#srp3

By way of introduction, I suppose you can call me Borgesius - bore-GAY-jes. It's the most recent of a number of names. I'd like to be anonymous, but I also like to keep the number of names down so if/when I run into people I know I can give a shoutout. They call me a childlover (CL). I suppose it may be the best we can do at the moment. I wish there were a better term; 'pedophile' is, excuse the expression, a mouthful. One of those words you feel like you'll choke on if you're not careful.

Let's say this is a cautionary tale. I see spaces opening up on tumblr, led by the way-cool SRP, and it's exciting of course because one person has the courage to start a blog and then suddenly lots of people are doing it. The possibilities seem limitless in a way; maybe tumblr will be a new base of operations.

Truth is though, I hold out very little hope in the long term for any open-web space other than boychat (BC) and maybe, maybe girlchat (GC). Don't misunderstand me. Those are possibly my two least favorite websites. But they've been around for a grip, in fact BC is likely one of the longest-running web forums of any kind, moving to the web from a Usenet group in 1997. It seems to have been on lockdown mode for a decade or so, with carefully constructed levels of authority and an impressively opaque administration. Nobody knows who the admin/admins are, as far as I can tell. If the stories I hear are true, that happened for a reason. Successive administrators landed themselves in prison rather publicly. Story for another day, maybe.

Anyway. This isn't the first time I've seen pedophile spaces spring up on major platforms. The first was probably Wikipedia. A canny target for obvious reasons, pedophile activists were editing it by 2004 or 2005, for their own various purposes. This led to some controversy, and in the end (2006 iirc) Jimmy Wales came down from on high to announce that self-avowed pedophiles wouldn't be allowed to edit Wikipedia. This is still a rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Child_protection), and it led to some bitter resentment in a community known for holding grudges – just ask any old-timer what he thinks of the gay rights movement. To this day, text at the very bottom of BC reads “ʇous ʎǝʞuop sʞɔns sǝlɐʍ oqɯıɾ”, check it out if you don't believe me.

Concurrently, though starting a bit later, pedo blogs started popping up on blogger, google's blog platform. I remember the first girllove (GL) blog, run by an unassuming and very kind man who reminds me quite a bit of SRP. I'd give you the URL, but within a couple years it was shut down for terms of use violation, familiar story for most of us, along with all the others that cropped up around it. Some came to be quite well-known in their time, particularly the boylover Rookiee who was active on blogspot and wikipedia, and who also ran a boylove (BL) podcast called Pedologues for around a year.

This was kind of the heyday of open-web pedophile sites. There were quite a number of them in 2006, there was even a BL internet radio station with a very active IRC channel I visited once or twice. These sites passed largely unnoticed for a little while, but people in the CL community liked to do activism and public relations for the sake of pedophiles everywhere and eventually a backlash organized itself in the form of a group called alt.hackers.malicious, led by a guy called rikijo.

At the time, there wasn't a name for when you track someone down on the Internet and post their personal information in public. These days, I guess you call it doxxing. That was AHM's purpose, under the pretense of outing NAMbLA members, which is neither the first nor likely the last time someone so vastly overestimated the reach of that particular organization. People laughed, at first. No big deal. “We” have the protection of free speech on our side, and as long as “we” are sure our identities are secure it's no problem.

This was a miscalculation. Turns out that 1) Internet pedophiles aren't always too great at keeping their personae separate, 2) very few content hosts were willing to take any sort of heat on behalf of pedophiles they had hitherto been largely unaware of, and 3) not everyone was as responsible as they claimed to be. Google rolled over and closed most of the prominent blogspots, Pedologues was no more, and over the next few years tons of people were outed. Most of the nicks that had been linked to real life names went silent, along with plenty of others that hadn't. The cops started paying attention too, and they arrested a large number of admins and users on various boards. One of them, boylover.net, they arrested the admin and took over his account, managing to ensnare a ton of people who were trading child porn through the private message system. Because of course they were. We're not talking about your visions of moral fortitude here.

Eventually the first wave of doxxes died down, alt.hackers.malicious went quiet, and a couple years later a second round took its place, this time associated with our friends over at P-J, the vigilantes who worked with NBC for To Catch a Predator. I'm not a superstitious man, but given the number of friends whose names are on file with them, I'd rather not say the organization's full name. These folks got ahold of the data alt.hackers.malicious had mined, possibly through personal association but more likely just by aggregating what was publicly available, and added a number of their own discoveries to the list. There's a wiki out there full of these names, doing everything it can to pop up on a google search for a given person. If there was a file on me, I never saw it. I count myself lucky. I was a fragile, neurotic boy of about 16 when I witnessed all this. It shattered my nerves and what faith I had in fellow CLs, and it could easily have ruined my life.

These days, the old names are all silent and the old sites are all down. Except for GC, BC and its affiliates, and one or two other small and relatively inactive sites, the English web is as quiet as it's ever been when it comes to pedophiles. People keep a pretty low profile on those sites now, usually sticking to the forum or chatroom rather than venturing out onto other content hosts to spread their message. Lesson learned. Names come and go but it's not worth doxxing anybody when nobody's got the sack to pull the kind of PR stunts they did in the old days. Everyone keeps their head down. A decent amount of the old traffic has moved to “deep web” services which are nearly impossible to take down and of course swamped with child porn. A job well done for the vigilantes I suppose.

What I worry about is groups from places like, oh let's say social justice spheres, gearing back up for another round in light of advocates like SRP. If you don't believe me when I say social justice, look at the most violent reactions you get. Don't get me wrong. I believe that the struggle against patriarchy and rape culture is part and parcel of any liberation movement worth the name. Many feminists, including at least one good friend of mine, show great understanding towards pedophiles. HOWEVER. Self-avowed feminists are among the most prominent, and most vehement, voices opposed to pedophiles. The movement that reified the term 'pedophilia' and turned it into a container for our greatest social ills was led in large part by a section of the women's liberation movement.

It may not be necessary for the 'antis' to start outing people, given tumblr's proclivity for mashing the nuke button, and I understand that most people around here are fairly careful with their identities. I just gotta warn you. Not all, maybe not even most of the old crew advocated abolishing age of consent laws (to be clear, I do not). If you're gonna go out there and make the same kind of arguments in public as those folks used to, and kick up a big ruckus, more power to you. I still believe public awareness is our only hope for change. But you're tempting a kind of wrath the brunt of which you do not want to bear. Tread lightly.