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I said: I want to study individuals who are attracted to minors who have never committed a sexual offence. And my professor looked at me and said: Yuck! CANDICE:
Hello, this is Candice, welcome to the prevention podcast. As I have been sharing, we are doing a series of podcasts talking about pedophilia and we're interviewing all kinds of interesting people including anti-contact pedophiles, and today we have a wonderful guest, Dr. Allyn Walker. Welcome!
ALLYN:
Thank you!
CANDICE:
I first want to say that Dr. Walker identifies as non-binary, so today we will be referring to Dr. Walker as they, them, and their. Alright! Well, welcome to our podcast.
ALLYN:
Thank you so much!
CANDICE:
I'm so happy we met!
ALLYN:
Yeah!
CANDICE:
It's really great that you found us so that we found you, and that you're doing the amazing research that you're doing.
ALLYN:
Thank you!
CANDICE:
That's one of the thing that I want the people that are listening to us to know, is that you are doing research on pedophiles. And so, really, if you are open, let's start with that. What is your research about?
ALLYN:
So, I did a study that I called the MAP resilience study. Map stands for minor-attracted person. A lot of the time people will talk about pedophiles, and MAP is a term that is used by people in the minor-attracted community to refer to themselves.
It includes pedophiles, which are people who are attracted to prepubescent children, and then also hebephiles, who are attracted to children in the early stages of puberty, and sometime ephebophiles, who are attracted to children in the late stages of puberty, so often MAP is used by people in this population as a less stigmatizing term, and also as an umbrella term that kinda of includes everyone.
So, I did this study, the MAP resilience study, to find out—I come from a criminal justice background—my PhD is in criminal justice, and also a social work background, so I wanted to find out what motivates MAPs to not commit offences, how do they strategize not to commit offences, and then also how do they cope with their attractions, their sexuality, and deal with the stigma that they've got going on in their lives.
CANDICE:
That's great! Well, and I appreciate you explaining MAPs, because we have talked about MAPs on this podcast, and I kept saying pedophile, and, which is funny, because I do know about ephebophiles and hebephiles, and so, thank you for clarifying that, I think that's really important. And its such an interesting topic of research! What interested you in this type of research?
ALLYN:
So, before I had gone back to get my PhD, I was hearing about individuals who are attracted to minors who were coming out and saying I'm attracted to minors, I don't want to offend, and I never have. And I had never really considered that, that this population even existed.
So I was working in criminal justice at the time, I started looking into the criminological literature on it, and there's really nothing that talks about people who are attracted to minors who do not commit sexual offences.
So I got really interested in this, especially, I don't know if you've heard of this research, but there's a bunch of it saying, they've done studies on the general population and talking about pedophiles and asking them do you think that this population should be incarcerated, even if they haven't committed an offence, and a huge proportion say ‘Yes', and a huge proportion say they would be better off dead, so its really upsetting stuff, and I was really interested in like, how are people dealing with this stigma, and how do they deal with other sexuality in general, and yeah, so, I decided to study it.
CANDICE:
I appreciate you saying that its upsetting. One of the things that I post on Twitter quite a bit is that it is upsetting to me, that anti-contact,—and I'll literally put it in CAPS—and anti-contact pedophiles, are told, like, 'die', threatened, and there's so much hate out there, and it's acceptable in our society, and then this misunderstanding: oh yeah let's just throw them all, you know, lock them up and throw away the key, so what i think I'm struggling with, and this is why I'm doing this podcast—they're anti-contact, they don't have a history of contact, but because the media has run wild with the term pedophile, and I think really, misused it,
ALLYN:
Yeah
CANDICE:
And you've seen that too
ALLYN:
Sure, so many people think that pedophile means sex offender.
CANDICE:
Yes!
ALLYN:
That even wasn't a finding of the study necessarily, because I already knew, like, that it doesn't mean that, but so many people talked in my study even about that misconception, people have come out to their parents, people in my studies said that, you know, this one person in particular told his dad that, he said—I'm a pedophile, and um, his dad said, but being a pedophile is illegal. And no! It's not illegal, this specifically refers to that attraction or sexuality if you will, of being attracted to minors and does not in any way refer to their behaviour at all.
So, yeah. It s really upsetting that so many people make that connection and then also like you were saying about the online people saying you know kill yourself, die—I've seen Tumblr pages belonging to MAPs, so I'll often people will connect with each other with Tumblr, using different hash tags, and tags to spread positivity to each other, and so there's this tag that's like #MAPpositivity, or #NOMAPpositivity, which stands for non-offending minor-attracted person positivity
So people on Tumblr who are like against maps have been latching onto this tag and then posting things about like, kill yourself, with hearts and stuff, so that it looks, so that MAPs will look at it and think, oh this is going to be some positivity, and then they see like, oh no, its someone telling me to kill myself again. One of the people in my study told me "we get used to the phrase kill yourself. We hear that a lot."
CANDICE:
Which is sad. It's really sad, yeah. But you and I are talking, and some of our listeners will be those individuals who believe that, and so, I think what I'd like you to do even though you may have already said that, I feel like we need to say it again, what is a non-offending or anti-contact pedophile?
ALLYN:
Sure. Yeah, a non-offending pedophile or MAP is a person who has an attraction to minors, if we're talking specifically about pedophiles, to prepubescent children, and they have not committed a sexual offence against a child.
Anti-contact people are specifically people who are against sexual relationships or sexual contact of any kind between adults and youth, and those people exist, so, not all MAPs, not all pedophiles are interested in sexual contact, a lot of them believe that it would cause harm to children, so they just don't have any interest in engaging with that, and causing that kind of harm&mdash
CANDICE:
—and never have
ALLYN:
—And never have, and never will.
CANDICE:
Mmm hmm. And some of our listeners might say, well this is a choice. Being a pedophile is a choice. What do you say to that?
ALLYN:
So, uh—
CANDICE:
And what does your research say, perhaps? Maybe that's something.
ALLYN:
Well, so, a lot of research, I have not done this particular research, but a lot of research out there shows that pedophilia is a sexual orientation. It can't be changed, so a lot of the people in my study had tried to change their orientation, tried to change the sexuality. What we find is people who study this have found is it mirrors being gay, you can keep being attracted to that age throughout your lifetime. So, Michael Seto refers to it as a sexual age orientation, rather than a gender orientation. So some people are just attracted to a specific age.
CANDICE:
Well I appreciate you saying that too, sexual-age orientation, because i can, my guess is that a lot of individuals might listen to this LGBTQ and say, "whoa whoa whoa, we do not want to be affiliated with someone who is a pedophile".
ALLYN:
That is understandable, given the assumption that pedophiles are automatically sex offenders—really it's difficult for us to, in our minds, separate that. And, so, and there's also been a history of people on the LGBT community being accused of sexual contact with minors based on their sexual orientation.
So there's really a lot of parallels in how MAPs and the LGBT community have been treated, have been assumed to exist, and a lot of, yeah, so, unfortunately those parallels have maybe made the LGBT community not want to associate with the MAP community.
CANDICE:
Yeah, which makes sense.
ALLYN:
Yeah, it makes sense, but its also unfortunate.
CANDICE:
It is unfortunate, yeah. Let's get into your research! Yeah, because your research is amazing, and I hope that the world gets to read it and see it, and I hope you present at ATSA, the next ATSA conference, I think it needs to be out there. So who did you interview for your study specifically?
ALLYN:
So, I interviewed 42 minor-attracted individuals. They came from all over the world, so I had a lot from the U.S., some from Canada, and Europe, Asia, Africa; they were from all over. These were all individuals who not only were minor-attracted, but also were committed to not offending, and had not offended. They had not committed a sexual offence against a child. That was a requirement for participation in this study.
CANDICE:
Okay, Where did you find these participants, how did they come to you?
ALLYN:
So, I interviewed them from two different groups. So, one is VirPed, which stands for Virtuous Pedophiles, they're an amazing website. I don't know the latest count, but when i was doing my study, which was a little over a year ago, there were like 1800 members of VirPed, and not all of them post regularly, but a lot of them do, and they're a peer support group, so they kind of help each other with the stigma that they're facing, and sometimes with strategizing not to offend, so I got a lot of my participants through there. I advertised on there, or people advertised for me on there, I should say.
CANDICE:
That's great
ALLYN:
And I also advertised on the B4U-ACT website, they're a group located out of Baltimore, Maryland, they also provide peer support, like Virped, but they have an in-person component as well. They try to advertise to mental health professionals who might work with MAPs, and try to teach them about issues related to them, so that they can provide effective services.
CANDICE:
That's great, that's great, so they got a wide range, and from all over, sounds like, which is great.
ALLYN:
Yeah, I had also a wide age range as well, so uh, a lot of people think that pedophiles, that MAPs, that they're—even people in my study had this image as pedophiles as like creepy old men, yeah, literally old men, what they told me—
CANDICE:
But that's the assumption people make.
ALLYN:
The people in my study ranged in age from 19 to their mid 60s.
CANDICE:
Okay!
ALLYN:
So, yeah, and were a mix of uh, men and women. I had 39 men and 3 women in my study, so.
CANDICE:
Well yeah, and I think one of the things that you and I have talked about before is, women, there are female pedophiles, and its such an under-researched population, and so I think its great that you had at least 3, right?
ALLYN:
For sure
CANDICE:
I also, we interviewed somebody who was in their late teens, recently, and so I think that's—there is a clear misunderstanding that is this like old man, this dirty old man, hiding out in an alley waiting to snatch you up in a van kind of thing. I do wonder if some of our listeners might say, well if you're a teenager, how do you know if you're a pedophile? What would you say to that?
ALLYN:
Sure, I mean, I think for a lot of people, and even in the MAP community, you hear people saying, well, you know, you're a teenager, this could change your sexuality could change as you age, but for a lot of folks, they just know. You know, and especially, teens tend to have attractions toward adults, and other teens, and so if you're a teen and you're having attractions toward people who are way younger than you, that can be a pretty solid sign for a lot of folks that they're minor-attracted.
CANDICE:
Yeah, yeah I think that's a good delineation. What surprised you most about what you were told, or what they participants told you?
ALLYN:
Yeah, so I came from from a criminal justice background, as I said, and I was really trying to figure out, well what is motivating people not to offend, and so I just generally assumed that when I asked people that question, they would say I don't want to go to jail.
And for some people that was what they told me, but for the overwhelming majority, you know, were kinda of like, well obviously I don't want to hurt a child, and that really surprised me. These people are highly moral people, they, you know, like anyone else, they a lot them told me "Well I love children, I wouldn't want to hurt them". So these are not just the sexual urge that people have, its also people have romantic attractions to children, they have romantic feelings,
CANDICE:
Emotional too
ALLYN:
Emotional yeah, and they're not interested in, you know, harming a child. They love children, they, you know, are attracted to them, but they don't want to harm them, so that was, that was the answer that really shocked me.
CANDICE:
Yeah and I appreciate you saying that too, because we have interviewed individuals who have said "Well I love a child, I love children, I would never do that", but I can see some listeners saying—gasp—They love children, that's—and then judging that—that's disgusting, they're going to hurt someone, a child, if they're around the child, and what I hear you saying, which I appreciate, is that no, because they love children, that they truly don't want to harm a child. Because they see, again, its like this moral choice, and they don't want to hurt anybody.
ALLYN:
Absolutely. And so, I was asking people, you know, how do you strategize not to do this, and for a lot of them, they were like: "Its easy, I just don't. I'm not just going to trip and fall into a child", was what one of them said, and, I mean its really interesting that we think about this group of people as having maybe impulse control issues, and like that if they saw one they would prey on that child, that's not the experience of the people that I spoke to at all.
CANDICE:
Well that's a huge assumption too, isn't it? That, that's the assumption of pedophile equals child molester.
ALLYN:
Right, absolutely, and again&mdash
CANDICE:
None of the control, and they're always going to see a child and I'm going to molest them right away.
ALLYN:
And it's a ridiculous assumption if we think about it, but media interpretations of pedophiles, or MAPs, are so pervasive. I had someone tell me that it was a trope, and you know, he said if you wanna make your character a bad guy, make him a pedophile. He said, "when have you ever seen in the media a pedophile being a good guy?" And I said I don't think I ever have, and he said well that's the point, you never do, its easy to villainize someone because yeah, that's just our expectations.
And the really upsetting thing to me was that when I talked to a lot of these folks, they told me that when they realized that they were attracted to children, they assumed that they were going to be monsters. That was literally the term that they used, they said am I a monster, what's wrong with me? And they said, I assumed I was going to end up like those other people who I've seen in the news, who hurt children. And it took them a while to sometimes get to that place where they were like, I'm not going to do this, that's not who I am, I am not a monster, I am not going to do that.
CANDICE:
Isn't that interesting, that influence though? The media's influence, so even someone saying, yeah someone growing up and watching a movie and there's a rape—you know, but watching it so much, and you know, this boy with blonde hair and blue eyes was a rapist, of a kid, oh blonde hair and blue eyes, I'm going to be a rapist, I'm going to be a rapist, instead of like, no. But it is sad, the media is so powerful, that for someone that has an attraction such as this, it really can impact them to think well I am a monster.
ALLYN:
Absolutely, and there's so little community, I mean the community that exists is amazing, especially VirPed, B4U-ACT, but there's so little advertising for these communities, that so few people know that they exist, so even when the people that I talked to who thought originally "am I a monster", they got to this place where oh its not going to be me, they thought I'm the only one whose good and is minor-attracted, or that I'm the only good pedophile out there.
And I mean its shocking the number of people that I've heard tell me that, because they just did not realize that there were other people like them out there. And so, yeah, when they told me that they found community, that they did find out that there are other people like them, it was this revelation that I'm not alone, I'm not the only one, there are others like me.
CANDICE:
Well I think that we're, that there are a lot of others, similar, and who are pedophiles, and I think our society wants to say, again, its the, you know, older man in a dark corner alleyway that's a child molester, and then they automatically say, "oh they had sex with a sixteen year old, they're a pedophile".
So again its just this uneducated explanation, which does isolate people with pedophilia, because there's such a stigma—there's pedo-hunters and there's so much hate—it makes sense that people do feel alone, and it also, when I think of the work we do, and with prevention, and thinking of the folks that we've treated, it is really scary to reach out, because who are we? First, can we be trusted to offer that support, or are we going to judge them as monsters, are we pedo-hunters? What might we do, are we going to expose them on the web? And, then slander them, and so on and so forth, and so.
ALLYN:
Well and that was something that I found in my research too was that i talked to people a lot about how they coped with their sexuality, and a lot of people told me that they wanted some kind of mental health treatment, wanted to go see people like you, and they were just too afraid.
They had heard stories about people, about mental health professionals outing them to the police, outing them to family, straight-up telling people I can't help you, you know, leaving them without a referral, treating them with suspicion in general, or even trying to do some kind of conversion therapy, where they would, you know, be asked to write down their attractions, and then smell bath salts or something.
CANDICE:
Or ammonia or something.
ALLYN:
Yeah ammonia, so just really horrible treatment from mental health professionals. It kept a lot of them from seeking out care at all. And a lot of people who I spoke to did have those experiences where they were turned away from care, they were treated with suspicion, you know, someone said to her counsellor, "would you be able to work with someone who is attracted to children?", and her counsellor said "no, I'm, I can't work with someone who has hurt a child".
And she said no, that's not what I said! And they were able to have that conversation, and fortunately work it out, but there was that moment in the beginning where, you know, where my participant got up to leave, and her mental health practitioner said, well I can't treat you if you've done something to a child, and she said no, no, and had to go back and that was on her then to educate her counsellor about that.
CANDICE:
Which would be nice if counsellors were more educated, you know, we, one of the things that we're known for is saying, when we get, we get calls from clinicians, and therapists nation-wide, who will say, we've heard that you've got support, psycho-educational support, so on and so forth, locally, hey we've heard that you are willing to treat, and then we do a lot of educating as well.
We'll also get questions when I first started, this was several years ago, people saying, well how is it possible that you're treating these individuals? Don't you need to report them? And its like, what exactly do you report them for? Sorry go ahead.
ALLYN:
It's scary that so many people think that they need to be reported, and I did talk to someone who, you know, he had never committed and offence, he did not say he was going to commit an offence, but his counsellor reported him to the police and told him about that in his second session with her, and he hasn't been able to trust mental health professionals since!
So a lot of these people, if they're concerned that they are going to act out, about their, you know, orientation, and they don't feel like there's anyone out there that they can trust, that's a huge problem, that you know, keeps us from preventing crime. And then also, a lot of these people don't struggle with urges, with that kind of stuff, but they struggle with the stigma that is attached to their sexuality, they struggle with, you know, depression or anxiety or other related reasons, shame for sure. And again, they just don't feel like they can find any help out there.
CANDICE:
Yeah, and so I appreciate us talking about that too because, you know, you've talked about some of the damaging ways that mental practitioners will show up for these individuals, and one of the things that we are huge proponents of is let's work on shame-reduction, let's work on lifestyle and choices, and ways to stay safe, and have a healthy, adult relationship, and manage your attractions in a way that keep you and society and children safe.
And that's such a more productive way to look at supporting these individuals rather than, again, lumping them in a category as a child molester and a sex offender. Yeah, and I'm so happy that we're talking about this, you know?
ALLYN:
Absolutely
CANDICE:
What challenges did you face, or did your research participants face? Or come up against?
ALLYN:
Sure, yeah. The big one I would say is that stigma piece, again, you know. People saying "well I can't be out on the internet because people will tell me to die", they had, you know, issues with coming out to their family or not coming out to their family, because they just didn't feel like they could trust them with that.
CANDICE:
Or probably their partners, did you have anyone who said "I feel like?—"
ALLYN:
Absolutely, a lot of them were in relationships with other adults, so another piece that we didn't talk about is this difference between exclusively and non-exclusively attracted to minors. So, a lot of the people in my study were exclusively attracted to minors, or children, and then some were attracted to minors preferentially, but then had attractions to adults as well.
So they were often able to find adult partners that they could be in a relationships with, and yeah, even though they were in those relationships, often very happily in those relationships, that's a big secret to be keeping from someone, you know, these attractions, that sexuality that you have, and you know you wanna be open and honest in any relationship.
And so to feel like, you know, not necessarily that this person they're with is not trustworthy in general, but that everyone has this idea of what a pedophile or a minor-attracted person is. So even a very trustworthy person in general could have suspicions toward people, and some people did come out to their partners, and that was to a range of different reactions.
CANDICE:
Responses—yeah, I bet!
ALLYN:
Yeah, some of them were very supportive, which was awesome, and some of them broke up with them immediately, or, you know, reported them for, you know, even though they hadn't committed any crime, so it was a big risk to them to tell their partners.
I think another huge challenge that these folks came in contact with was loneliness, especially for those people who were exclusively attracted to minors. These people often grew up assuming I'm going to get married, I'm going to fall in love, I'm going to have kids, yada yada, then they realized that they were minor-attracted, and again, exclusively, and they said that's never going tho happen with me, I'm never going to be with someone who I'm romantically or sexually attracted to at all.
And that's a really tough thing to deal with, this realization that you're, that you don't have any prospects romantically, or sexually, I mean I can't imagine feeling that way.
CANDICE:
I think most of us can't, right? How isolating.
ALLYN:
Yeah! Sure, so just, just that loneliness was a big part of their lives, and there's really nothing that a lot of people can say to them about that. So it's so important for them to be able to get some sort of support.
CANDICE:
Oh absolutely,
ALLYN:
Yeah, and to know that they didn't have that support on top of those feelings of loneliness, that's hard to hear.
CANDICE:
Yeah. I wanted to ask you if any of your colleagues or anyone in you cohort when you were doing your research, if they had any judgment or opinions about your—or even professors—had any opinions, because this is definitely, its such a dicey topic.
ALLYN:
Yeah, when you say professors, um yeah, ahahah. Yeah. So, first day of a specific class, I won't say which, and uh, we were asked to go around the room and say our research interests, and it go to me and I said, "I want to study individuals who are attracted to minors who have never committed a sexual offence". And my professor looked at me and said "Yuck!" and moved on to the next person!
CANDICE:
Whoa!
ALLYN:
So that was quite a way to start my program!
CANDICE:
Yeah, what was that like for you?
ALLYN:
I think I thought "Well I'm going to get a lot of this, I might as well get used to it".
CANDICE:
Yeah. Did you?
ALLYN:
You know I really haven't encountered too many of those kinds of reactions. I have had people tell me that my research is triggering to them, and, you know, on the one hand&mdash
CANDICE:
Colleagues, or?
ALLYN:
No—people just friends, and I can see people being triggered by, you know, triggers can happen with anything, so that's understandable, but I think that a lot of the idea of it being triggering is, again, this assumption that individuals who are minor-attracted are going to commit an offence
So even if I'm talking about people who have never committed an offence, they're committed to, you know, non-offending throughout their lives, its still, it really says something when someone says, well I'm triggered by that, it really says how deep those assumptions are.
CANDICE:
Mmm hmm. That's a great point. Yeah, that's a great point.
ALLYN:
I think that the majority of the responses that I get are interest. People really don't know that this is a population that exists.
CANDICE:
Curious.
ALLYN:
I had a job talk where I started talking about my research, and people in the room started googling, they started taking out their phones, and what I found out afterwards was that they were doubting whether or not this was a population that existed, and I think what they specifically were googling was the word ‘pedophile', they were like wait, pedophile means—and these were criminal justice people.
CANDICE:
That's fascinating.
ALLYN:
Yeah, so they did not know that pedophile doesn't mean sex offender, and they were checking up on me as I was giving this talk.
CANDICE:
Isn't that interesting! I was on a list-serve recently, and an individual reached out and they said hey, in a different state I've got an individual who has pedophilia and needs some support, and so I responded and said, you know, we have these services, and gave my information.
Then a colleague reached out on the list-serve, and said, hey just so you know, we treat pedophilia as well, we're all sex offender providers, and then just went into this language of sex offender treatment, and so again, it was sort of frustrating, you know, this automatic assumption that we're sex offender providers, and therefore we're treating pedophiles, and nowhere on the email did he say that this was a contact-offending individual who was a pedophile.
ALLYN:
And a lot of the people that I spoke to that had sought out mental healthcare, they ahd ended up in treatment with people who specialized in sex offending, and on the one hand, that kind of makes sense, it made sense to them—these professionals know what a pedophile is, and you know, they specialize in this, I should go get help from them.
But on the flip side, they often treated them, you know, a lot of the times the phrase was, like a ticking time bomb, they just said you're probably going to commit and offence, we're going to work with you not to, and a lot of the time they weren't there to get help for non-offending, they were just trying to deal with loneliness, deal with stigma, all that stuff, and so that suspicion that providers had, who were there to hopefully, you know, start where the client is, treat them like a person, they just weren't.
CANDICE:
Yeah, well hopefully you'll be doing some research with providers, some research with providers to find out -
ALLYN:
That is the goal.
CANDICE:
Is that the goal?
ALLYN:
Mmm hmm, so the next step for me is to do some research with mental health professionals and their opinions toward pedophiles and MAPs and also looking at their knowledge of mandated reporting since it was such an issue with a lot of folks in my study, and just to see how many people know who are providing services or are going to be providing services. The laws, the policies in this field surrounding when you should and can report.
CANDICE:
That is so neat, and I've not heard of any research out there that's looked at mental health providers' views, so I think that is so needed. And then some education, and even training, and hopefully some continuing education.
ALLYN:
Yeah. I can see that. Yeah, um, and I think that B4U-ACT is trying to start that kind of dialogue, they have a monthly dialogue between MAPs and providers.
CANDICE:
That's great!
ALLYN:
But yeah we need a lot more of it
CANDICE:
Yeah we do. Well thank you so much for being on the show. Is there anything else Dr. Walker that you want to share with our listeners? I wanted, this has been such a privilege, anything else that?
ALLYN:
Um, you know, I asked at the end of my interviews with MAPs what would you say to another person who is struggling with this, and the majority of them said, "you are not a monster". And I really want to take that and leave with that message, of these people are not monsters.
And if you are struggling with these attractions and you haven't been able to tell others, just know that for yourself, and know that there are groups out there, there's VirPed, there's B4U-ACT, there are others, who would love to talk to you.
CANDICE:
Great, thank you so much! Thank you for being on our podcast.
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