I am working a number of things out internally. A number of my recent posts have been directed to this effort, including the "Pedophile Under Every Rock (Part 1)".

I am becoming more aware of established trains of thought on celibacy and abstinence. I have recognized that I am a "secular celibate" in addition to being "pedosexual". Such celibates draw a line in terms of sexual behavior they engage in, nearly always on the topic of masturbation. I have learned many celibates nurture the sexual nature of themselves even if they have religious motivation that curtails engaging in any autoerotic act. As a secular celibate, my line allows a free autoerotic life and sexual relationships with adult men or women.

The subject line of this post is an effort to solicit your opinion on the following dogma of the Sex Offender Treatment (SOT) programs I participated in. Part of my "thing" is that I spent seven years developing a really extensive plan for how to live my life given my "pedophilia". This whole deal is pretty much what my life is all about.

Back to the ideology. The SOT staff expressed often that all of the SOT participants had victims to their crimes. We fell into three general groups of offenders based on offense typology. One group were those who had committed an offense relating to sexual contact or inappropriateness with a minor. There were no "pedophiles" in this group in my last SOT program (three years duration and one hundred participants over that time).

The second group were those, primarily Federal, offenders who had agreed to meet a minor for sexual purposes via an internet chat room. This group was divided nearly exclusively based on the gender of the presumed "minor". The male-attracted offenders were ABL's, and the female-attracted offenders were not "pedophile" (and were most similar to the situational child molestors).

The third group were those convicted of child pornography. Most of these offenders were "pedophiles".

I am still researching, and considering joining a SOT organization, but my current conclusion is that most programs operate with similar premises and methods (with the exception of John Hopkins and University of Minnesota). The first task is to break the new participant's "denial". Situational child molestors in particular deny it to the end of the earth, in the face of undeniable evidence, and only cave when the final threat of being kicked out of the program (and thus returned directly to prison) is made. This takes probably 50% of a person's time in a three-year SOT program. It involves admitting, detailing a sexual history of the person, and discussing their history at length to identify and work on "rationalizations" and "cognitive distortions".

There is a middle part where participants usually work on interpersonal skills, healthy adult sexuality, rationalizations and cognitive distortions, life skills, substance abuse issues, personal abuse issues, and victim empathy, which is the topic of this post.

For the second and third group of offenders, victim empathy is a difficult concept in the SOT. The atmosphere of such a program is one of complete and unquestioning obedience. They have life and death power over you. My participation was secured by weekly depoprovera shots and intense oversight of all of my activities. I was required to maintain detailed logs of everyplace I went, the distance, and the times, and also of every sexual thought I had in detail.

If you are a fan of Hunter S. Thompson, there is a point where Raull Duke sees the impending fall-out of one of his lawyer's actions, like giving a waitress a napkin with "Backdoor Beauty ?" written on it. That happened to me in group therapy a lot. You got familiar with it over the years, and you could feel the cringe of "Oh Dear God, Mother of Jesus Here It Comes" that Raull felt when a fairly new group member started down a particular path.

For the second group, it usually started out with "But it was a COP on the other end !!!! How can I talk about the "damage" I caused my "victim" when there wasn't a child even involved !!! Those reading this, if you can answer that question.... well, then you've been through the mind-fuck. I can answer it reasonably and rationally. It's the god damnedess thing you've ever seen in your life.

For the third group, our arguments usually followed the reasoning that since nearly everyone got it from downloading off of USENET, nobody ever knew what the "demand" was - we weren't paying money, or doing anything that would give the appearance that we were fueling the child pornography industry into a "$5 Billion Dollar A Year Industry".

The necessity for SOT staff of arguing with a bunch of pedophiles on that issue is in large part why they find us so unamenable to treatment. It doesn't make any sense to most early inductees. However, at some point you come to realize the logic of your action having caused actual and direct damage to the victims portrayed in the pornography, regardless of the fact that they will never have any awareness at all that you saw it, or that anyone saw it for that matter.

We were always accused of failing at "empathy". That is the universal "pedophile" experience in SOT.

This is properly termed the cognitive-behavioral approach to SOT.

The final element of the SOT programs is the development of a written and detailed "relapse prevention plan", designed to reduce the risk of the individual acting sexually with children. It is developed throughout the period of time one spends in SOT - for me, five years. At the end of the program one writes it, and goes through a peer and staff review of it for several months in individual and group therapy. Mine involved joint counseling sessions with my wife for her input into that plan.

Obviously SOT to me is a big deal and its where a lot of my issues are focused. The mental health profession has a responsibility to present a workable plan for those of us who are either affected due to SOT participation or seek out mental health treatment individually. Their plan affects all of us because it is the intellectual framework we are understood within in society. The plan they are promoting - and affecting the lives of tens of thousands of pedophiles with - is unworkable. In particular, intellectual dishonesties aside, it fails in the following premises:

1. That an autoerotic life has increases the risk of a "pedophile" molesting a child

2. That contact with children increases the risk of a "pedophile" molesting a child

Sincerely,

Kevin Brown