Recently, a conservative Twitter account put a non-binary professor at Old Dominion University on blast. It would seem like a familiar story of conservatives trashing someone who is different… Except the professor in question, Dr. Allyn Walker, has been specifically advocating for using the term MAP (“minor-attracted person”) instead of pedophile, because pedophile is unnecessarily stigmatizing to people who have not committed a crime.
As of today, Dr. Walker is on administrative leave for their own safety.
Now, Dr. Walker is someone who is working to prevent crimes against children, and says that child sexual abuse is inexcusable.
Their defenders have pointed out that the backlash against Dr. Walker is transphobic and bigoted. Sure enough, the professor has received a lot of abuse online.
I am willing to bet the threats against them are credible in many cases. Child sexual abuse is a hot button issue — for a good reason, but also because it has been weaponized by conspiracy theorists such as Q followers — and emotions surrounding this topic run high.
The problem, of course, is that in our extremely polarized and frankly poisonous online discourse, there is little room to argue with Dr. Walker’s actual conclusions.
I don’t want to see a professor tarred and feathered and run out of town!
However, I do agree with Mile Salter, professor of criminology at UNSW Sydney, when he reminds us that some stigmas exist for a reason, and this should factor into crime prevention:
A social norms approach to primary prevention *requires* social disapproval of harmful behaviours and impulses.
Nobody has ever argued that we will prevent domestic violence by "de-stigmatising" misogyny, or that the stigmatisation of misogyny stops men from seeking treatment. https://t.co/VidBs7TJFJ
— Michael Salter (@mike_salter) November 22, 2021
I was also stunned when I downloaded Dr. Walker’s PhD thesis after noticing snippets of it floating around online, because it contains a very crude link between child sexual abuse material (CSAM), referred to as “pornography” by Dr. Walker and the sources they cite (this was in 2017, surely the term “child pornography” would have seemed obsolete in an academic discussion like this by then?), and what Dr. Walker believes to be pedophiles’ coping strategies as they attempt to refrain from harming children:
This is from Allyn Walker’s publicly available PhD thesis.
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
— Natalia Antonova 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@NataliaAntonova) November 22, 2021
While some computer-generated content featuring minors exists, the vast majority of the content featuring minors is indeed CSAM. It features real crimes against real children. Furthermore, computer-generated content itself can be considered dangerous — and there is much debate about it in professional circles.
There is also the fact that pedophiles lie:
Third, CSAM does not divert offenders from contact offending.
In a sample of 127 CSAM offenders, only 4.8% disclosed contact offending. After a tactical polygraph was applied, an additional 52.8% disclosed contact offending. https://t.co/qgtoz3V1oX
— Michael Salter (@mike_salter) November 22, 2021
This is why one of my biggest problems with Dr. Walker’s work is their reliance on self-reporting. I am not a criminologist by trade, but I did study criminology as a means of preparing myself for a life in journalism and I’ve written about crime for many years, and continue to do so.
Self-reporting in this field can be notoriously unreliable. It is especially unreliable when coming from people who have a vested interest in de-stigmatization, and it ignores how predation can work in the real world, beyond the bastion of academia or even beyond prison. Simply put, no predator out in the wild wants to be thought of as a predator, and all research on the topic should account for this fact.
Should pedophiles be able to get help? Absolutely. And a doctor, in a clinical setting, should be free to use whatever language they need to use in order to help their patient. Dr. Walker, however, is not a psychiatrist, and we’re not talking about a clinical setting here.
As Dr. Walker put it, “it’s important to use terminology for groups that members of that group want others to use for them.” Except, if we’re going to change the language, not as medical professionals, not in a clinical setting, but as people out in the world, we should stop and think about whom this benefits and in what way.
Well-meaning people who have jumped on the “MAP” bandwagon should hit pause for just a second. It’s hard to do that when Dr. Walker is in real, physical danger, of course. It’s hard to do that when online discourse on the issue is frankly out of control and promoting vigilante justice.
The flipside of that is that some people have knee-jerk reactions when the phrase “marginalized group” is deployed. They assume that members of said group can and should be brought into the mainstream.
Yet some groups are marginalized for a good reason. Pedophiles are one such group, because their urges present a real danger. Helping them control these urges and preventing abuse should not entail removing a necessary and powerful stigma.
If someone thinks they can only achieve sexual gratification by, say, killing a person and raping their corpse, we’ll say that this person needs serious help. We’re not going to call them a CAP, corpse-attracted person, and argue for their dignity.
That’s because there is no dignity in their urge to begin with. Actual coping would be admitting this as fact, and learning to live with it — and getting medical help as needed.
Of course, in order to have a productive discussion about all of this, we have to stop threatening each other online — yes, this includes threats against Dr. Walker — and remember that our common cause should be keeping children safe from harm.
Crime prevention is hard. Yelling on the internet is far too easy.