EXCLUSIVE: Pro-Pedophile Charity Prostasia Foundation Shuts Down Due to ‘Climate Shift’

By Genevieve Gluck
Prostasia founder Jeremy Malcom in a YouTube thumbnail for the Prostasia Channel.

A self-described “child-protection organization” which campaigned for normalizing pedophilia as a sexual identity has ceased operations citing a “shift” in the political “climate.” Established in 2018, the Prostasia Foundation was a charity registered in the state of California that has advocated for the rights of “minor-attracted persons,” or MAPs.

Despite claiming to be motivated by a desire to eradicate child sexual abuse, the organization’s efforts had dedicated themselves to crusades against child pornography bans, letter-writing campaigns to state representatives demanding child-like sex dolls be kept legal, and funding research into “fantasy sexual outlets” for pedophiles. Prostasia has also condemned anti-pedophile sentiment as harmful “Nazi-like” rhetoric and called for its mass censorship across social media.

A recent announcement published in Prostasia’s September Newsletter explains that the charity has terminated operations, with the charity’s blog and social media accounts being permanently archived.

“When Prostasia was founded in 2018, there was a spirit of greater openness to evidence-based discussions of CSA and its connection with pedophilia and to non-carceral approaches to preventing sexual violence,” reads the statement. “But in the years that followed, until 2021 when Prostasia was at its most active, the climate shifted. Movements across the political spectrum hardened the discourse, and our mission became increasingly contentious.”

Prostasia’s announcement further claims that the organization “faced a persistent wave of misinformation and smear campaigns,” leading to an “uphill battle” to continue their MAP advocacy.

As previously revealed by Reduxx in 2023, one general manager of Prostasia was caught operating pseudonymous online accounts where he admitted to being a pedophile and to masturbating to photos of children.

Though listed on the Prostasia Team Page under the name “Prescott Bayern,” the general manager, whose real name is Lawrence P. Bayern, was active on one of the world’s largest pedophile message boards dedicated to homosexual men who call themselves “boy lovers.” Calling himself “Larry,” Bayern advocated for giving children their own sex dolls and stated that he has had a “desire for adolescents.”

In one forum, Bayern told another participant: “Tomorrow I am going to where ever I can find the most children, ogle and leer at them all day and then go home and self gratify myself until raw.”

For years, Prostasia has collaborated with an organization which calls itself the MAP Support Club, an unregistered group which claims to provide “peer support” for pedophiles, and invites “minor-attracted people” aged 13 years old and up to participate in online chats about “minor attraction”.

Announcing their partnership, Prostasia said, “Since November, 2019, MAP Support Club staff have been in talks with Prostasia Foundation about a public partnership, which is the first such public and formal collaboration in history between a child protection charity and a chat-based support community for minor attracted people.”

Prostasia has also claimed that minors can be pedophiles in order to justify their outreach to children. “Every day, a handful of adolescents around the world are realizing for the first time that they might be pedophiles,” one Prostasia blog post reads. “Can you imagine how awful that must be? I believe that it is helpful for there to be public role models of non-offending, anti-contact MAPs.”

In another article published to the organization’s blog, Prostasia has offered “online ageplay safety tips,” and defines ageplay as “a form of role-play in which at least one of the participants adopts the role or mindset of someone younger—a teenager, child, or even a baby” for sexual purposes.

“Sex-positive movements, such as the LGBTQ+ movement and the organized kink/BDSM community… fight for the rights of sexual minority communities,” the post continues. “According to this philosophy, it doesn’t matter what you think about when you masturbate or have sex. There is no point in questioning why someone should be sexually aroused by kinks such as ageplay.”

The blog post goes on to warn readers to use end-to-end encrypted messaging services when engaging in “ageplay” and recommends applications such as such as Signal, WhatsApp, Wire, Wickr, or Threema. “Also, be careful not to host archives of your chats on unencrypted cloud services… If you are an ageplayer, it pays to be aware of the risks that you may face by engaging in ageplay online: you may run across real minors, predators, or undercover police.”

In 2019, Prostasia hosted a conference discussing “ageplay and child protection” in Oakland, California. Titled “Safewords and Red Lines II: Ageplay and Child Protection,” the workshop billed itself as a collaboration between “kink practitioners and sexologists,” and argued that “sex-positive communities such as kinksters, consensual non-monogamists, and sex workers are well placed to be allies in the fight against child sexual abuse and exploitation.”

In 2022, a professor who criticized Prostasia had his research article on the activist organization erased after they allegedly bullied the publishing journal into deleting his work.

Dr. Alaric Naudé, a Professor focused on the social sciences and linguistics at Suwon University in South Korea, had his research on Prostasia removed from The British Journal of Sociology and History just 24 hours after it was first published on February 9.

When Dr. Naudé inquired with the Journal on the reason why, he was told Prostasia had contacted them and demanded its removal on the grounds that the group claimed it was defamatory.

The article, titled A Case Study via Sociolinguistic Analysis of [a] Covert Pro-Pedophilia Organization Registered as a Child Protection Charity, focused on how Prostasia claims to be for child protection but builds a narrative framing pedophiles as victims of “an oppressive social structure.”

The following year, two academics who have had leadership roles within Prostasia contributed to the publication of an academic article arguing in favor of providing child pornography to “people who are attracted to children.”

In “Fantasy Sexual Material Use by People with Attractions to Children,” content depicting the rape of children is labeled “fantasy sexual material,” or FSM. The research received funding from Prostasia, and its authors include Gillian Tenbergen, former Executive Director of Prostasia Foundation, and former advisory board member Craig Harper.

The academic article argues that treatment options for pedophiles ought to “address sexual frustration.”

“Specifically in relation to people with sexual attractions to children, the relationship between FSM use and help-seeking and treatment needs should be established… considering sexual fulfillment and satisfaction as an important treatment need might be an increasingly pressing issue.” The articles continues: “FSM could act as a safe sexual outlet that allows for a feeling of release and sense of catharsis, which could reduce a motivation to seek out real children as a sexual partner.”

In addition to promoting the concept of “minor attraction” as a sexual orientation, the Prostasia Foundation has advocated for the use of puberty-halting drugs on children who are labeled “transgender.”

Former Prostasia Director of Communications Noah Berlatsky told Business Insider in 2023 about his “queer family,” while claiming that his son identifies as a transgender woman. “Our daughter came out as bisexual in middle school. In high school, she reassessed and came out as trans and lesbian, Berlatsky wrote. “My daughter is transgender, and my wife is bisexual and nonbinary.”

During his time in a leadership role, Berlatsky produced promotional material for Prostasia via a podcast and video interview series called Prostasia Conversations, beginning in 2020.

Prior to working with Prostasia, Berlatsky had written a book titled “Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism,” published by Rutgers University Press in 2017, which dealt with the theme of bondage in the comic book series of the same title. He has also written for various mainstream media outlets, such as The Atlantic, and NBC News.

In a 2021 article for NBC, Berlatsky provides a glowing review of season 3 of Netflix’s comedy drama series “Sex Education.”

“The students (and indeed the adults) at the fictitious British Moordale Secondary School masturbate, have sex, use contraception, deal with STDs, explore kink and have abortions,” Berlatsky wrote. “All of this is presented with a cheerful lack of censure. The show loves everybody, and, indeed, every body. This utopian depiction of a world in which all are accepted for who they are is exhilarating.”

The following year, he praised Netflix’s popular show “Stranger Things” while arguing against proposed bills seeking to establish greater protections for children in the classroom. Such bills, Berlatsky said, “claim to protect children from sexual discussions in classrooms, but in reality will help criminalize and stigmatize discussion of LGBT identities, and force queer children, and queer teachers, into the closet… adults terrorize children because, ultimately, they are afraid that if children were ever fully empowered, the world would turn upside down.”

But Berlatsky would make headlines after conducting a sympathetic interview with non-binary academic Allyn Walker, formerly an instructor at Old Dominion University, who came to widespread infamy in October of 2021 after utilizing the term “minor attracted people” to refer to pedophiles while speaking on the Prostasia podcast.

Walker, a female-to-male transgender who identifies as non-binary, 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.”

Walker spoke with Berlatsky in order to promote her book titled “A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity.” As outrage mounted on social media, copies of Walker’s PhD dissertation quickly began to circulate, showing Walker had entertained theories regarding allowing pedophiles to access “high quality child pornography” in the belief that this will reduce sexual abuse. 

Disturbingly, Prostasia has also partnered with a similar pedophile advocacy group called Virtuous Pedophiles (VirPed). In an open letter from the non-profit dated February 8, 2021, Prostasia’s Executive Director Jeremy Malcolm co-signed an open letter to BBC’s Channel 4 about the television series Hunting Paedophiles. The signatories include Nick Devin, Founder of Virtuous Pedophiles, and J. Michael Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University.

“Just as the media has learned to use the term ‘child sexual abuse material’ in place of ‘child
pornography,’ it is also time that the use of the term “paedophile” to refer to someone who
has committed child sexual abuse was also phased out,” reads the letter.

“The incorrect conflation of paedophilia with child sexual abuse creates a stigma against
help-seeking by people who do have paedophilia, or who think that they might. This
stigma is especially damaging for young people, who are typically in their early teens
when they realize their sexual interests.”

As Reduxx recently revealed, a leading figure at VirPed has allegedly been arrested in Norway and charged with the rape of two children under the age of 14. The charges leveled against the VirPed director stand in direct opposition to the group’s stated goals, and call into question the group’s claims about its own vetting process. Despite the charges against him, “Charlie” is being discussed sympathetically within the VirPed community.

Genevieve Gluck
Genevieve Gluck
Genevieve is the Co-Founder of Reduxx, and the outlet's Chief Investigative Journalist with a focused interest in pornography, sexual predators, and fetish subcultures. She is the creator of the podcast Women's Voices, which features news commentary and interviews regarding women's rights.
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