I am sexually interested in children.

I’m non-exclusive, so that means I’m sexually interested in young boys but also in adult women.

We have different treatment options for different types of clients. Many of our clients are not at high risk of committing offenses. For these clients, our treatments are focusing most on relationships, self-acceptance, like mental health, living fulfilling lives, having more developed social networks, how to come out in the different parts of their social network.

People with a sexual interest in children who don’t become perpetrators don’t meet these newsworthiness criteria at all. That’s why you pay a lot more attention to what’s going on with a person who has offended than with a person who does not become a perpetrator of child sexual abuse.

People think someone with a sexual interest in children is also committing sexual abuse against children. They don’t know that people with a sexual interest in children are struggling and don’t want to have this interest. That’s probably going to be the case for a long time.

As cognitive behavioral therapists, we think that you cannot control your thoughts or fantasies, actually, but what you can do is learn not to act on those fantasies and that interest. And you can do that by getting certain tools to control, but also by supporting and doing more of the things that you feel good about. So if you do more of that, that is what we call the protective factors.

I’ve never attempted to have any sexual contact with children but I think because the interest was always there, there was a time in my 30s where I started accessing child sexual abuse and exploitation materials online, which is, of course, illegal, and it was wrong, and I shouldn’t have done that. But I got caught in an online sting by the authorities. So they charged me with possession of illegal images. I pled guilty to that charge because I was guilty and that ended my professional career. I was incarcerated for two years and then was on probation for another ten years after that, which I’ve now completed.

Yes, looking back, I have to say that I wasn’t aware of it when I was 12, of course, but there were already situations where I could have noticed it. I was interested in a boy who was six and I was twelve. So that’s also unusual, I would say. You’re usually interested in older people at that age. Especially as a girl, I think it’s more likely to be interested in 16-year-olds or people of the same age, but not 6-year-olds. But I wasn’t quite aware of that at the time.

There are clients that come to us and say they’re really worried about the way they think about things and that they fear one day they’ll lose control.
There are also clients that have committed internet based offending but aren’t worried about committing contact offenses.
And there are clients that have come to us and say that there’s no way they would ever hurt anybody but they don’t know how to live with this interest.

I had experienced interest in younger children and I remember instances of that from when I was as young as about eleven, developing an interest in a boy who was at that point 5 or 6, but not really having a context to understanding those kinds of feelings. That was sort of a pattern that continued throughout my preteen and teen years. Although I was also, at that point, just as strongly interested in people my own age, so I didn’t necessarily know that it was unusual.

From when I was about 13 or 14 years old, I realized I was interested in younger girls. At the same time, I was also interested in my peers. I tried very hard not to deal with it, it was uncomfortable. I tried very hard to present myself as not being interested in children, to not come into contact with them and basically it wasn’t until around 2009 that I started to address it within myself, I went to a sexologist for the first time.

It takes guts, and it takes trust, and it takes all kinds of good human values to decide to come out to someone because if someone does that, it just doesn’t fit the monster narrative. The very act of disclosing doesn’t fit the monster narrative.