VirPed's accounts have been banned (twice) from Twitter and once from BlueSky. We had one main thing to say... Bly Rede is the co-director of Virtuous Pedophiles. Blog posts reflect his personal views, and are not statements from the organisation. Virtuous Pedophiles has been on the internet since 2012. An offshoot of the contact-neutral organisation B4U-ACT, VirPed was founded to show that there are some pedophiles who are unequivocally against adult-child sexual activity and exploitation.
From 2012 until 2022, VirPed ran the account @virpeds on twitter which was banned in August 2022 in the wake of mass reporting over our Library Letters. A backup account, @VirPedSpeaks started in 2022 and was banned in 2023. There was also the short-lived @virpedofficial which lasted from 2023 until 2024, when we decided we no longer wanted to operate it on the new X platform (where it was effectively shadowbanned and unable to gain a following). Our attempt at a BlueSky account lasted a matter of days in November 2024.
On all of these accounts, we pinned various threads, which were versions of the following text, which tries to explain to the outside world what we were trying to say.
Some people (us included) are anti-contact pedophiles.
We are against abuse, do not choose these attractions, and gradually realise it is meaningless to blame ourselves for having them.
We can't change it; we prefer not to live under a rock.
Other people like us (often younger ones) are only just discovering their attractions.
They have good intentions but they hear the daily lie "you people are ticking time-bombs; it's only a matter of time before you offend" and they are terrified it might apply to them.
Young people like us feel stigmatised for what they are; they realize they had better keep it a secret.
They decide it's too dangerous to talk to other people about it, to ask for help or sometimes even to think about it too much. They have to work on this entirely alone.
Where does a young person like us turn, when they can't talk to their nearby adults?
To the internet, where there are three messages they can hear:
Trolls: you're evil; die
Dark Web: society is wrong; abusing kids is OK
VirPed: you're not evil BUT abusing kids is not OK.
Young people with this attraction need guidance toward a law-abiding life, whether that's professional or peer support or resources or moral friends.
They need it quickly too and without too many conditions.
They don't need reporting if they've committed no crime.
The attraction itself is wholly involuntary.
Dealing with it day to day involves voluntary choices, which are not easy to make...
The first and easiest decision is to choose never to harm a child and to accept that informed consent is impossible.
A second and more difficult choice is whether to tell people in their life that they have these feelings.
With society as it is, there is no right answer to this.
Occasionally it might be a good idea but it's really hard to predict the consequences. They can be severe.
A third choice is what to do with the feelings inside their heads.
Fantasise (which hurts nobody) or try to ignore or suppress the feelings?
There's no one right answer to this one for everyone (but we say, judge the decision by its outcome, not your discomfort).
A fourth choice is how to make sense of this attraction, which appears spontaneously and unpredictably in maybe one in two hundred people.
We are forced to ask ourselves "why was it me?" and come up with a satisfactory and fair answer we can live with.
Are we most like gay people? Kleptomaniacs? Those with an illness or genetic condition? Some other victimised group?
We might be a bit like some of those, but never exactly like any of them. Pedophilia is most like pedophilia. It is unique and calls for a unique response.
The way society responds to us has to be based on the facts about us.
(a) Our condition is unchosen
(b) currently incurable
(c) brings about thoughts which harm nobody and
(d) need not involve actions which do harm children
Yes, we should be angry that abuse happens; alarmed at the way online exploitation can go on; watchful for risks.
We can have those concerns just as much as anyone else can.
We're members of society too.
One of us is somebody you know: a friend, a colleague, a son, a dad, a daughter...
Each of us has moral feelings that are not dictated by what attractions we have.
We're three-dimensional human beings, keeping silent about this one aspect of ourselves.
In a darkening world, we believe there is still hope for people like us.
Hope from better understanding; increased connection to society to encourage pro-social behavior—and not from ostracism.
VirPed is one of the thin strands that maintains that connection and that hope.
| 
