The director of a pro-pedophile activist group has allegedly been arrested in Norway 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 and was arrested on July 9.
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, according to a co-director of the Virtuous Pedophiles (VirPed) group who calls himself Markus, and allegedly admitted to law enforcement that he had sexually abused a child “several years ago.”
Members of the online pro-pedophile community have stated that at least one of the incidents of sexual abuse for which Charlie is charged occurred at a “MAP community conference.”
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 charges leveled against the VirPed director stand in direct opposition to the group’s stated goals, and calls into question the group’s claims about its own operations.
On a page titled, “I Am an Adult Pedophile,” the VirPed site reads: “Don’t panic. You are a pedophile, but it’s only a part of who you are. You are not alone. There are a lot of people like you who have this attraction and still go on to live satisfying lives and never try to seek sexual activity with a child. Your attraction does not make you a bad person, and you did not choose to be a pedophile either.”
However, Charlie is being discussed sympathetically within the VirPed community despite the charges against him.
“My heart goes out to him,” wrote one forum member, known as gwenisgone, who has listed their “age of attraction” as being between 1 to 12 years old. “It’s been difficult dealing with this news ever since I found out, but I firmly believe Charlie to be a good and upstanding person. This will be an incredibly difficult time for him and our community. What’s important is that we stand together and support each other through this process.”
A German man who calls himself Consuela added, “I hope everything goes well for him and these accusations go away with nothing found, he is such a nice guy.”
Forum moderator Paddy Hopf said, “I am a moderator on VirPed, doing this good work, and now my boss has been arrested on charges of going against the tenets of the organization… VirPed will not die. We are like cockroaches. We are small in a world that is out to get us, but we’re too pervasive and resilient to be put down.”
The incident has been the subject of debate within one of the internet’s longest-running pro-pedophile forums, BoyChat, where men gather to discuss their sexual attraction to underage boys. BoyChat, which has been in operation since 1995, was founded by a self-described “boy lover” and operates as a network for men to connect and discuss their pedophilic interest in boys as well as strategies for promoting the normalization of pedophilia.
Men involved in the BoyChat community share tips on how to avoid law enforcement and advocate for sexual offending against minors. The terms “pro-contact” and “no contact” or “anti-contact” are used to differentiate between those who believe sex with minors should be legalized and those who claim to avoid acting on their urge to abuse.
On July 16, user John Holt announced that VirPed director Charlie had been arrested, while suggesting that BoyChat members should err on the side of “caution.”
“In Norway, lolisho is illegal,” he stated, referring to lolicon and shota, two forms of Japanese illustrated child pornography. “He may have been arrested off the back of a coercive parent’s personal grievance and then they found cartoons.”
The responses from BoyChat members were varied, but several users have expressed a view that it is impossible to be a non-offending pedophile.
“It would be nice if [pro-contact] pedophiles were more conciliatory and welcoming towards their mistaken VirPed brethren, especially when a VirPed has failed to live up to their own overly ascetic ideals,” wrote Errant on August 1. “Show them that it’s not all fire and brimstone and ideological puritanism and that it’s OK to come over to our side of the pool.”
User Fragment wrote on July 16, “I think it’s much worse when an anti-c offends… both ethically and in terms of optics. As a pro-c, my crimes were basically committed in alignment with my own sense of values and right and wrong. But an anti-c committing those same crimes is violating their own deeply held code. My conscience is clean, theirs is not…. It’s funny how the ‘children can’t consent’ meme is so strong in VirPed culture that no one is even talking about where it might’ve been a willing or unwilling encounter.”
In 2022, Reduxx became aware that a UK-based member 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.
Similarly, members of both the VirPed and BoyChat forums have been solicited as participants in academic research.
In 2023, Reduxx learned that a researcher at McGill University in Canada had been conducting a survey aimed at gaining insight from “child lovers” in online pedophile communities, including BoyChat. The survey featured images of naked children and asked participants to rate their attraction. Psychology PhD researcher Julia Levitan’s survey, titled “Nature and Correlates of Romantic Attraction to Children,” asked respondents whether they identify as transgender, non-binary, or genderqueer.
The Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a UK-based child protection charity dedicated exclusively to preventing child sexual abuse praises the Virtuous Pedophile community on its official website, where the charity has given VirPed a rating of “pioneering.”
“The work of Virtuous Pedophiles has been supported by a range of professionals including academic researchers in the psychology field,” reads the charity’s statement, before linking to a series of testimonials posted on the VirPed website.
The group has also been covered positively in dozens of mainstream media outlets. In 2014, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offered them praise in a profile titled “Virtuous Pedophiles Group Gives Support Therapy Cannot.”
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.
Of VirPed, Blanchard said: “People do not choose to be attracted to children or adults any more than they choose to be attracted to males or females. Not all pedophiles are child molesters (or vice versa). Child molesters are deined by their acts; pedophiles are defined by their desires. There are pedophiles and hebephiles who never act on their sexual attraction towards children. They cannot be blamed for what they feel, and they should be supported for the constant self-restraint they must exercise in order to behave ethically. I support Virtuous Pedophiles in its efforts to reduce child sexual abuse by helping pedophiles to never molest children.”
Blanchard was also responsible for the DSM entry for pedophilia, and conferred with self-described “MAP” activists associated with a group called B4U-Act.
B4U-ACT has campaigned for years to change and ultimately eliminate the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) entry on pedophilia. During a 2011 symposium titled “Pedophilia, Minor-Attracted Persons, and the DSM: Issues and Controversies,” hosted by B4U-ACT, co-founder Richard Kramer – who uses a pseudonym to conceal his identity – used results of anonymous surveys conducted with the participation of members of B4U-ACT in an attempt to establish that pedophilia is an innate identity that emerges in childhood.
While former B4U-Act co-founder Melsheimer died in 2010, the co-founder and current head of B4U-ACT, Kramer, also has a long history of pro-pedophilia lobbying and has admitted to having a sexual attraction to boys.
Prior to his involvement with B4U-ACT, Kramer operated a website called the Male Homosexual Attraction to Minors Information Center, which advocates favorably for what Kramer describes as “feelings of sexual attraction that some men have for underage boys.” The website notes a previous symposium addressing the issue of removing “gender identity disorder and the paraphilias” from the DSM, a move which would ultimately amount to de-pathologizing harmful forms of sexual behavior.
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