It can tend to get a little bit annoying when people spend all their time regaling others with how things could be if... proceeded by a list of sweeping social changes which haven't happened yet. Probably so many people do it because the way ahead to bringing anything even resembling those changes about can seem utterly insurmountable. That's why it's vitally important to discuss how we should be living now, as well as how things should be ideally.

But anyway, on to your suggestions about forging ahead! The most difficult aspect of what you propose in regards to not 'lighting the fuse' is exactly how we'd be able to mount any kind of public advocacy of anything, and somehow avoid being asked questions about sex. It's very true what you say--that mainstream conceptions of child/adult sex exist on the other side of a sort of logical event horizon within which all rationality breaks down--but evidently we're not the only ones who realise this. Our enemies will attempt to force us to take a position on sex, and if we don't, we'll likely be pilloried for avoiding the issue.

And advocating any sort of 'empowerment' of kids probably won't win us many friends. Empowered kids are exactly what this society doesn't want. Most would say it couldn't continue to exist in its current form if kids had any sort of 'power'! Any position we take that calls for kids to be more empowered, or to have more choice or more freedom, will likely be twisted round to us trying to prise them away from their parents and social workers and into our beds, as this neatly avoids the questions about how society treats its young by focussing on the sex issue and hitting the moral panic button.

My current view is that the scope for 'pedo' activism and advocacy is severely limited. Any position we take that involves kids in some way (I crack myself up) is fraught with problems. If the laws of logic break down when adult/child sex is the subject, and we can't avoid accusations that out arguments about kids' place in society are just self-serving attempts to engineer situations where we can have sex with them, then it follows that any statement we make regarding kids will cause a logical singularity.

But what does that leave us with? About the only thing we all agree on here is that we should have the right to associate with each other and discuss things with each other. We do that almost entirely over the 'net because of the dangers of doing so offline. What can we do to change that, and get offline in larger numbers? Any plausible answer to that question would likely be a line worth pursuing.

Advocating the legalisation of CP could be problematic, because if we are constrained in rebutting the argument that CP damages the kids that are involved in it, then it becomes difficult to take account of that 'damage' and yet still claim to care about kids. But it may be a promising line in some respects. Initially, people publicly demanding the right to look at child porn would likely be met with the same intensity of derision as people standing up and demanding the right to producer child porn. If the distinction could be made in enough people's minds between pictures and acts, then that would be a major victory for reason, which may lead on to other things. Shifting the tone of the CP debate away from child sex and onto the distinction between images and actions is one hell of a task though.

The most important line we can pursue in my opinion though is the recognition or our civil rights. This ties in with being able to associate together offline, and to issues such as Kevin Brown's fight to keep his son from being taken prisoner by the state. We need to get the message across that so long as we obey the same laws as everybody else, we should be treated like everybody else. The only laws we should actively seek to challenge our those that don't relate to criminalising interactions with kids. Laws that stop us from associating together are an obvious target. Countless people on SO registers are legally prohibited from associating freely with other SOs, or even having an Internet connection. Those laws seem like a juicy target. How do we make human rights and civil liberties groups feel obliged to challenge those laws? Do we need to organise a challenge from scratch? Is it a waste of time, and should we be focussing on other areas?

That'll do for now. I hate trying to make posts that me sound like i have pretensions of being an 'ideas man' ;p Thanks for sharing your thoughts.