Non-offenders vs. the 'Brand, Tag and Castrate' Model for Policing Pedophiles.
by Bernie Najarian
As a city boy who grew up where the only wildlife were rats and feral cats, I’ve never had much to do with livestock. I think I once patted a cow at a petting zoo when I was a tot; otherwise, the mooing species came to me purely wrapped in plastic or pressed into burgers. I did have a same-aged school friend, though, who had cousins in Colorado, and he sometimes went out to their ranch for family occasions. While there, he got to try his hand at a few of the adventures of the cowboy life – his tales of which, I was only dimly aware, made him seem very sexy to me. One thing the beautiful blond boy-hombre had participated in was the annual spring branding of calves born over the winter. As a city slicker, his only task was to help his ranch cousins pull a calf from the round-up pen, grab the legs to tip it on its side, and hold it while a few operations were performed. The first, applied by the uncle or a hired hand, was the brand, a red-hot iron that hissed through the calf’s fur and smoked up a storm as the life-long mark was impressed into the skin. Then came an older cousin who clipped a brightly colored tag onto one of the ears, to make the valuable animal more difficult for hunters to mistake for a deer. Finally, if the calf was a bull-calf, an older cuz who wanted to be a veterinarian someday took a sharp knife, cut a circle out of the bottom of the scrotum, and pulled out the tiny testicles on their long cords, fraying the cords expertly away with the knife to ensure infection couldn’t set in. Then the calf, haltered, was allowed to stand up, and, with a slightly dazed look in its eye, was put back into a nearby pen with its mother. Unlike a human, it gave no sign of PTSD and soon, apparently, went back to normal life.
This image always stuck in my mind, and it popped out into vivid focus in 2013, when I started reporting on the Azov Films caper, known to police and mainstream media as Operation Spade. This was a massive, very atypical worldwide “child pornography” police trawl. Its odd feature was that the only people arrested were men who were confident that what they were buying, with their credit cards, was legal photography and not child pornography. The Azov Films website operated legally in Canada and had passed previous police inspections as non-pornographic; it dealt in parentally authorized ‘naturist’ videotapes of Eastern European boys taking part in sporting activities in the nude. The decision by several police forces, including Canadian, American and Spanish, to abruptly overturn the legal status of these films and arrest all the buyers seemed an unusually harsh treatment for people who’d assured themselves, based on lawyered legal statements on the website, that they were well within the law. The trickery used to re-interpret words of existing legislation so that normal sporting motions could be defined as “lascivious” in US law is outlined in articles I wrote at the time (compiled into one security-safe but not very elegant text-paste at https://justpaste.it/7ebrd).
Operation Spade turned up some people who were doing unequivocal illegal actions along with their presumed-legal ordering. Statistics compiled when the Operation was disclosed to the press on Nov. 14, 2013, showed that out of 55 American arrests for which details were available (out of 74 total), 15 of the men were found either to be involved with more conventionally defined child pornography, or, in a few cases, to have been engaged in as yet unprosecuted contact-offending with minors. The remaining 40 (74%) would have been considered perfectly lawful if not for the redefinition of their Azov purchases. (The details allowing this determination for US cases were concealed in other countries). They, apparently, had lost any grounds for feeling betrayed by arbitrary authorities, given the success of finding a minority of unequivocal offenders in their midst.
One of the Canadian officers heading the international operation, Det. Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police, issued sharp public criticisms of Australian judges who gave Azov purchasers only fines as punishment, and British authorities, who initially wrote the Azov merchandise off as too banal to be subjected to prosecution. His most ringing statement of indignation at blasé responses to his campaign came in response to a Calgary university professor who described depictions of non-sexual nudity as “victimless.” He riposted:
“It’s terrible. (It shows) a sexual interest in children. How can that not be dangerous?”
This, to me, was the statement that gave the game away, that showed why policing strategies had changed in the direction of bending the law to make it a wider net. The forces involved wanted to catch everyone and anyone who was sexually attracted to children, whether the people intended to live legally or not, because “how can that not be dangerous?”
Effectively, an international effort to brand, tag and castrate all minor-attracted people (MAPs) was underway. The great thing about Azov Films, from the viewpoint of police forces, was not only that it allowed the bagging of a number of uncaught intentional illegals, but also that it allowed the arrest of a much larger group of otherwise unreachable people with lawful intentions – people with no legal ‘mens rea’ (mindset to commit a criminal act). There was a traditional, Victorian-influenced “ticking time bomb” cliché that held that all minor-attracted people were unable to decide to live ethically and to abstain from child exploitation, and would inevitably offend either physically or at least via depictions. Based on belief in this ‘deviants have no self-control’ cultural relic (which earlier in history had also maintained that gays were helplessly promiscuous weaklings who couldn’t build relationships), the police authorities were certain that all these lawful youth-attracted people needed to be pre-apprehended to prevent crime. Hence the elegance of twiddling a law so that a legal lure attracting such people would suddenly become illegal.
Of course, when I use the words ‘brand, tag and castrate,‘ I’m speaking metaphorically. No arrestee had his hide seared or perforated, or had his testicles removed either physically or chemically. (Chemical castration, however, remains a popular idea among people who approve of the other police tactics.) Nonetheless, they were handled with great severity as deviant livestock. Because Azov’s merchandise was shipped by conventional U.S. mail, the arrestees were charged with a federal crime, much more serious than most corresponding state crimes, including those involving frank child porn. Many who were convicted solely on the basis of these purchases got unusually long sentences of 4 to 15 years. Penalties varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and one man, Douglas Randolph Collins of Van Nuys, California, was even let off with a misdemeanor, after a non-conforming judge determined that his completely typical Azov materials “did not meet the legal definition of child pornography.” (http://www.signalscv.com/archives/102004/). No one, however, is known to have had charges dropped; all were written into the record books as offenders, with most then being commanded to register as sex offenders upon release into the community. All were severed from contact with children, including their own biological children.
They were, then, in all but a few cases, imprisoned, registered, and segregated from the community as ticking time bombs. Like all but 3% of those charged with federal crimes in the U.S., most escaped threats of much longer sentences by pleading guilty and plea-bargaining for the times they actually received.
There is no question that many police officers around the world would like to pass all non-offending minor-attracted people through a process of imprisonment, registration and social isolation as a mere precautionary measure.
You can see the impulse illustrated here in this screen-capture of a series of tweets from Jim Gamble. Now working privately, he’s the former leader of the UK National Criminal Intelligence Service’s campaign against child abuse, including the notorious Operation Ore, where many innocent people were arrested after their credit card numbers were fraudulently used by thieves on a pornographic website.
In the last five years, the Virtuous Pedophiles organization (Virpeds, www.virped.org) has banded together many adamantly lawful pedophiles and hebephilic MAPs into a focused unit dedicated to fostering a lawful MAP culture. They have striven to allow people willing to sign up as resolutely non-dangerous MAPs to emerge far enough into public communication to obtain and extend peer support. One of their strategies has been to reach out to researchers, including psychologists, sexologists and sociologists. This is partly so that non-offenders can be included in investigation of MAP characteristics, and partly to increase the chance that MAPs needing help with self-control or depression can safely obtain it. At first, they worked almost entirely through their own website. In Feb. 2015, the small existing group of minor-attracted and MAP-supporting individuals who ran Twitter accounts was joined by one of the most active of the Virpeds, an ‘Ender’s Game’ fan who dubbed himself Enderphile. He put up his slogan “Believe it or not, there are pedophiles who never harm kids. Pedophile ≠ Molester” and began to defend himself against all comers. There were seemingly endless waves of regular tweeters and trolls who were roused to alarm or sadistic glee by his banner, and he responded to them all, holding his own with science, reason, and caring, and ending off, if the responses he received devolved to hard-core hate-trolling, in testy retorts.
Whenever a significant issue arose in his discussions, he wrote a blog piece about it. The blogging site medium.com turned out to be a very stable place to house his thoughts. (Update: some of these blog pieces are now offline). He started off with “On the concept of the non-offending pedophile” on October 4, 2015 (https://medium.com/p/c26c78b49fd - offline) and soon progressed to “On the harm caused by the media by conflating pedophilia and child molestation” (October 14, 2015, https://medium.com/p/71e956dfed02 -offline). He accumulated literature from his researcher contacts and progressed to articles with up-to-date reflections on MAP-related science and medicine, such as “On what help pedophiles need, and how you can help” (March 17, 2016, https://justpaste.it/4q6vs) and “On the growing scientific consensus about pedophilia being a sexual orientation” (August 2, 2016, https://medium.com/pedophiles-about-pedophilia/pedophilia-as-a-sexual-orientation-d414e0780f6d -offline). In the meantime, hostiles who had convinced themselves that Enderphile was the thin edge of a child-raping wedge managed to have his account suspended twice through mass-reporting. He persevered and re-emerged successfully each time, even though, in Twitter house rules, reviving a suspended account under a new name is forbidden.
(Such revivals were something that nearly all controversial Twitter posters had to do on occasion, since accounts that broke no rules could be shut down by gangs of hostile accounts mass-reporting in ways that hoodwinked the website’s spam-protection bots.)
In December, 2017, as I detailed in a previous story (https://justpaste.it/1exxe), two seemingly unrelated ‘fake-news’ attacks managed to collectively fell the then-operating Enderphile2 account. One story was a mischievous, fraudulent cook-up by a far-right-wing attack website alleging that a Canadian man who had recently been arrested for sexual crimes involving teenagers was Enderphile. Enderphile, fortunately, was able, while his Twitter account was still active, to post proof that he was then in California rather than in a Canadian prison – but this made no difference to the attackers. (See 'Marianne Faithfull' screenshot below).
The other attack was by a more traditional disreputable news source, the grimy Murdoch tabloid from the UK called The Sun. Reporters Ben Lazarus and Chris Pollard published a news story on Dec. 12, 2017 sounding the always-histrionic Sun outrage klaxons about the existence of non-offending pedophiles on Twitter ( https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5117958/twitter-allows-perverts-to-share-child-fantasies/). They opined that the four accounts specified, especially those whose anonymous operators used animé images as avatars, must be there to ‘groom children.’ Twitter, however, doesn’t allow self-operated accounts by children within the age range of pedophilic attraction (scientifically defined as attraction to prepubescents), and thus there was no one there for true pedophiles to ‘groom.’ Also, there was no evidence of any grooming of older children by MAPs potentially attracted to post-pubescents. The idea was simply a marketable outrage phantasm. Lazarus and Pollard also coaxed comments from members of Parliament based on the idea that the accounts exchanged sexual fantasies and aimed to “sexualize children” and “normalize” this process – all things the adamant non-offenders operating the accounts rigorously eschewed. The ‘smoking gun’ that the Sun story provided consisted of comments by a non-offender posting as ‘Robert West:’
A middle aged pervert calling himself Robert West, says in one alarming post: “I have volunteered to help out with activities for children at an event. I will be helping to keep several children entertained. I helped out last year. It should be fun!”
A post with this exact wording is not to be found today, nor are any screenshots in evidence. Possibly Lazarus and Pollard have fudged by paraphrasing similar text rather than quoting word-for-word, or perhaps the exact source post was deleted. Their statement appears, however, to be based on a Nov. 22, 2017, blog post by West in the same medium.com account used by Enderphile, the ‘Pedophiles about Pedophilia’ blog.
West is a unique character, not at all like Enderphile. On Twitter, he describes himself as follows:
Robert West @RobertWest5 (https://twitter.com/RobertWest5/status/944657073576579072)
Replying to @wierstamann
Hi there. I'm 45-50, demi-male, Christian, mostly-exclusive paedophile, with very low sex drive. My attractions are romantic and aesthetic, but I am still committed to not acting on them. Also quite leftist.
In his blog post, West talked about how his commitment to non-offending was so stable that he allowed himself to supervise children alone at a special event when he was unexpectedly called upon to do so. The post was called “Keeping Children Safe and Entertained” (https://medium.com/pedophiles-about-pedophilia/keeping-children-safe-and-entertained-544c484f7360). The text below is excerpted.
I recently went to an event and volunteered to help out with their children’s activity room. I did not plan it that way, but I was in put in charge of the room. And I had no helpers.
I am an anti-contact paedophile. I have aesthetic and romantic attractions to young children, mostly girls. I have not acted on those attractions, and I will not. I am in control of my actions…
… At the end of the event, I was exhausted. I felt good that I had helped provide a fun and safe activity room. It was also a good dose of reality. It is a lot of work to care for children, and each is an individual with their own needs and challenges. I think some people idealise children or put them on pedestals like little angels. The reality is much different. And it can be rewarding. I think I will volunteer again next year.
A review of related tweets shows West, on 23 November, having a discussion with someone whose tweets can’t be seen – the opposing account is now locked from public view – but who appears to threaten to report him to police. Enderphile is copied on the tweets and was contributing to the discussion. Since his account is now suspended, his contributions can’t be seen. (We have some of them, however, from other sources – see below.)
Robert West @RobertWest5
23 Nov 2017
Replying to @ThE317DaYTheorY @enderphile2
There were parents around, and it was an open area. I have known I am a paedophile for over 30 years and have never done anything inappropriate with children. I care about children, am not a danger to them, and was glad to do something helpful.
Robert West @RobertWest5
Replying to @ThE317DaYTheorY @enderphile2
I don't have any urges to do sexual things with actual children.
I have several adult friends I first met when they were children.
I have been quiet for years because of the stigma. But now I want to let people know they can live good lives w/o offending.
Robert West @RobertWest5
Replying to @ThE317DaYTheorY @enderphile2
What crime are you trying to report? A thought crime?
The accuser that West is responding to, ‘The317daytheory,’ is not as opaque as this exchange with an inaccessible account makes him look. Cross-connecting posts show that he has many other accounts. In them, he reveals himself to be a prodigiously active, 31-year-old far-right-wing Trump-tub-thumper and provocateur, claiming to be from Walthamstow, east London. His long list of Twitter accounts includes an extensive graveyard of previously banned accounts. On his current main accounts, @WRatHsChilD_ish and @WRatHSCHiLD_At6, he is furiously campaigning for all non-offending MAP accounts to be wiped off Twitter. His historic accounts @WratHs_Child, @_WRatHS_CHiLD, @Wr6ath6SCh6ilD2 and @Wr6ath6SCh6ilD3 featured high levels of anti-semitic postings, consistent with his preferred name Wrathschild, a play on the surname of his imagined nemeses, the Jewish banking family Rothschild. (NB: A completely unrelated pop duo sings professionally under the name Wrathschild and has a Twitter account with that name.) The suspensions of these prior accounts have apparently taught him that open Jew-hate is a no-go on Twitter, and he has turned to MAP-hate instead, with just the occasional subtle dig about Jews.
Wrathschild is a highly eccentric individual who seems to have performed in the past as a rapper in Walthamstow, and has an entire account, @19CoH86, dedicated to unreadable, typographically strange rap-like poetry. The ‘CoH’ in that account’s username is not random, but refers to CoH.uk, an apparently defunct website for a label called CoH(Cohesion) UK Recordings. There is also an apparently musically related Wrathschild account, @JEE_MALE, which lists a URL at CoH.uk, now a dead link. CoH.uk’s residual online content consists entirely of output from a man called Cyber Steve, real name Steve Lewis. It’s not clear if Steve Lewis is ‘Wrathschild’ or merely an associate. Another, distinctly different Twitter account, @permanentlayyy, echoes some Wrathschild content and has another CoH.uk dead link attached. Additional confirmed accounts for Wrathschild include @WRatH_SeE and a locked account, @ApPYouRPeriL.
The Twitter terms of service only allow one account per person. Wrathschild is a very ambitious troll who is not obstructed by niceties like rules.
This warped individual is perhaps the most likely person imaginable to expand Robert West’s benign day of child care into a hyperventilated national emergency. Based on observing current activity at the @WRatHsChilD_ish and @WRatHSCHiLD_At6 accounts, I surmise that the @ThE317DaYTheorY account probably hounded all manner of press, government and right-wing accounts with urgent calls about the pedophile danger posed by West and his non-offender colleagues. Some complaints about this hate activity must have been filed. The @ThE317DaYTheorY account is currently locked not because its owner restricted access, but rather, as he complains on another account, because it was locked by Twitter for abusive activity.
It wasn’t the only casualty of the encounter. Wrathschild also lamentingly tweets that his particularly prized account @WratHs_Child was suspended right in the middle of a debate with @enderphile2. The remaining accounts swore to remove enderphile2 from Twitter, and worked with various fellow trolls such as Carrieanne Faithfull a.k.a. Carrieanne Dennis, profiled in my previous article (https://justpaste.it/1exxe) to do so.
I should mention that at least one other far-right account, @grantjkidney, claims to have been “instrumental in scrubbing the platform” of the Enderphile account (https://twitter.com/GrantJKidney/status/951976497224482816) – he asked followers to report it on Nov. 15 – while one lefty-hacker account, @nomadscammers, makes similar claims. What is very clear is that just after the exchange between Robert West and Wrathschild, a number of accounts (@jillcares, @actualdrewbabe, @macupp12, @knutsonmelissa1, @lolaXwolf, @WRatHSCHiLD_At6) had a success that had eluded dozens of people per week through most of 2017: they received a report from Twitter that the Enderphile account had violated the Twitter rules. The account was locked for several days, meaning that Enderphile could read but not send out tweets.
Once restricted, Enderphile sent out the explanation he’d received from Twitter to various contacts, looking for support. We have obtained a copy of this mail-out. The offending tweets were:
to @wzardsarecool and 10 others, including @ThE317DaYTheorY
25 Nov. 2017
Failed analogy. A murderer is defined by having murdered. A pedophile is not defined by having done anything. And “mental illness” is exactly what they called homosexuality. (An image was attached showing a statement from a scientific paper – it was not preserved, but apparently the paper had German authors)
One member of the conversation, @Patriarchian, replied using a typical move from right-wing trollkind, (https://twitter.com/patriarchian/status/934513237000970240)
Of course that is from Germany, where they let Muslims rape little boys and girls without any punishment.
Enderphile replied sarcastically,
Haha, sure thing, they do that every day. They sell boys and girls in market for Muslims to rape, and every German citizen is so happy they keep voting for Merkel. You should stop believing everything you read on the internet.
@ThE317DaYTheorY then responds with a tweet that can’t be retrieved, but that must have accused Enderphile of misrepresenting some content he’d quoted earlier, most likely a selection from Robert West’s child care statements from the blog. Enderphile gives him both barrels:
It’s not a different post, you lying twat. Just scroll down a little. I’m sure you can handle that.
The only item that stands out in this series of tweets, from the viewpoint of Twitter rules, is the phrase “you lying twat.” The accompanying note of explanation from Twitter instructed Enderphile that “you must not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affilation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
Wrathschild proclaims himself a “white man,” and generally comes across as male, so the use of the usually female-targeted slur “twat” may have reflected the fact that Enderphile speaks English as a second language. In any case, this bad word seems to have been the trigger that caused the success of multiple reports. The Enderphile2 account was wounded, at this point, but by no means down. About three days after filing an appeal, Enderphile re-opened for business. But the seeds of his account’s demise had been sown in this interaction: someone among Wrathschild and his Britain First troll associates had reported the content of these discussions to the Greater Manchester Police.
On Dec. 13, 2017, the day after the Sun article appeared, the European Twitter office in Ireland received a memo from Manchester Police containing an order under the recently implemented ‘Investigatory Powers Act 2016’ (nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter), a draconian measure that allows police to require ‘communication services providers’ to provide user information for all internet postings they are able to imagine might be connected to a planned or committed crime. Such orders can be sent out without the oversight of a judge.
The memo told Twitter: “You are required to produce the said communication data to the authority shown above as per standing arrangements.
Traffic Data (required): @enderphile2 – Name of account holder, IP address at registration, IP address on the specific communication on November 23rd 2017.
On November 23rd 2017, a post was placed on Greater Manchester Police Wythenshawe Forum by an anonymous member of the public. It raised concerns regarding a Twitter stream from an account holder with the name @enderphile2.
The context of the 'tweet' was that 'Enderphile' or 'Ender Higgins' (sic) as he or she were known
had stated "… I RECENTLY WENT TO AN EVENT AND VOLUNTEERED TO HELP OUT WITH THEIR
CHILDREN’S ACTIVITY ROOM. I DID NOT PLAN IT THAT WAY, BUT I WAS PUT IN CHARGE OF THE ROOM AND HAD NO HELPERS. I AM AN ANTI CONTACT PAEDOPHILE. I HAVE AESTHETIC
AND ROMANTIC ATTRACTIONS TO YOUNG CHILDREN, MOSTLY GIRLS. I HAVE NOT ACTED ON
THOSE ATTRACTIONS, AND WILL NOT. I AM IN CONTROL OF MY ACTIONS"
Social open source and Police databases have revealed no further information for this
account or account holder. There is a concern that this Twitter account holder may have or
intends to commit sexual offences against children. At this stage no sexual offences have
been revealed however, account information and locations of posts would assist in locating
the account holder and further research being undertaken. Having viewed the open account
via Google, there are numerous message of a disturbing nature around their sexual beliefs and minors.
Statutory purpose: S22(2)(b) – for purposes of preventing or detecting crime or of preventing disorder.”
Apparently, Robert West’s blithe-sounding statements about safely supervising children had triggered a “deceptive predatory pedo on the move” response in suspicious police. West’s statements had been transposed, probably by the person filing the police report, to Enderphile. It may seem sloppy of police not to have checked on this, and to have confused West’s statements with Enderphile’s, but, as the Azov example above shows, police deploying the ‘brand, tag and castrate’ strategy will use any means necessary to make a good catch, and don’t require evidence of criminal intention. The activist Enderphile was a much more significant player than the relatively politically unaware West (who clearly had no idea that claiming to supervise children alone, as a reliably abstinent pedophile, could become a major flash point), and Enderphile was therefore indicated as the calf to be branded.
The next day, Enderphile’s account was suspended; subsequent appeals have failed to revive it. The account of another prominent activist, the mild-mannered and patient Šimon Falko (@simgiran) was closed as well, despite complete compliance with terms of service. Ten other MAP accounts were temporarily locked and released, most of them after the account-holders went out on a limb and divulged their mobile phone numbers. This I’d consider to be the tagging step of brand, tag and castrate.
Twitter’s email to Enderphile informing him about the police letter arrived just before his account closed, and he was able to photograph some of the relevant tweets. They showed him repeatedly trying to clarify to @ThE317DaYTheorY that West’s blog post was not his own.
to @ThE317DaYTheorY, 22 Nov. 2017
Posting articles about spending time alone with children unsupervised? Lmao what? Can you make up any more bullshit?
@ThE317DaYTheorY’s posts are again absent, but Wrathschild’s modus operandi as a provocateur is always to spin his opponent’s material in the way that looks most damaging. He acknowledges reality only enough to make his distortions hard to catch. He has a distinctive style of requoting opponents in fancily scripted, color memes, and he appears to have used this technique to make an edited quote of West’s material showing only the parts that, in isolation, would make West look dangerous. Or perhaps he had written Enderphile in as the origin of the quotes.
Enderphile to @ThE317DaYTheorY, 23 Nov.
You conveniently leave out the parts that don’t fit your narrative. There was nothing secret about it and he was not “unsupervised,” there were parents there all the time. Take your bullshit elsewhere. (Little did Enderphile know that this advice would be taken very literally – BN)
Enderphile to @ThE317DaYTheorY, 23 Nov. (a few minutes later)
There was nothing “secret” about that. You have nothing but lies and fallacies. Also, the pedophile in question was @RobertWest5, and the FULL article explains the situation very well. Stop your bullshit.
But the bullshit was unstoppable in the corral Enderphile was now in. The ranchers in Manchester were ready for a branding party and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
(Word to the wise: in politics, spin-daemons like Wrathschild always feel at liberty to edit ‘the whole story’ and take the damaging bits out of context. It’s a sad fact of politics that those context-dependent vulnerable bits either need to never see print at all, or need to be inseparably internally loaded with clarifying text. A statement like “I wished I *not* could have sex *not* with a child, but then I became certain that this would be wrong” will always be recycled by trolls as the first half of the statement, without the intervening *not*s. Trolls are not about debate or argument; they’re about spin tricks and damaging representations. Never make the mistake of thinking a discussion with a troll is a debate; it’s a mental wrestling match where the falls are the release of spinnable statements. This is not to say that trolls can’t occasionally be transformed into debaters if they gain respect; usually, however, they are strongly committed not to let this happen. The fun of imaginary superiority is one of their strongest motivators.)
As of today, Jan. 16, 2018, Enderphile is none the worse for the attempt to round him up. He has used his down-time to give an articulate podcast interview to Candice Christiansen of the Prevention Project, stating his reactions to his suspension. He also takes on the constant spin-misrepresentation of his anti-child-abuse position. About the possibility of impending police visits, he coolly says nothing (http://thepreventionpodcast.com/interview-with-anti-contact-pedophile-ender).
Enderphile lives with his wife and children in a place significantly removed from Manchester, but nonetheless, he can only be wondering if he’ll be abruptly toppled over one morning soon and held under the smoke-iron by authorities. It seems safe to say he won’t be found to have committed a crime, but the chance that his children will be removed from his care cannot be ruled out. This would likely harm his marriage, even though his wife is aware of his full sexual complexity. He lives in a country notorious for the maltreatment of political activists.
The most positive result of the campaign against him is that California-based “Internet lawyer and ICT (Internet Communications and Technology) policy advocate” Jeremy Malcolm (@qirtaiba) has written an article strongly supportive of the non-offender accounts (https://medium.com/@jmalcolm/experts-police-and-vigilantes-face-off-over-pedophiles-on-twitter-96307e9476f8). In tandem with publishing this article, he and a group of Enderphile’s academic and professional contacts prepared a letter to Twitter. It strongly supported the role of Enderphile and other non-offenders in promoting child safety through the medium of ethical, non-abusing peer support culture, developed among MAPs and extended through Twitter.
The text of this letter is interesting, perhaps historic, and I’ve reproduced it in full below. One fascinating detail is the inclusion of several signatories who asked that their names be blacked out when the letter was posted on Malcolm’s blog. It’s rare to see academics and professionals reacting to such a pressing climate of fear in western countries these days. Or, at least, we think it is.
John Starr
Director, Trust & Safety
Twitter Inc.
1355 Market St Ste 900
San Francisco CA 94103-1337
Dear Mr. Starr,
We write to you as clinical and forensic psychologists, sexologists, sociologists, child protection workers, journalists, writers, and digital rights advocates, with a shared interest in working towards the reduction of the incidence of child sexual abuse. We believe that Twitter has the potential to be an important ally in this battle; however, we are concerned that Twitter's recent suspension of the accounts of prominent anti-contact, non-offending pedophiles may have been a knee-jerk response to uninformed public pressure, rather than a reasoned decision made in the best interests of children.
A common misconception is that pedophiles and other people attracted to minors are bound to sexually offend against children, and that pedophilia is defined by the act of child sexual abuse. This is not the case. In fact, many pedophiles, despite being sexually attracted to children, are able to successfully resist the temptation to commit acts of abuse because they know that doing so would be wrong. For many of them, however, avoiding offending depends upon a network of support from family, peers, and professionals.
Many of us have worked with a group of such non-offending pedophiles, also known as anti-contact MAPs (Minor-Attracted Persons), in a peer support network called Virtuous Pedophiles (@virpeds), as well as in other support networks. Recently, a prominent member of Virtuous Pedophiles, who goes by the pseudonym Ender Wiggin (@enderphile2), had his account permanently suspended by Twitter. At least one other member of the same network, Šimon Falko (@simgiran), also had his account permanently suspended around the same time, and a number of other accounts of non-offending, anti-contact MAPs have since been permanently or temporarily suspended.
We acknowledge that Twitter is at liberty to terminate the accounts of its users for breaching its terms of service, and we strongly agree that any Twitter users who advocate for sexual contact between adults and children would be appropriate candidates for such suspension. @enderphile2 and @simgiran were not such accounts; on the contrary, both have always used their accounts to speak out against sexual abuse, to help their peers avoid offending, and to help reduce the stigma associated with pedophilia that prevents many pedophiles from seeking help if they need it.
In our professional opinions, terminating the accounts of non-offending, anti-contact MAPs is likely to result in the opposite effect of that which Twitter may expect or intend. Rather than reducing the incidence of child sexual abuse, if anything, it increases the risk that some pedophiles will be unable to obtain the peer or professional support that they may need in order to avoid offending behaviour. It is also likely to increase the stigma and isolation associated with pedophilia and thereby increase the likelihood of some MAPs acting on their sexual feelings.
We respectfully request that you reconsider your suspension of these accounts and, going forward, take into account what might be the unintended consequences of your policies towards the suspension of the Twitter accounts of anti-contact, non-offending pedophiles.
Yours sincerely,
(An asterisk indicates that the endorsement is given on behalf of the listed organization;
otherwise, affiliations are shown for identification only.)
James M. Cantor, PhD, CPsych
Director, Toronto Sexuality Centre; Associate Professor University of Toronto;
Senior Scientist, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Name blacked out in blog (open in actual letter)
Klaus M. Beier
Director Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
(University Hospital of Berlin); Full Professor, Founder of the German Prevention Project
Dunkelfeld*
Professor Belinda Winder, PhD, Msc, MEd
Head of Sexual Offences, Crime and Misconduct Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University
Craig Harper, PhD
Lecturer in Human Psychology, Nottingham Trent University
Juliet Grayson
UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, StopSO (Specialist Treatment Organisation for the
Prevention of Sexual Offending)*
Julie Newberry, PhD. MBACP(accredited), Professional Certificate in Therapeutic Practice with
Sex Offenders
StopSO (Specialist Treatment Organisation for the Prevention of Sexual Offending)
Sarah Goode, PhD, MA
Author, former CEO of StopSO (Specialist Treatment Organisation for the Prevention of Sexual
Offending)
Geri Akerman, PhD
Therapy Manager at HMP Grendon and visiting lecturer at University of Birmingham and Cardiff
Name blacked out in blog (open in actual letter)
Jen Pryboda, PhD
Forensic Psychologist
Name blacked out in blog (open in actual letter)
Name blacked out in blog (open in actual letter)
Tom Squire
Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Specialist
Candice Christiansen
Founder, The Prevention Project*
Jeremy Malcolm, PhD, B Com (Hons)
Senior Global Policy Analyst, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Sheila van den Heuvel-Collins
Author of To Be Human Again
Name blacked out in blog (open in actual letter)
Name blacked out in blog (open in actual letter)
Sara Radford
Social Worker and Circles Coordinator, Circles South West*
Ross Bartels, PhD
Forensic psychology researcher/lecturer, University of Lincoln
One of the signatories, Sheila van den Heuvel-Collins, has also come out with a strong statement of support in her own blog (https://sheilavdhc.com/2018/01/15/maps-on-twitter/). She raises the issue of guidance for young people in the process of realizing they are minor-attracted.
Here’s the thing: most people become aware of their sexuality somewhere around puberty (approximately ages 10-14). This is about the time we start giving our children a bit of freedom in the world–to walk to school without us, to spend some time on the internet. This is the period when parents whisper furtive prayers that their child will be all right. We hope they’ll find good role models and good people to hang around with.
Twitter removed the good role models from their site. This reduces the chance of a young MAP meeting the likes of Ender before they decide to search for child pornography, before they meet a pro-contact pedophile.
It’s estimated that less than 20% of sexual crimes are committed by Minor Attracted People. That means that almost 20% of sexual offenses can be prevented.
I have yet to meet a person, no matter how heinous, upon whom I would wish sexual assault. In order to prevent abuse, we have to talk about it.
To see such an array of thoughtful people allied with non-offenders is heartening, and yields up hope not just for MAPs but for civilization as a whole.
On the not-so-bright side, Wrathschild and his fellow Britain First and UK white nationalist trolls have been greatly encouraged by their success with Enderphile, and are now lobbying fiercely to have all recognizable MAP accounts expunged from Twitter. Wrathschild, picking the most emotive piece of spin he can for the UK public, claims he is campaigning on behalf of a 1995 murder victim, the eight-year-old Sarah Payne, who was raped and killed by repeat sex offender Roy Whiting. He shows a photo of a vicious and deranged looking Whiting and says “Below you will see an Animal disguised as a Man. His name we don’t need to mention. It (sic) is the reason Sarah’s Law came into place! Fast forward to 2018, and Animals like this are permitted by @twitter to promote their Theory on Children, on the premise that they’re “Non Contact.”
With this maximally bigot-screeched line of outrage-panic, he accosts dozens of celebrity, press, and right-wing accounts every day, pressing people to “join our campaign.”
In this remarkable historical era where the internet has liberated all the political genies of the free world from the bottles they were isolated in, it will be interesting to see if the conjunction of academic expertise, reasonable ideas and ethical self-restraint can win this match, or if the seething mass of Twitter trolls and gutter press will be able to ‘morally’ emote us all back towards lynch mobs and blood-libel paranoias.
It will also be interesting to see if the police will be able to restrain themselves when faced with passionately law-abiding minority group members, or if they will yield to social psychosis, light up a fire, and pull out their roundup hardware.
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