Dr. Naudé points to a study conducted by Finnish child safeguarding NGO Suojellaan Lapsia Ry, which found that pedophiles “being in contact with other users can exacerbate the problem. Users might justify each other’s behavior, thus perpetuating the cognitive distortion that child sexual abuse material use is acceptable.”
This is the link that the article provides to the study: https://archive.ph/0HeGk
Here’s what it states:
Suojellaan Lapsia ry / Protect Children extends a warm thank you to the Commission for its invaluable work in the field of child protection. Moreover, Protect Children wants to kindly thank for the opportunity to provide feedback on this initiative. Protect Children is a non-governmental and not-for-profit organization based in Helsinki, Finland. We believe that to fully protect children from sexual violence, it is crucial to tackle the issue from all angles. Protect Children educates children on vital digital safety skills, conducts research on pressing issues, and establishes innovative intervention strategies to prevent online sexual violence against children through an offender-focused approach. Protect Children’s specialists analyze child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to support law enforcement agencies in their efforts to identify and save children and remove the material from the internet. Since January 2020, Protect Children’s Specialists have analyzed over 60 000 single images in the global Project Arachnid alliance lead by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Additionally, Protect Children leads peer support groups for parents of children who have been victims of sexual violence.
Directive 2011/93/EU is a vital and comprehensive piece of legislation, which is efficient in furthering the realization of the rights of the child. Due to the constant development of technology, however, and the impact the changing technology has on the means of offending and types of sexual violence against children, the Directive, like most other pieces of legislation, has its shortcomings. Bearing this in mind, many of the suggested policy options seem effective in strengthening the rights of the child and protecting children from sexual violence. Protect Children finds Option 4 to be the most suitable one. Option 4 successfully combines the need for updated legislation, as well as the need for non-legislative measures supporting the implementation of legislation within the Member States, rendering the legislation more effective and suitable for the present as well as the future.
At the present moment, the Directive falls short in effectively criminalizing all forms of sexual violence against children (existence of opt-out clauses significantly lessening the impact of the Directive). Presently, the Directive allows States Parties to opt out of criminalizing CSAM which does not include a real child (however, bearing in mind the highly realistic nature of computer-generated images of CSAM), as well as CSAM involving an adult portraying a child. New research (Protect Children 2021) demonstrated the strong correlation between viewing CSAM and contact offending, thus highlighting the urgent need to better remove all forms of CSAM, as well as prevent individuals from accessing it. This includes offering appropriate intervention means as per article 22 of the Directive.
Protect Children believes that legislative amendments should be taken to broaden the scope of the Directive to account for technological developments and brought with it the new ways in which crimes of sexual violence can be committed against children. Through legislative amendments, the legislative framework would be more suitable to address the changing nature of crimes of sexual violence. Furthermore, Protect Children strongly supports further harmonization of legislation across the Member States to avoid impunity or perpetrators travelling to States with more lenient legislative frameworks.
As for Dr. Alaric Naudé’s study, I found it here: https://thepublicinsight.org/paper/a-case-study-via-sociolinguistic-analysis-of-covert-pro-paedophilia-organization-registered-as-a-child-protection-charity-and-its-links-to-paedophilia-enablers-in-academia-and-academic-propaganda/
Just by reading it, you can tell that he’s essentially using things that Prostasia and its members have said against them, especially on Twitter or on the forum. It’s little wonder why Prostasia asked for the “study” to be taken down.
Special mention goes to the part about stigma:
- Inverted Victim-Oppressor, Blaming An “Unaccepting” Society
A distinct victim-oppressor linguistic pattern underlies the entire organisational agenda. This attitude is consistent with the findings of Blaloch and Bourke (2020) “The dominance of these justifications suggests self-proclaimed paedophiles in both studies did not consider sexual activity with children to be wrong; rather, they believed it was merely viewed negatively by society.” Prostasia reasons that not all paedophiles have acted on their urge and hence attaching a stigma is wrong. It projects blame onto society for not accepting paedophiles and thus coercing them to offend. This follows the usual projection by paedophiles of responsibility away from themselves toward the victim or society, a pattern that hinders attempts at rehabilitation. Using the same logic from Prostasia, rapists offend because society has applied a stigma to rapists, or that murderers commit murder due to the stigma that society has applied to murderers.
The forum shows numerous examples of how paedophiles view the stigma against them as somehow being unfair or unwarranted, tantamount to a violation of their human rights. One individual proudly explained that “paedophilia” is Greek for “love of children” and that “normal people” did not know the proper definitions of words. Self-justification with a condescending attitude can be seen in comments across the forum.
Figure 9: Conflation of human rights laws with valid stigma against paedophiles (Prostasia Forum)
On the Prostasia forum, as with other platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Human Rights are conflated with the stigma attached to paedophilia. The paedophilic argument runs; “stigma is a violation of human rights and therefore (the) stigma should be removed”. Arguments of morality are also challenged. The comment above calls for the removal of stipulations in law restricted by morality. The underlying assertion that morality is never objective is incorrect and assumes morality in only a religious context. There are scientific views of morality based on empirical observations. For example, violent pornography precedes dehumanization and sexual aggression (Zhou et al, 2021), therefore legislation designed and based even on a purely moralistic or ethical science foundation would also limit the spread of harmful materials that have negative impacts upon the wider society, whether it be physical or psychological. The argument put forward by paedophiles encapsulates an oxymoron in that it relies on human rights laws which are themselves based on both a form of morality and a value of human life, while at the same time claiming morality does not exist.
Figure 10: Paedophile compares paedophilic suffering with the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust. (Prostasia Forum)
In developing its arguments, paedophilic ideology makes extensive use of false equivalences in an attempt to normalise an otherwise abnormal position. In the above post, a paedophile uses one form of psychological projection that is associated with blame projection, (Hotchkiss, 2003) in addition to an irrational belief they are victims in need of empathy (Sykes, 2003). A false comparison of paedophiles and the plight of Jews in the Third Reich is made by a certain paedophile, Ralph. He states that the “truths” (which is to say any truth that does not support the paedophilic self-notion of truth), is in itself not a truth, equating the study of Jews in Nazi Germany with the study of paedophilia. He identifies a false equivalence of the plight of the Jews who were exterminated for being Jewish with the faux-plight of paedophiles. There has never been a historic or collective genocide or extermination program targeting paedophiles, nor have paedophiles as a group ever experienced the abuses suffered by Jews as a group. Such a comparison is not only a false equivalence but carries, in addition, an anti-Semitic undertone.
Prostasia regularly compares itself with Jews, claiming that being anti-paedophilia is being anti-Semitic because “anti-paedophiles attribute paedophilia with Jews.” This claim sits alongside the claim that criticism of Prostasia is an activity of Far Right and Alt-Right groups (Prostasia, 2021), thus attempting to make an equivalence between critique, political affiliation and ethnic identity. Analysis of available posts criticising Prostasia on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube found a relatively even distribution of critical content from across the political spectrum and, while some comments were from individuals associated with the far-right, an equal number were found from accounts with a far-left ideology. The majority of comments, however, were in the range of centre-left and centre-right with language patterns amongst these groups being almost identical. Prostasia’s stance on social media was only accepted by extreme fringe groups. This attempt at redefining paedophiles is currently unsuccessful but when combined with academic interests may eventually find itself being mainstreamed as a sub-section of “Queer Theory”.
Prostasia does not support paedophiles who are afraid they may be at risk of offending. By Prostasia’s content, they concede they are an advocacy and activist group. Three different occasions have been noted where paedophiles asking for assistance to avoid offending were turned away. Their website states,
>"Prosasia's priority is on using law, technology, and social intervention to prevent CSA before it happens, rather than merely tracking down and punishing those who have already offended - at which point our society has failed the victim. We do this through four actions: Facilitating research - Campaigning for effective laws - Consulting to platforms and agencies - Defending the innocent."
As seen from this text, a part of Prostasia’s victimhood ideology creation lies in activism associated with appealing for favourable laws and appealing those that are unfavourable. The foundation repeatedly advocates either against tracking down paedophiles or punishing them. At the least it advocates sentence reduction. Once again, psychological or guilt projection is used by Prostasia — it is society that has failed the victim, not the paedophile that is responsible for the rape of a child. The semantics of the four “actions” mentioned by Prostasia are of special interest, as is the order which denotes importance. In this case, research is viewed as being of utmost importance and defending the innocent is mentioned yet seems to be an afterthought in its general syntax as per the four actions listed. The semantics of the word innocent here is also vague, and may not refer to children at all but possibly to paedophiles.
There’s a lot more than that, but it’s a bit long so I wasn’t going to quote the whole study.
I think the following quote says it all really:
That de-stigmatisation of paedophilia is a progressive step to a more tolerant society is illogical and contrary to evidence. In reality, de-stigmatisation of paedophilia is regressive and only accepted in a true rape culture and hyper-violent societies.
Which is followed by the study’s conclusions:
- Conclusions
From the findings of this study, a conclusion can be drawn that Prostasia is a pro-Paedophilia organisation that registered as a child protection NGO and that it has links to academics whose work is supportive of paedophiles and paedophilia. Further, it serves to proliferate Child abuse by undermining the work of legitimate child protection services by spreading pro-paedophilia propaganda and erroneous content via social media platforms, as well as its own website. It directly endangers children by putting them into contact with paedophiles via the so-called Map Support Club, as well as normalising paedophilia by promoting it as a legitimate sexual orientation. Prostasia therefore gives insight into the mental processes that paedophiles take in order to justify cultivation of deviant desires, and the classification of semantics, in attempts to destigmatize themselves in society, using methods that are similar to those used in grooming children. This study is just one aspect of publicly available data from which to make a linguistic analysis, however it would benefit from follow-up studies that concentrate on dark web activities.
Definitely no bias in the slightest.
