A “non-binary” academic who previously was forced to resign from a criminal justice assistant professorship after defending the “dignity” of “minor attracted people” is offering to pay self-identified pedophiles to participate in a survey. Allyn Walker, now associated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (formerly the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse), posted the recruitment advert in the Virtuous Pedophiles Forum, where she has been a member for nearly ten years.
“We’re recruiting 10 participants for interviews within the next week to give us feedback on new content for the Help Wanted program. Interviews will last 30-60 minutes and participants will receive a $100 gift card of their choice in exchange for their time,” Walker wrote in the VirPed forum.
Virtuous Pedophiles (VirPed) is a group founded in 2012 that purports to seek the de-stigmatization of pedophilia in order to facilitate “harm prevention and personal support.” Members acknowledge that they have a sexual attraction to children, but claim to want lead normal productive lives without abusing children. The group has repeatedly claimed they have a “commitment to non-offending” and position themselves as a resource for journalists, academics, and public education on pedophilia.
The Help Wanted Program, created by academics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health bills itself as “an online course to provide help to people attracted to younger children.” A video introduction featured on the program’s website promises to offer “coping strategies to manage your sexual attraction to children” in order to build a “healthy sexuality.”
Requirements shared by Walker offer self-declared pedophiles the opportunity to participate in an “anonymous, audio-only Zoom call with a member of the study team.”
“We will not be collecting any personally identifying information from our participants. We ask those interested in participating to please visit the link below for information on how to participate in the study and obtain an anonymous email address,” Walker stated.
Walker, a female-to-male transgender who identifies as non-binary, was the subject of widespread controversy in 2021 after she sat down for an interview with Prostasia – a registered 503c which many have called “pro-pedophile” for their stances on legalizing child-like sex dolls and routinely comparing pedophilia to a sexuality.
Similarly, Walker had once entertained theories about giving pedophiles access to “high quality child pornography” to stop offending.
This is from Allyn Walker’s publicly available PhD thesis.
— Natalia Antonova 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@NataliaAntonova) November 22, 2021
I struggle to understand how anyone can present viewing child abuse material as just a coping strategy that is not, itself, an offense.
Some of you have gone a little too far in your “all stigmas are bad” nonsense. pic.twitter.com/1ROm8NGtok
Walker was an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and had interviewed with Prostasia’s now-defunct podcast in November to promote her book titled “A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity.”
In the interview, Walker stated she used the term “minor attracted people” out of consideration for pedophile’s feelings, noting “… I think it’s important to use terminology for groups that members of that group want others to use for them.” She also stated that “MAP advocacy groups like B4U-Act have advocated for use of the term, and they’ve advocated for it primarily because it’s less stigmatizing than other terms like pedophile.”
The term ‘MAP’ is an acronym which stands for ‘Minor-Attracted Person,’ and is used in online pro-pedophile communities as a way to reduce stigma against individuals who seek to sexually abuse children. It was coined by the co-founder of pedophile advocacy group B4U-ACT, convicted child rapist Michael Melsheimer. Melsheimer explicitly stated that the purpose of the organization was to normalize pedophilia where the National Association of Man-Boy Love (NAMBLA) had failed to do so.
Both B4U-Act and the Virtuous Pedophile (VirPed) community has been influencing researchers and academics for several years from behind a veil of anonymity.
B4U-ACT partnered with a researcher at McGill University in Canada, who then conducted a survey aimed at gaining insight from “child lovers” in online pedophile communities in an effort to attain data on “romantic attraction to children.” The survey, like Walker’s survey, inquired about sexual offending against minors while promising complete anonymity and privacy to respondents.
In 2022, Reduxx became aware that a UK-based administrator of VirPed had been placing letters within books at public libraries. The letters pleaded for more tolerance towards “non-offending pedophiles.” The man behind the campaign, who calls himself Bly Rede, had the year before been promoted by Candice Christiansen, a sex-addiction therapist who serves on the United Nations Human Trafficking Task Force, on her show titled “The Prevention Podcast.” Christiansen is the creator of the website The Global Prevention Project, where she has published submissions from self-professed pedophiles.
Bly warned community members in 2021 that researchers and academics have access to the VirPed forum. “Some researchers describe (without directly quoting) the kinds of things that are discussed here and they might publish those descriptions in papers, articles etc. We see no reason to refuse this,” he wrote.
Bly runs several websites promoting the concept of a non-offending “minor attracted person,” or MAP, and he frequently portrays children as pedophiles in order to induce sympathetic reactions from readers.
In 2019, Bly published an article on his blog “The P Word” which argued that young children can be pedophiles, and that he first realized he was attracted to children when he was a child. In the article, he quotes the definition of pedophilia as stated in the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) manual for physicians, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V).
“A pedophile is someone who experiences sexual attraction to children below the age of puberty. It’s quite a simple definition, and you will notice that it isn’t the same as the definition we would give to the term ‘child molester’ or ‘child sex offender,'” Bly remarked.
“That is for the simple reason that being a pedophile does not mean you’re inevitably going to sexually offend against children. Why isn’t this generally known? Because the only pedophiles most of us hear about are the ones who commit offences. The rest are invisible. Why do we stay invisible? Because we are hiding.”
He added, “Most pedophiles realise they are pedophiles at the age of fourteen. For some it’s a little earlier.”
Bly does not mention that the DSM-V definition of pedophilia he refers to was directly influenced by MAP activists.
In 2024, Reduxx discovered that a transgender MAP activist behind a “MAP” merchandise shop was one of the men who involved in a pro-pedophilia group that has consulted academics. Katie Cruz, a pseudonym used by a man who calls himself Cali Miller, said he had been “working behind the scenes” with activist group B4U-ACT, which campaigns to have pedophilia recognized as a sexual orientation, and which has contributed to academic research at some of North America’s top universities.
On Patreon, Cruz has stated that his “age of attraction” is between 9 and 13 years old. He also has claimed to identify as having a “trans age” of between “13 and 17ish.”
In a blog written by Cruz titled “A MAP in Love,” he states that he is “hopelessly in love with little girls” and explains that he holds “radical ideas of legalizing relationships between adults and tween girls.”
“I’ve known for a long time that I was a girl-lover. I’ve always found young girls to be desirable, on an emotional and physical level,” Cruz wrote in 2019. He described how, in 2007, “in the midst of lonely turmoil,” he discovered pro-pedophile advocacy and communities online.
“I read through their heartfelt messages about how much they love and care about little girls. What they were writing was exactly how I felt. And what they preached never changed. They all truly love little girls, just as I do,” Cruz said.
One notable endorsement of VirPed comes from Ray Blanchard, a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Blanchard has helped to devise protocols and guidelines used internationally via his work with the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). Blanchard served on the DSM-4 Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders in the early 1990’s, and was again appointed to the DSM-5 Working Group on Gender and Sexual Identity Disorders.
Blanchard was also responsible for the DSM-5 entry for pedophilia, which distinguishes a difference between a “pedophilic sexual interest” and a “pedophile disorder,” and conferred with self-described “MAP” activists during the process.
Yet despite promoting themselves as “virtuous pedophiles,” one of the leading figures behind VirPed was arrested in Norway in July and charged with the rape of two children under the age of 14. The man, who has remained unnamed in Norwegian press but is known as “Charlie” online, was reportedly a primary school teacher in Rogaland.
According to local news reports, Charlie was remanded to custody, placed under a contact ban, and held in isolation for the first two weeks of his four-week detention period. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge of raping a minor, but was found in possession of child sexual abuse materials. Under Norwegian law, the sexual abuse of children under the age of 14 is treated as a serious criminal offense and can carry severe penalties.
Charlie was released from police custody on August 13 and is awaiting trial.
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