because we are all so horrified by these crimes we must not stop efforts at prevention.