Many professional efforts to support us are based on the idea of preventing crimes. Do they actually work?
We don't know [how effective prevention programmes are] for several reasons.
(1) because there are only very small populations of pedophiles that seek out or receive treatment before or instead of an offence.
(2) It's impossible to measure who *would have* offended without intervention in individual cases.
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(3) It's only recently that there have been systemic attempts to reach out and offer support to pedophilic individuals who have not offended, or who are offending but have not yet been caught (now there are @StopSO_UK
, @DontOffendIndia
, @StopItNowUK
, @B4U_ACT
+ more.
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(4) In the case of the already-offending group there are a whole set of issues around mandatory reporting or ethical disclosure for professionals, for which there are different rules in different countries.
(5) Most therapy takes place with individual practitioners
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who do not collate or harmonise their approaches to this taboo issue, and would feel a strong need to be cautious in how they would discuss it in the public sphere, because of taboos.
(6) Many of those just discovering they are pedophiles and best placed to benefit
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from early intervention are themselves still legally children, which means if they reach out their parents will be told, their school might break confidentiality and generally have no clear idea or policies on how to deal with a disclosure of attraction toward minors.
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There are other issues too, but all of these align to create a situation where support is too seldom asked for, offered, publicised or comes with an assurance of expertise UNLESS a person already offended (and even then it's at best patchy).
MAPs hope this can change. ::
About the author: I have been writing and talking about the experience of being a pedophile since 2017. Once on twitter until my account was banned in 2020, I co-led Virtuous Pedophiles from 2021 to 2025. I now continue to look for ways to improve the lives of pedophiles, but never at the expense of harming children. I have never viewed illegal material, and never sought or engaged in sexual activity with any child. The rest of my life is countryside walking, friends, Radio 3 and feeling doleful about ageing. | 
