VirPed Panel: 28 July 2024

“Alice” asks:

Have you ever accessed the Stop It Now! helpline or used the online modules? If so, what do you think of the service? Have any of you found the modules helpful? Are there any other services that you would recommend?

StopItNow and other prevention organisations are not really aimed at pedophiles. They are aimed at helping people at risk of offending. This includes some pedophiles (nobody knows how big a slice) but also includes a lot of ephebophiles or opportunistic abusers, people with impulsivity issues, anti-social behaviour issues and even young people of a very similar age to their victims.

I am a pedophile, and I have no problem with that sort of help being offered, but I’m not the target audience: I’ve never viewed illegal images online nor come close to committing a hands-on offence. I’ve never really responded to these organisations’ messaging nor felt the need to use their resources. It’s not that I’m resistant to help, just that I found more appropriate help for the issues that affect me, like the burden of secrecy, feelings of alienation and depression - issues which I know prevention organisations wouldn’t treat as important if I reached out. If I reported suicidality, I would worry about deanonymisation.

The UK StopItNow branch is kind of infamous in our community for offering interventions that seem more based on mandatory programs for convicted offenders than people who are free to engage or not. They show little understanding of how pedophile attractions work, and little acknowledgement than having the attraction can be low risk. Their advertising seems designed to intimidate rather than invite. The logo for the US branch is a big “stop” hand instead of a hand reaching out. It seems to say “we’re not going to have a conversation; we’re going to instruct you”.

Lucy Faithfull Foundation has a public voice that non-offending pedophiles don’t have, and as a result when they speak, although they are pretty clear they are talking about people at risk of offending, the articles nearly always have “pedophiles” in the headline, which is really frustrating/depressing for someone like me. Some prevention organisations, anxious to publicise what they do, let this media misinformation go unchallenged. There are a couple of excellent exceptions to this. StopItNowUK is not one of them.

So all in all I see a lot of mutual disinterest and even sometimes a bit of distrust between prevention organisations and low-to-no-risk pedophiles. Outsiders assume we could be useful to each other, but actually it’s a mismatch of needs presented and help offered. They don’t seem to believe someone like me exists.

Don’t get me wrong. A lot of pedophiles do struggle with illegal images, and it’s no good pretending this isn’t a significant issue. Help is needed. If someone who is using illegal material asked me for help, I would recommend direct anonymous professional support such as PreventIt or Talking for Change instead of doing modules online. Online modules are not personalised and basically give the same advice to everyone regardless of their risk level or age or circumstances. Also because they’re publcly accessible, you can tell the authors are paranoid about getting cancelled by some tabloid journalist who decides to take them to task for publishing something that seems too “tolerant towards pedophiles”.

On the flipside, I have looked at the Lucy Faithfull forum for friends and family of “The Knock” and it’s amazingly good. It treats its users like grownups, and a lot of the opinions from users on that forum mirror those you can read at VirPed, even though they are on the “other side of the fence”.

I have no experience with this myself, though I did do a test run through the material used at Prevention Project Dunklefeld (A German resource) many years ago when that was new. It seemed to be pretty good, though it (at the time) was focused on those that had committed contact offenses, which doesn’t apply to me. Mostly it was focused on developing victim empathy, as I recall.

I’m not sure how many people within the pool of Virped members that respond to these questions will have had this experience, unfortunately. Maybe I’ll be surprised.

Specifying only one type of prevention project is problematic because I’ve heard that StopitNow UK is very different from StopitNow US. Ideally, a program like this will both help a MAP cope, teach empathy and help to protect children. From speaking to others who have availed themselves of resources, the most effective seem to be Prevention Project Dunkenfeld (Germany) and Talking For Change (Canada). I’ve read the material put out by SIN (UK) and I find it quite scary and unhelpful. Their material sounds like a total war on fantasy. This has the potential of creating someone totally frustrated and self loathing, who may in fact be more of a threat.

I rang in to Stop It Now UK from April 2022 to June 2023, around once per month. It was a great jumping off point for acceptance of my attractions and acceptance of myself. They gave me a lot of ways to cope with the stress and anxiety. After my initial shock and horror was far enough behind me, the service stopped being useful. It’s primarily for people struggling with porn, and I never struggled with porn. Once I was self-accepting, and had places like VirPed and MSC, I was good.

I have never used StopItNow, so I can’t give a first hand opinion on how well they provide support. I remember reading through the website of StopItNow UK a few years ago, and I was underwhelmed and in some areas quite horrified by what I read. It seemed as if they wanted to shame pedophiles for using any kind of outlet, even if it was legal and didn’t involve the abuse of real children, as well as merely fantasizing about children. The term “illegal fantasies” was on their website when I read through it, which is laughable and completely insane. How can a fantasy, something that only exists in our thoughts, be illegal? Just from their website, StopItNow UK didn’t seem to be a service that I could get any reasonable support from.

I think if a support service wants to be genuinely helpful, they have to understand that many pedophiles don’t even come close to being a real threat to children, and our attractions are not correlated with uncontrollable impulses. The help we seek is related to our own mental health, dealing with the stigma of society treating us like monsters, as well as the pain of keeping this secret from our friends and family. Support services should hammer home the idea that we are human beings like everyone else, deserving of the same rights, respect and legal/social protections as everyone else.

One online support service I did take (as part of giving feedback) was the Help Wanted project, and while there were still some issues with the online modules overfocusing a little on preventing abuse (as well as giving advice that wasn’t really applicable to pedophiles exclusively attracted to children), most of the course was excellent and the positives outweighed the negatives for me.

I don’t like self-help tools in general, partly because they’re so impersonal and unable to adjust to the support needs of any given individual, but mainly because they tend to have an excessive focus on abuse prevention, more so than other forms of support. While this is a laudable goal, it’s not relevant to most pedophiles, the vast majority of whom never commit any form of abuse, with or without external support. There’s also some empirical evidence that an exaggerated focus on avoiding offenses in support offerings can cause pedophiles to view themselves as high-risk, in turn making them high-risk since that fear can lead to various mental health issues that are risk factors for abuse.

Experts generally recommend that support for us focus on self-acceptance, even if the underlying goal is preventing abuse, and the self-help tools I’ve seen consistently deprioritize that aspect of support. They’re an okay starting point for people who aren’t ready to pursue something like peer or professional support, but they won’t be as helpful to most, and may even be counterproductive for some.

I’ve been aware of Stop It Now! for some time, before I was aware of Virtuous Pedophiles. I’ve never used the helpline, but I did consider it back when I had nowhere else to turn.

I have read portions of the self-help modules a couple of times, and found what I read to be largely inapplicable to myself. It presents itself as a resource that is aimed at pedophiles broadly, but it seems applicable mainly to people dealing with an addiction to pornography or other self-control issues. Only a small part of the text acknowledges the valid existence of genuine pedophiles whose attractions are immutable. Much of the content also takes a moralistic view of sexual fantasy and subscribes to the “slippery slope” idea that anyone fantasizing about children is fueling their own appetite for child abuse.

In those ways, it reinforces the idea of pedophilia as something to be suppressed if not cured. This is counter to self-acceptance, which is arguably a major component of living healthily with pedophilia and something that is encouraged in the VirPed community.

Nevertheless, I do think Stop It Now! could be helpful for those struggling with sexual impulsivity, whom it seems to be designed for. I also appreciate the existence of any sympathetic resource in what is otherwise a dearth of accessible services for pedophiles; it’s a lot better than nothing. However, for a real pedophile of reasonable mental stability, I’d probably recommend the likes of VirPed over any resource designed by people who are not pedophiles.

Other responders have noted their reservations and disapproval of the StopItNow courses, which I largely share. I had a much more positive reaction to the “Help Wanted” program of Johns Hopkins University - though apparently it is currently closed because of a research program to improve it.

When I evaluated this program a few years back I wrote a blog post on it, from which the rest of this answer is drawn.

Without the need to reveal their identity to anyone, this course gives young pedophiles information about how to deal with their attraction, with this key element: It never, not even once, implies that the pedophile is sick or evil or a bad person. It explains what behaviors constitute child sex abuse, and it describes how it is very harmful to the victims and the serious legal consequences.

An entire chapter is devoted to disclosure. It starts with the presumption that you should not disclose your attraction, and then goes through the various dangers and difficulties and helps you find the specific people you might want to disclose to, how to do it, and how much to disclose. Much of society thinks of a pedophile as nothing but a potential molester, someone outside humanity whose happiness is irrelevant. As such they would support all pedophiles disclosing their attraction publicly to help keep children safe, whatever the cost to them. The course treats pedophiles as people who deserve happiness as much as anyone else, and their suggestions are much more realistic.

The course avoids categorical rules. It qualifies its suggestions, so a simplistic “Never be alone with a child” becomes instead “Avoid being alone with a child you feel a strong sexual attraction to”. It gives a reason for every piece of advice offered, and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions based on information – and allowing for the particulars of their situation. It assumes they have the capacity to draw the right conclusions. If they don’t, categorical statements aren’t likely to move them anyway. The course does categorically recommend that pedophiles obey the law, which is entirely appropriate.

The course includes many “testimonials”, read by pedophiles describing how things were for them. These are very good, and among other things highlight how much variety there is in pedophiles.

The final chapter is on building a healthy sexuality. They note that most pedophiles have a significant attraction to adults too, and should work from that basis to build relationships. They do not talk about eliminating the attraction to children, which most scientists today agree is impossible – however much the average person desires that outcome. As always, they emphasize the positive and constructive.

One of the most delicate issues is touched on only in the third and last personal “Account” in the final chapter, not in the actual text. What do you do with your sexuality if you just have no interest in adults? The speaker says, “if you’re exclusively attracted to children, refocus your sexuality/masturbation on just getting pleasure from your own body. The advantage of the latter is that it’s free and you can do it any time and there are lots of safe ways to do it.” The course has (rightly) made it very clear that looking at child pornography is not an acceptable way to do it. But they don’t address pictures of children in swimsuits, or from nudist colonies. They don’t address material from “child modeling sites”. And they don’t address bringing to mind the image of the girl who lives next door while you masturbate.

They also don’t address whether you might do those things in parallel with working on developing your attraction to adults, or whether you might continue to do them even if you do have an adult partner. There is an enlightened mindset regarding adult sexuality today that says it’s OK for adults to fantasize about other adults (typically through pornography) even in a committed relationship. This same mindset would also suggest this as a possibility for adults attracted to children (though not through actual pornography).

I can think of some good reasons for these omissions. The course designers may not agree with each other. What’s legal may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction or not be legally settled yet. Detractors who dislike such a compassionate course for pedophiles might leap on such controversial suggestions. It is just as well to leave these issues unaddressed. The course has accomplished a great deal in getting to the point where these are the remaining questions.

On the whole, the course treats the teen pedophile as a real person, facing a real problem, and helps them solve that problem. And that is not a reaction they will get much of anywhere else! And while designed initially for teens, it will be helpful to pedophiles of any age.