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CHAPTER 3: Paedophile Networks in Australia - Extent and Activities

3.1 Clearly, not all paedophiles operate in groups or networks. The Committee therefore had to consider what proportion do. It examined what sort of paedophile structures have existed in the recent past and what sorts of groups and networks currently operate.
Public Advocacy and Support Groups

3.2 In a number of countries since at least the 1960s paedophile support groups that operate in public have been formed or become prominent. A United States Senate subcommittee in 1986 gave the following description of them. [note #75]

Several organizations whose members openly advocate adult sex with children have been active in the United States and Europe at least since the 1960s. The goals of these groups often are couched in legal and psycho-sexual arguments about 'age of consent' laws and prevailing social attitudes, but at the heart of each group examined by the Subcommittee was a basic obsession with justifying 'consensual' sex with children, regardless of age. In some cases, the groups' leaders were convicted child sex offenders. The groups range from anarchistic, underground clubs whose newsletters and philosophies are haphazard at best to well-organized, politically astute groups that march in parades and openly distribute literature.

Although primarily based in major cities, the American pedophile support groups have members throughout the United States and foreign countries. Subcommittee interviews with former members of these organizations, some of whom were imprisoned for child molestation, indicate that while they ostensibly exist to support such goals as 'sexual liberation for all persons,' these groups serve primarily as contact services for pedophiles. Like most clubs, they bring people of similar interests in touch with each other; in the case of pedophiles, however, the purpose of this contact often is to exchange child pornography and information about meeting children.

3.3 The United States Senate subcommittee also reported: [note #76]

The membership of known pedophile-support groups in the United States is probably less than 2,000. While many of the groups' members have been convicted for child sex crimes, the groups themselves are not involved actively in large-scale criminal conspiracies, such as commercial child pornography rings.

3.4 However, the Senate subcommittee said of the overt, organised paedophile support groups:

Organized pedophile groups pose the most serious threat when they serve as contact and support groups, justifying pedophilia in the minds of their members and reinforcing within child molesters a belief that society, not the pedophile, is misguided. There is no way of knowing how many 'closet' pedophiles, who had only fantasized about molesting children, were moved to act out their fantasies by the encouragement and support of these groups and their newsletters.

It would be a mistake, however, to overemphasize the threat posed by these groups to the exclusion of the more numerous unorganized groups of child molesters that make no pretense of wanting to change legislation or to argue their case in public. The largest and most dangerous child sex rings invariably have proven to be groups of friends and/or pen pals with no real organizational structure. [note #77]

3.5 One of the US support groups, the Rene Guyon Society, achieved a certain notoriety in the 1970s and early 1980s with its slogan of "sex before eight, or else its too late" and its claims of a membership numbering in the thousands. However, the 1986 United States Senate subcommittee report commented that the Society "is widely known by most investigators as a one-man propaganda operation whose membership claims are not credible". [note #78]

3.6 The most prominent of the US groups and the only one to endure has been the North American Man/Boy Love Association. [note #79] It was founded in 1978 and continues to function, apparently within the law. [note #80] It has chapters in several US cities and publishes a regular newsletter which circulates world-wide. An article in 1994 stated: "While the 1,000-member NAMBLA is made up of a number of what are called ephebophiles - people attracted to children in or just emerging from puberty - it also includes a contingent of actual paedophiles, or people who are attracted to prepubescent children (the two factions don't always get along)". [note #81] Currently NAMBLA claims to have "more than one thousand members worldwide". [note #82]as The Committee received no evidence that it conducts activities in Australia, although copies of its newsletter may be received here.

3.7 The most prominent support group in the United Kingdom was the Paedophile Information Exchange, which was founded in 1974. Its membership was apparently never more than a few hundred, [note #83] and it apparently went out of existence in 1984, following the arrest of some of its leading members on child pornography charges. [note #84] The PIE's Bulletin in July 1984, which announced that the group was closing down, is reported to have listed twenty three other paedophile support groups in Europe and the United States that PIE members could contact instead. [note #85] There have been attempts in Britain to establish successors to the PIE, but none have achieved the same notoriety or apparently been successful. [note #86]

3.8 The Netherlands exhibited a tolerant attitude to the activities of paedophile supports groups from at least the 1960s until the mid-1980s, when public attitudes became somewhat less accommodating. There are it seems paedophile support groups currently still active in the Netherlands, and also in several other European countries, including Belgium, Denmark and Germany. [note #87] At least two paedophile support groups with differing aims now operate through the Internet. [note #88]

3.9 Two paedophile support groups achieved some prominence in Australia in the 1980s. The Australian groups shared a number of characteristics with the ones in the United States and Britain referred to above. The membership seems to have been very small and overwhelmingly male. The emphasis was very much on man-boy relationships rather than heterosexual ones. The groups both here and overseas, by portraying themselves as just another oppressed sexual minority, enjoyed a measure of support from the fringes of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, which also became increasingly active in the 1970s. [note #89]
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