When you find evidence that your partner is a pedophile, but they have never told you, it can be a huge shock. You will have many questions and it may completely change how you see your relationship.
Unfortunately, it is not surprising that pedophiles do not tell even their closest loved ones about their pedophilia. Society gives pedophiles no reason to talk about it and many reasons to avoid that. Many people in our community say they will never talk about their attraction with anyone.
But from your point of view, this is an important piece of information about your partner that you didn’t get told before, so it is natural if you have strong feelings about the secrecy.
There are different ways that someone can find out their partner is a non-offending pedophile. Here are some:
- Discovering search history, where the partner has been looking for legal images of children
- Finding that they have a lot of pictures of children they don’t know
- Seeing messages on your partner’s device from a fellow non-offending pedophile
- Words the partner has used during lovemaking or sexting
- Discovering the partner has been visiting websites like virped.org
- Someone that knew about them decided to tell you without their permission
Sometimes one of these is enough by itself to believe someone is a pedophile (attracted to prepubescent children); sometimes it isn’t clear until you put several different clues together.
Once you are sure your suspicion is correct, you have to decide whether you want or need to start a conversation about it with your partner.
While you decide on that, there are some things you may be wondering:
“Can I stay with them now?”
Unless you are instantly sure you can’t, this is worth pausing on until you have reflected more. They are not a different person than you knew and from their point of view, they have not transformed. You will be trying to fit this fact about them into what you already know of them, and to do this you may have to become curious about what pedophilia is (which is why you’re reading this now) and how they in particular experience pedophilia.
“Is it appropriate to talk to a friend or other family member to get someone else’s view?”
There are two issues here:
- your strong and understandable need to talk to a third person about this
- the risks that come from telling anyone that you know or believe someone is a pedophile
You will have to balance these. In ideal circumstances, we don’t share highly private information about our partners without their knowledge or consent, but many partners of pedophiles feel a strong need to share what they are dealing with.
If you tell someone in your friend and family circle who overreacts, or who is more judgemental than you, then they might tell someone else, or decide to force your partner out of secrecy. That could later make it harder for you to work through the issues with your partner.
In the early stages, you may do better with an anonymous helpline or (if you have access to one) a professional counselor. Other professionals will have a duty of confidentiality - although they will break confidentiality if they believe a child or another person is at risk. If you want the perspective of other pedophiles, we at VirPed will offer email advice.
“Am I misreading the evidence?”
It is possible that you have decided your partner is a pedophile, but because you haven’t spoken to them, you don’t have definite confirmation.
“Maybe I have jumped to the wrong conclusion?” First you should check you understand what the word pedophile actually means
After that, there are only two ways to resolve this:
- have a conversation with your partner
- investigate more without their knowledge
Starting a conversation
We don’t know how your partner will react to you starting a conversation. Some pedophiles in this situation are too afraid and may deny or cover up. However, others will open up. This may depend on whether they think they will immediately get into trouble, or lose you as a partner. Many pedophiles do not talk about their attractions until it feels somewhat safe to do so.
If your partner confirms you are right and that they are a pedophile, you can check out our page about what to do if your life-partner comes out to you . There is also some advice from Talking for Change about what to do if someone comes out to you .
What they tell you from this point onward, and how able they are to talk honestly will determine what the next steps can be.
If you are comfortable giving more details about your specific situation, you can email us with questions or to ask to Forum for Friends and Family , which sits alongside and overlaps with our main forum for adult pedophiles.
Firstly, thank you for coming to this website to find out more. Whether this news has made you panic or made you thoughtful, we can hopefully give you some perspective on the secret you now know.
Our forum is a peer-support community. We help pedophiles anonymously and honestly discuss their experiences and feelings. We don’t allow image sharing, justification of adult-child sexual contact or encouragement of illegal behavior. Moderators enforce these rules. All posts are written in English.
When people contact Virtuous Pedophiles, the message they write comes to us. The people we hear from most are other virtuous pedophiles. Here are some of the initial messages we have received. Reading them will give a flavor of our diversity, the themes that come up over and over again, and a hint at how many of us there are.
Read about the life experiences of virtuous pedophiles
Our panel of VirPed forum members spent 2024 answering questions about pedophlia-related issues based on their life experiences and answered questions from the curious.