Jack Dawson (a cover name)
November 2024
I’ll start with a back story.
Fifty two years ago I was a young paedophile. I had spent my adolescence hoping that I would grow out of my attraction to young boys, but it never happened. I didn’t abuse children and I never used child abuse pornography. I scarcely knew it existed. I yearned to have girl friends, like my brother and my mates. I yearned to be ‘ordinary’. I yearned to shake off this thing that was keeping me in fear and shame, frustration and pretence.
At my second attempt to seek help at my health centre, my tearful confession of my paedophilia was met by a cheerful smile from the young doctor. “We can sort this,” he said. “I know a clinic in London that treats people for this, and I’ll refer you to them”. “But will it cure it?” I said, “I’ve read that it’s very difficult to cure, maybe impossible.” He laughed. Yes, he laughed! “Oh yes, it’s curable. They can cure this,” he said.
That was the most important laugh I’ve ever heard in my life.
Only a few weeks later, midsummer 1972, I found myself kicking my heels on top of Hampstead Heath, where I’d gone because I was so early for my assessment interview at the NHS Portman Clinic, down the hill in Swiss Cottage. Looking down over London, enjoying the green and the sky, I thought: “I’m on my way to freedom – to a new life.”
By the end of 1975, three years later, I was indeed free. I walked away from the last of my weekly sessions of psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Portman Clinic knowing that I had shaken off that thing that dogged me. My paedophilia had finally vanished, and left me, still naive, still with so much to learn, but free of any trace of paedophilia. It had gone in the end, almost without my noticing, as I gained sexual confidence with women.
By the end of my time at the Portman, I had a dream. The 1960’s and ‘70’s were a time of dreams. My dream was that by the end of my life every city and large town in Britain would have a clinic like the Portman. Every town would have a place where people who were suffering sexual damage and distress, women and men who had suffered abuse as children, people who had developed paedophilia as a response to sexual damage (as I had) or other trauma, would receive the kind of relational, exploratory, long-term, empathetic therapy that had cured me. It would be available to all.
Paedophiles would be able to make a choice. If they wished to change their sexuality, they could receive therapy to do so, as I had done.
That could have major implications for the fight to eliminate child sexual abuse. If we could encourage the growth of a cohort of ex-paedophiles and ethical (non-abusing) paedophiles, they could model a transformed future for those paedophiles in despair of the possibility of change. They would no longer be caught between the bleak roads to suicide or the sexual abuse of children. They can, of course, take the road of ethical life-long abstention from paedophilic sexual expression. Lots of paedophiles do take that road in the absence of available curative therapies. However, for many ‘exclusive’ paedophiles (that is, those solely attracted to minors, as was my own case) that means a life without the delights of physical sexual intimacy and long term commitment with adult partners, and, paradoxically, without the ordinary pleasure of closeness to children.
Access to widespread analytically-based long-term treatments could be a keystone in a long term strategy to end paedophilia as an unwilled life-long condition, and a keystone in a strategy for ending the cycle of sexual abuse of children.
That should be our societal goal.
We are a very long way from that goal, and, in many ways, things for paedophiles are now worse then they ever were. Paradoxically, the demonisation of paedophilia is far worse than it was fifty years ago, whilst women, lesbian, gay, trans and queer people have seen great progress, and children’s rights are taken far more seriously. Paedophiles are anathemised as never before. They have even become a major new target for fascist activity.
They are non-people.
Indeed, the back-wash from the liberation struggles of other sexually different people risks, on one issue, making the prospects for the rolling out of curative therapeutic services for paedophiles more difficult. That issue is the (welcome) proposed ban on conversion therapy, in its current forms.
If I think about conversion therapy, I think of bullying. I think of practices which invoke fear and judgement, and community or religious forbiddings. I think of group pressure, evil spirits, god’s will, religious textual invocations, or a kind of Maoist voluntarism: “you must not, you must not, you must not be gay / trans / paedophilic” etc.
Yet when I read the two recent Parliamentary bills which propose a conversion therapy ban they do not focus on those issues of manipulation and bullying. In neither ex-MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle’s or Baroness Burt’s bills are the issues of bullying referred to. Instead, the issue is propounded simply in terms of an intention to change someone’s sexual orientation.
Russell-Moyle’s bill seeks to “prohibit practices whose predetermined purpose is to change a person’s sexual orientation or to change a person to or from being transgender”.
The wording of Burt’s bill is worse. It states that “ ‘conversion therapy’ is any practice aimed at a person or group of people which demonstrates an assumption that any sexual orientation or gender identity is inherently preferable to another, and which has the intended purpose of attempting to (…) change a person’s sexual orientation (…) or suppress a person’s expression of sexual orientation (…)”.
I am certain that my own therapist, Mervin Glasser, strongly believed that sexual attraction to adults was “inherently preferable” to attraction to children, and I am certain that he counted my change of sexuality from child-attraction to adult-attraction as a success, not just for me, but for his therapeutic role. It was his best intention, his hopeful “predetermined purpose” in seeking to help me, and he achieved it.
From my life-changing talk with my health centre GP, to my assessment interview, to the end of my treatment I had no doubt that those workers were committed to helping me change my sexuality.
Their commitment to the value of adult-adult sexuality was never judgemental. It was not a command. It was the offer of a helping hand. It was shown in Glasser’s support for every forward move I made in my journey to rid myself of my paedophilia.
Legitimate talking therapies with paedophiles must start from a point where the client and therapist both recognise that adult-to-minor sexual acts are intrinsically damaging to the child.
As to conversion therapy being “any practice (…) which has the intended purpose of attempting to (…) suppress a person’s expression of sexual orientation” (Burt’s wording) this ignores the responsibility, which every one of us has, to protect children against adult “expression of sexual orientation” towards them.
Russell-Moyle’s bill offered the reassurance that: “No offence is committed (…) where a person is (…) facilitating or offering support to a person who is (…) exploring or questioning their sexual orientation”. Yet many, perhaps most paedophiles do not ‘question’ that they have that orientation. They know it for an awful fact. Many or most paedophiles recognise their sexual orientation very early on. In my case I was 15 when I recognised this, and this is fairly typical.
These wordings potentially narrow the field in which clinicians may freely operate.
Even the Tavistock and Portman Foundation Trust, the governing body for the Portman Clinic, felt it appropriate to issue a statement saying that “we believe that talking therapy that has the intention of changing someone’s sexuality (…) should not be allowed, and should be a criminal offence”.
What does that say to myself and other clients from their own Portman Clinic who have left their treatments with their erstwhile paedophilic sexuality changed into ordinary adult-attraction? That our therapists were criminals? That our therapists damaged, not healed us?
The legal definition of ‘sexual orientation’ in both the Equality Act (2010) and the Sentencing Act (2020) is worded to exclude paedophiles. The definition serves to ‘pull up the drawbridge’, so that paedophiles are left outside.
This leaves paedophiles facing double threats.
On the one hand, they are left outside the remit of the conversion therapy legislation in its recent draft forms. Yet paedophiles are as damaged by conversion therapy bullying as are LGBT folk. They suffer greatly and without any redress from such quackery and charlatanism. Such damaging pseudo-treatments leave many of them losing all faith in the prospects of cure.
On the other hand, the unmodulated discourse condemning the notion that sexuality can ever be beneficially changed equally threatens the survival and future prospects for the potentially curative treatments that have so benefitted myself and others.
If paedophilia had been a matter of free and open debate, these issues would have been recognised before the conversion therapy ban was mooted. But paedophilia is taboo. It is a forbidden subject, except as a hugely feared and reviled object of child protection concern. It is a demon to be protected against. It is solely a forensic, criminal matter, not a free-standing mental health or psychiatric concern.
There is no ‘P’ at the end of the lengthening umbrella acronym for the sexually different: LGBTQQIA.
Yet the numbers of paedophiles amongst us seems to be roughly of the same order as the numbers of people who are gay, or on the gay spectrum. It is mooted that somewhere between one and three % of adults are paedophiles, mostly men, but with a rising recognition of women’s paedophilia. The number of people on the paedophile spectrum, that is, those who may be sexually aroused by pre-adolescent minors, as well as adults, is much larger, perhaps somewhere between 15 and 20% of men.
The Portman Clinic still exists, and is widely respected in its field. They’ve taken on new areas of work, and demand for their services has increased exponentially, especially given the huge increase in child abuse pornography. But their service model has not multiplied across our country. They remain a beleaguered ‘island’ in the turbulent seas of the NHS.
With shrinking budgets they’ve had to narrow their referral guidelines and criteria for success. Nowadays they measure success by clients changing to living without offending, not by having rid themselves of their paedophilic fantasies. They do ‘bend the stick’, however, and their young peoples service treats youngsters on the edge of a paedophile sexuality. Change comes easier when you’re young, and those youngsters seem most likely to respond to the curative potentials of the treatment.
But I would not be treated by the Portman Clinic now. They are no longer meant to treat non-offenders.
I am in my ‘70’s. Life, for me, has been on an upward trend for 50 years. I have loved and I do love. Sex has been a huge delight. I enjoy my grand parenting role.
I don’t want to die knowing that the treatment that gave me this good life is so marginalised, so un-regarded that it might at any time become extinct.
I do not want my dream that all paedophiles should be able to choose not to be so, should fade.
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I offer the following links to pieces authored by me or about me, in lieu of being able to
use my real name.
http://www.stopso.org.uk/my-experience-as-a-paedophile-cured-by-nhs-psychoanalysis/
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/feb/25/socialcare.familyandrelationships