Encountering Hatred in Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Work

One step in preventing child sexual abuse is to understand better adults who are sexually attracted to children but have never sexually offended a child.

Source: rudamese / PxHere

A university researcher rarely writes a content analysis of the hate mail they’ve received in response to their work.

But it isn’t very often that academics have to contend with the torrent of response—much of it threatening and vile, almost all of it ill-informed—that Allyn Walker encountered after writing a book about how to prevent child sexual abuse by better understanding adults who are sexually attracted to children.

The roots of the story go back to June 2021. That was when Walker, now a research associate faculty member at the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, a program of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, published their research in A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. The study dealt with 42 people who were primarily attracted to children but had never engaged in sexual offending against a child.

In a media interview to promote their book, Walker talked about their own identity as a queer and trans scholar. Within days, the story was picked up by an anti-trans website. “From there, it hit Twitter, and it just exploded,” Walker said. “It was all over social media, all over various news sites,” culminating in coverage on some of the country’s most heavily consumed media.

Walker’s article, Transphobic Discourse and Moral Panic Convergence: A Content Analysis of My Hate Mail in Criminology, traces what happened next:

“It was so frustrating seeing news that painted me as someone who was just interested in ‘pedophiles’ feelings’—that was the quote that a lot of people read. [These news stories] didn’t talk about the difference between ‘pedophiles’ and people who commit offences.”

The point of Walker’s research is to understand that many adults who are attracted to children never offend and often need help to contend with their feelings and prevent potential harm in the future.

Because the media reports left out this key information, Walker notes, those media outlets "basically ended up telling their readership that I was concerned for the feelings of people who committed sex offenses and that I was encouraging sexual abuse. And all of these news stories also emphasized the fact that I’m trans. So I was sent a ton of hate mail.”

It was a given that most of the incoming mail would misunderstand Walker’s work. But that was just part of what motivated their content analysis. Walker added:

“The vast majority of my hate mail ended up being about me as a trans person and a queer person. The message sent to the general public was that my work was immoral, it was questionable, and not that I was being targeted based on being a trans person who does controversial work that helps prevent child sexual abuse. But seeing so much abject hate about trans people and queer people? That really wasn’t being talked about.”

In the end, Walker said, one of their motivations in writing the content analysis was to “hold a mirror back up to my so-called critics. Unless you really understand how the media tend to depict trans people as deceptive and evil, unless you’re part of the community and understand that nuance, you’re going to miss how the news reporting was leading people to draw this conclusion.”

Even nominally progressive media were hesitant to challenge that narrative, Walker added, “because they don’t necessarily know how to write about this in a way that won’t be misrepresented, and they didn’t want people to think they were advocating for child sexual abuse.”

Walker said they found a lot of hope in the positive messages that came in alongside the hate mail, all of it from people who’d understood Walker’s message that child sexual abuse prevention is possible: “There were people who had read my book, who are attracted to children, and said it helped them understand that they don’t have to commit an offense; that they’re not destined to harm a child. I’ve also heard from family members of people who are attracted to children who said I had helped them understand their loved ones better.”

Walker said they’d also received poignant messages from people who were victimized as children: “One of them said they wished the person who had harmed them had been able to get help and support before they committed the abuse because if they had, this may not have happened. Being able to hear those messages has really been the silver lining in this whole experience.”

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But that positive reaction contrasted sharply with the “really graphic, violent responses” from people who were less concerned about keeping children safe and more absorbed in their transphobia: “Those emails weren’t about wanting to prevent abuse. It was really about wanting to see me as a trans person punished. When we have this kind of punishment mindset, we’re not thinking properly about how to prevent harm.”

For Walker, the experience drove home the importance of peer support they’ve received since arriving at the Moore Center in 2022: “Over time, I do think we’re going to see less hate and more understanding. But we’re always going to need support for marginalized populations: queer and trans folks, and of course people of color, people with disabilities, and other groups that face discrimination.”

This means, they said, “In academia and beyond, we need more allies and folks who understand that if we’re attacked ‘for our research,’ it’s probably not just about our research. And that means we might need some extra support.”