Charity Commission please note
“Gender research” scholar resigns from Mermaids under a garish cloud:
A trustee of the transgender charity Mermaids resigned last night after it emerged that he had spoken at a conference hosted by an organisation that promotes services to paedophiles.
Aka child rapists.
Dr Jacob Breslow was a graduate student in gender research at the London School of Economics when he gave a presentation at an event for the US-based B4U-ACT in 2011.
Breslow’s presentation appeared to be a critique of how paedophiles were understood.
You mean as child rapists?
He’s now an assistant professor of gender and sexuality at LSE. He became a trustee of Mermaids in July.
After The Times approached Mermaids about Breslow’s talk, he tendered his resignation as a trustee. Mermaids said that it was unaware of his appearance at the conference until contacted by this newspaper. B4U-ACT calls itself a “unique collaborative effort between minor-attracted people and mental health professionals to promote communication and understanding between the two groups”.
Starting by translating child-rapist and child-molester to “minor-attracted person.” The issue of course isn’t “attraction” but physical acts.
Its “scientific symposium” was hosted in Baltimore, Maryland, in August 2011, to address concerns about the way paedophilia was addressed in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a publication by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for the classification of mental disorders.
Breslow’s presentation was titled Sexual Alignment: Critiquing Sexual Orientation, The Pedophile, and the DSM V. A brief extract of the presentation, still available online, said: “This paper works through the DSM’s struggle to understand ‘the pedophile’ through an investigation of the highly questionable and deeply assumptive clinical, empirical and theoretical studies it cites.”
“Assumptive”?
Last week Mermaids became the subject of a Charity Commission investigation following claims that it was handing out chest binders to children as young as 13 and 14.
Age is a construction. Open up your minds. We’re all the same age underneath. Infants like sex too you know.
H/t Mostly Cloudy
stupid cunts
I’m getting horrible whiffs of a NAMBLA / Paedophile Information Exchange type off Breslow’s ghastly “research”.
You’re not even wrong, Ophelia Benson. You are a joke and, on principle, I will never read another copy of the ‘philosophers’ magazine.
fuck you. if you can’t take criticism, you’re a fundamentalist.
The point of the term “minor-attracted person” is to distinguish between people who experience the attraction and child molesters. The idea is that they can’t control the fact that they experience the attraction itself, but they can control their actions.
From there, the theory goes, children will be safer if “MAPs” can access mental health services without fear of stigma if they’re honest about their feelings.
From B4U-ACT’s “Principles and Perspectives of Practice” on their website:
https://www.b4uact.org/about-us/statements-and-policies-2/principles-and-perspectives-of-practice/
Dear Miss Benson,
the core of your ignorance is centred on two false assumptions. In correction, the facts are:
– paedophilia is not cognate with child sexual abuse.
– initiatives like b4u-act are explicitly constituted with the goal of preventing sexual abuse.
You really need to keep up, because this post is not only offensive and harmful, it’s irrational.
I’m not including my email address because I don’t trust you.
Vsddvsdvxc
Clearly you’re a child of the Enlightenment, Miss Benson.
Will you be quoting scripture in your next blog post?
I seem to have touched a nerve…
I don’t know how often you get comments of this sort (since I imagine you mostly remove the run of the mill ones), but it is remarkable that writing about this person’s history seems to have inspired this set.
Very very rarely, in fact I’d say never in recent years. Back when Elevatorgate was a new thing there was some of it, but not lately. Tons of spam, but none of this kind of thing.
Yeeeeesh. Hey, everybody, FOR THE RECORD, I wrote my comment BEFORE the Alphabet People’s comments posted!
‘Scuse me, I have to take a shower now.
I doubt God hates women, Miss Benson, but I’m 100% sure She hates you.
Fascism and bigotry are so unbecoming on the ‘fairer’ sex.
Lo, against the odds, alphabet person’s comments are published!
Thank you, and I retract my last comment. I’m sure God loves you as much as anyone, Miss Benson. :-)
Ps: smell ya later, Lady Mondegreen.
Pps:
I apologise for my earlier comments. I was angered and hurt by this post, and responded in kind. I regret it now.
Also, Lady Mondegreen’s summary of b4u-act’s mission is pretty good.
Although b4u-act is a private organisation, a number of similar initiatives are being run, with government funding, from universities and other medical research institutes. Some are modelled on Germany’s Prevention Project Dunkelfeld* but a less pathologising approach is emerging, in which stigma is identified as a key factor raising the risk of child sexual abuse by paedophiles.
Most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by persons with little or no preferential sexual interest in children.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_Project_Dunkelfeld
Lady M @ 11 – can confirm! They were all held for first-time comment approval. I was doing other things for a few hours so let them all through at once.
I find it interesting what people feel entitled to say. (Up to a point. I won’t keep approving the dribbles forever.)
Ba hahaha! Pedo tears are funnier than pedo bears.
LM @ 5
Regardless of the Alphabet Peoples, I think your comment is a good one, in making a point about the use of the term “minor attracted people”, rather than about Breslow specifically. I was trying to think how to phrase the point without sounding like a jerk, and then you took care of it admirably.
The Reduxx piece says this:
And that’s a big problem, isn’t it? There is no organization seeking to help minor-attracted people access therapy while also working to safeguard children. B4U-Act wants to present as one, but it isn’t.
@ 14 – no you didn’t “respond in kind.” You responded very differently. Trying to make friends at this point is hopeless: I have an ironclad policy against getting friendly with people who open with “stupid cunts.”
I do hope alphabet person isn’t under a Court order forbidding access to an internet capable device.
Can reassure xir is not.
aaaaaa, I can understand the desire to separate the state of feeling attraction to minors from the act. A person can choose their actions, but cannot choose what arouses them. If Breslow’s goal is destigmatising the state of attraction to minors and only that, I would join you in defending him. The problem is, he isn’t arguing only for that. As is documented in the links and comments in this post and the next, he is also arguing for accepting actual sexual contact with minors.