Here Be Monsters: The MAP Showing Danger Ahead

The number of letters in the alphabet soup of LGBT+ is always growing, The potential addition of MAP should be contested with every sinew of conventional morality. ‘Let’s not mince our words – this is the greatest evil of all’, warned Calvin Robinson, at the time an Anglican priest, on Tucker Carlson’s show.

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When I searched on Google three years ago, the curated top result for ‘minor attracted persons’ was a brief document Supporting Minor Attracted People on the website Primary Prevention of Child Abuse, run by Timothy N Fury, a pseudonymous survivor of child sexual abuse. The document appears to sanitise paedophilia, claiming that ‘the majority of those who actually abuse children are not sexually attracted to them’ (to dispel any doubt, this refers to sexual abuse, not other types of mistreatment). Sexual attraction to children is not inherently problematic, according to Fury, who strives to reduce stigma, because ‘everyone does better with support, and minor attracted persons are no exception’. On the website home page, Fury answers the question ‘do you support pedophiles?’ as follows: –

I support those with a sexual attraction to children who wish to remain law-abiding (minor attracted people), and I support making help more widely and readily available to those with this attraction. I do not support the minority of these people who seek to change age of consent laws or otherwise seek to make sexual activity with children acceptable.

Distortion of language is a tactic: MAPs are not paedophiles, because they don’t actually have sex with minors. Miranda Galbreath, a sex therapist working with jailed sex offenders, regards the term paedophile as a ‘judgemental, hurtful insult’.

This isn’t the first attempt at making child sex attraction acceptable. For a long time a segment of society has striven to normalise such perversion. Paedophile Information Exchange, founded in 1974, campaigned for abolition of the age of consent. PIE included several Labour MPs and was supported by future government ministers Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt at the National Council of Civil Liberties (now Liberty).

Affiliation with the NCCL was not fully welcomed; at the spring 1977 NCCL conference, general secretary Patricia Hewitt acknowledged that ‘public hostility to paedophilia was such that it damaged the cause of gay rights for the gay movement to be associated with it’. However, a motion in 1978 declared that ‘this AGM condemns the physical and other attacks on those who have discussed or attempted to discuss paedophilia, and reaffirms the NCCL’s condemnation of harassment and unlawful attacks on such persons’. When PIE argued that photographs of undressed children should not be considered indecent (thus illegal) unless the subject suffered harm, a document written by Harman (NCCL legal officer, later deputy leader of the Labour Party) placed the onus of proving harm on prosecutors and warned against censorship.

In 1983 a Scotland Yard report on PIE was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions. This followed the imprisonment of PIE activist Tom O’Carroll in 1981 for conspiring to corrupt public morality. After being sacked by the Open University for his self-publicised paedophilia, O’Carroll’s book Paedophilia: the Radical Case was published in 1980. He was later put on the Sex Offenders Register and had further jail sentences. In 2010, writing as an alias, he lauded the pop star Michael Jackson for his bedroom dalliances with young boys. Despite all this, O’Carroll was admitted to the Labour Party in 2015, although he was expelled soon after.

Disbanded in 1984, PIE was retrospectively described by the BBC in 2007 as ‘an international organisation of people who trade obscene material’. In 2014, Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, issued an apology for the historical links with PIE, remarking that ‘it is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the seventies’.

Yet the portal for paedophilia is now being reopened, with the gateway claim that sexual attraction is not sexual abuse, a notion that is neither morally nor legally justifiable. Hundreds of men have been jailed for having pornographic images of boys or girls, just as holding terrorist manuals or propaganda is a criminal offence. The difference with terrorism, though, is that the establishment has a disturbing involvement in child sex exploitaton, from the alleged depravities of parliamentarians at Dolphin House near Westminster (albeit denied), the failure to stop television personality and prolific child abuser Jimmy Saville, and the institutional neglect enabling rape gangs to prey on thousands of girls in towns across the country (with eventual convictions including politicians and employees of police and social services).

Currently, the MAP push for inclusion in the alphabet soup of LGBTQ+ as a sexual orientation is a step too far, even for the likes of Owen Jones. But this is a thin end of the wedge. A degree of tolerance could eventually lead to broader acceptance, and then mandatory teaching in schools.

With its mantra ‘love is love’, the MAP campaign pursues protected status under the Equality Act. If this is achieved, critics will be censured. Watch policing of a drag queen protest and counter-protest, and it is obvious which side the police officers are ordered to protect and which to treat as public order offenders. Parents are deterred from protesting by the risk of social rejection for perceived bigotry, and the real prospect of arrest.

The direction of travel is clear. Standards for sexuality education in children up to six years of age, issued by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Sexual & Reproductive Health, are inappropriate in content while undermining parental responsibility. Similarly, a UN document International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education, emblazoned with the Sustainable Development Goals logo , blatantly primes kids for sexual identity politics.

Earlier this year a professional conference was held at an undisclosed location in Ohio. The ‘Demystifying and Thriving’ event discussed how to ‘Increase competence and cultural humility in providing affirming, compassionate care for MAPs’. The organisers want to depathologise the paedophilic person, frame him (it is almost always a man) as a victim of stigma and teach society to embrace him as having a sexual orientation that is no fault of his own.

A scholarly review in 2024 by Australian researchers Christina Farmer, Michael Salter and Delanie Woodlock showed how MAP advocates present paedophiles as ‘an oppressed sexual minority subject to undue discrimination and oppression’. The reviewers noted ‘strong claims in the MAPs literature that the stigmatization of sexual interest in children is the primary driver of child sexual abuse, and thus sexual interest in children should be socially and culturally normalized’.

MAPs may be found in high places. In 2018 the Times ran a story on ‘Creepy Joe’, long before Biden became president of the USA, and before any excuse of cognitive impairment. A catalogue of video evidence showed his unusual proclivities for sniffing girls’ hair and touching them inappropriately. John Podesta, appointed by Biden as senior advisor on energy, has a collection of paintings depicting child abuse. For a fuller list of public figures with a penchant for intimacy with children, we await – probably in vain – the contents of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book.

Optimistically, this may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. As Glenn Stanton reminds us: –

There is hardly anything the sexual revolution has imagined that has not gained general acceptance by liberally minded folks. The only rule that under girds their sexual ethic is consent. As long as two or more adults fully consent, it gets two-thumbs up from sex revolutionaries. This is why pedophilia is the last hold-out to not have received a cheery green light. Children cannot properly consent. And besides, adults attracted to children are just creepy.

We seem to have lost our backbone in Britain, but if MAP gains inclusion in the LGBTQ complex, it will inescapably be time to make a stand. Would caring parents want their children sharing a toilet or swimming pool changing room with a self-declared nonce?

This article (Here be monsters: the MAP showing danger ahead) was created and published by Niall McCrae and is republished here under “Fair Use”