Pedophile Activist on BBC Radio 4 Behind The Crime

[BitMuch]

A convicted pedophile describes his crimes against girls with great self-pity, says his victims did not have negative reactions and if they had he would have stopped before he got caught and argues to reduce stigma for pedophiles. The presenters psychologists Sally Tilt and Dr Kerensa Hocken do not challenge him and repeatedly call for viewers to sympathise with what they call his 'compulsion', comparing his 'attraction' to our desire to eat unhealthy food. Is this the next target for 'just be kind you judgy bigot' propaganda?

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001b43m

It was produced in partnership with the Prison Radio Association. Does that mean this episode is being played to prisoners?

I think there are particular features of the way that child sex offenders tend to think and fantasise that are compulsive/obsessive in nature. I don’t think the use of that term is supposed to suggest they don’t have a choice, or to remove or reduce moral judgement of their actions . But understanding why and how people reach the point of offending can help with preventing it (if the person seeks help) and with managing offenders.

Also, while obviously everyone has a choice about their actions and has to take responsibility for them, it’s not as most of us are battling against a sexual urge towards children, so it isn’t just a matter of some people lacking self restraint.

Exactly. If you can get to these young people early it might be possible to stop them potentially destroying many, many lives, including their own.

Children's lives should not depend on your "feelings" of making a difference.
You either reduced the potential to reoffend to zero or you've given another child nightmares for life.

If there's no quantitative definition of success then a realistic method of making sure no child comes to harm is still required on top of whatever you "felt" had a positive impact.

Sorry, what? Someone asked me if I felt it helped and I was answering that question.

as to it being my responsibility to ensure these men never reoffended - I am not the police, the probation service or the justice system. I was just volunteering, in my spare time, to do something that I had seen evidence to suggest would reduce the risk of reoffending. You seem to be saying that if that intervention reduced the risk by half, or 25%, it was wrong to take part. Why?

'Circles of Support and Accountability' Wikipedia page; read the 'Criticisms of effectiveness' section.

TL:DR There was no reduction in reoffending rates for sex offenders.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circles_of_Support_and_Accountability

I think we need to think about how we manage child sex offenders in prison too. Recently spoke to a governor from a sex offenders prison who told me he didn’t really believe any programmes were proven to be that effective and he didn’t believe the things that reduced reoffending for other crimes (education/work etc) necessarily reduce reoffending for sexual offences. He also mentioned a tendency, because these offenders are all placed together, for them to be meeting others with similar dangerous perspectives and ideas that they might use justify their behaviour.

im not sure what the answer is, but I do think there needs to be more research and money out in to trying different ways of managing dangerous people.

Sorry for your experiences.

Just to note - it's not a sexual orientation. It's a paraphilia - a fetish, based primarily on the fact that the target of desire cannot consent.

This is common to most paraphilias, from what I've read. Flashing, voyeurism, etc, all depend on including someone in erotic activity without the other party's consent.

To be clear, a large part of the attraction to whatever the target is is the absence of consent or the absence of the ability to consent. So this is not about whom one is attracted to - it's about being attracted to someone because of their vulnerability.

They all spout the same line when they are caught - ''I was going through a bad time'' and ''But I didn't hurt my victim.'' That's not repentance or contrition, its self pity.
IMO the programs aren't effective because its linked to something like narcissistic traits. The lack of empathy, not seeing other people as fully human. Thinking they are above the law - they rarely claim they did not know their actions were illegal.

It doesn’t say that at all. It says:

*’there is not enough evidence to claim that CoSA is proven to be effective in its programmatic aims.” In mitigation, the authors acknowledge that the previous findings are promising and note the difficulty in evaluating a program like CoSA on recidivistic outcomes alone and call for more rigorous evaluation methods that more adequately and fairly test the programmatic aims of Circles of Support and Accountability.

Are you interpreting the word "promising" in that paragraph to mean there was a definite reduction in reoffending rates?

And reduced reoffending rates still means that at least one person was violated during this CoSA experiment.

That's a very selective quote, FlorettaB. There was no significant difference in the rate of reoffending among sexual offenders.
The program may work for a significant percentage of non sexual offenders. Why not just use it for them?

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-tried-to-make-rapists-better-people-was-it-all-for-nothing-rl92ntf2k
Relevant article.

Then, in 2017, after Myers had spent 16 years on the front line of the SOTP, the results of a national evaluation came in. The SOTP didn’t work. It was abruptly abandoned. She had spent so long attempting to change people who had done horrible things, and when they were released they went out and did them again at just the same rate as the men who hadn’t attempted any change.

“It was gutting,” Myers, now 49, says to me. “Just shocking. A massive disappointment to so many people that had invested decades of their lives, totally and utterly driven by wanting to stop these people from doing it again.”

I am pessimistic about any deep change - the only route is to deter i.e. prison and social rejection.

If anyone wants to read the full article its been archived at archive dot ph/kcWJg
You need a strong stomach.

I tend to assume 'compulsion' with paraphilia. Am I wrong? It's not something I know much about.

Thanks for that, Inebriati.

The article also says "It is a minority of released sex offenders who reoffend,".

And it's about general sex offenders rather than pedophiles. I do think there's a difference.

I'm no expert but afaik, a compulsive behaviour is something you can't stop doing (like addiction.) and often has a specific trigger. Compulsions can develop around anything.

A paraphilia is intense sexual arousal to atypical objects or situations. As with compulsions they can cross a line into a disorder when they start to have a negative impact on the persons life or on other people.

I think paraphilias tend to be compulsive, to escalate (people become desensitised), and to cluster.
www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/paraphilias

Also afaik, pedophilia is considered a paraphilia, not a sexual orientation.

That's a great link, Inebriati. I think I may have read it before, as it's pretty much a summary of what I know!

Is there a place, do we think, for teaching paraphilia as part of kid's sex Ed? That people can get wrongly wired and it's problematic? Are we warning kids that sex experimentation can get problematic?

It seems to me that we've got a generation of lads/men who have paraphiliac obsessions driven by porn.

Agreed. We need data on this. I would celebrate a reduction in overall sex offences but it would be helpful to see a breakdown by sub-group.

Just thinking about how paraphilias are much commoner in men, it's another area where data is vulnerable to be debased by classifying by gender rather than sex.

Yep. All I hear is they’re all just one bad away from sexually abusing a kid.