A study on reducing stigma towards paedophiles being carried out by academics from Victoria University of Wellington has sparked outrage in New Zealand.
Posters using the far-left term “people with a sexual attraction to children” instead of “paedophiles” and seeking participants in the study were spotted on campus this week, and state that the project was approved the university’s ethics committee.
The study titled “Testing the Effect of Educational Modules for Reducing Stigma Towards People with a Sexual Attraction to Children” is supervised by Associate Professor Hedwig Eisenbarth with Courtney Spiller, and involves two surveys and four educational modules.
“This study aims to explore the effect of educational modules on stigma towards people with a sexual attraction to children,” the study description states.
“Educational modules that discuss myths and stereotypes around this attraction and those who experience it have been designed based on lived experience data and empirical literature, and also reviewed by an online group for non-offending paedophiles.
“Reducing stigma towards people with a sexual attraction to children is important for mitigating the negative consequences of stigma (damaging mental health, reducing help-seeking behaviours) and ideally reducing the risk of sexual offending from this group (through enhanced wellbeing and help-seeking).”
But New Zealanders responded to the posters with anger and disbelief, with many criticising the use of the term “people with a sexual attraction to children”, while others objected to efforts to reduce stigma against child sex offenders.
Family First NZ CEO Bob McCoskrie wrote on X: “Don’t allow the culture to play linguistic gymnastics with the term ‘paedophile’.
“The stigma is there for a good reason. It’s a very healthy stigma which hopefully redirects the offender. But more importantly, the stigma is there to try and protect the victim. That’s where our focus should be.”
“Paedophilia is the rape of children,” another New Zealander wrote. “Bring back capital punishment”.
“How was this study approved by the University’s Ethics Committee?” asked a third.
Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson also responded to a post about the study, writing: “Petersonacademy.com fixes this”.
Mr McCoskrie also pointed out that the phrase “people with a sexual attraction to children” was similar to the controversial term “minor attracted person”, which has also been used by university academics seeking to normalise paedophilia and reframe it as a sexual preference.
“There is an effort to normalise sexual attraction to children. As you can imagine, this is a recipe for disaster. The movement is even going so far as to claim that paedophilia should be understood as a sexual orientation. Their goal is to remove the stigma from ‘non-offending’ paedophiles,” he wrote.
University of New South Wales Professor of Criminology Michael Salter wrote in February: “The literature on ‘minor attracted people’ doesn’t hesitate to recruit from websites and forums with a pro-abuse agenda, and then publish papers about how ‘MAPs’ suffer from ‘stigma’ and they need to ‘come out’ and be accepted by family and friends.
“The myopic focus of ‘MAPs’ scholarship on the supposed ‘stigma’ suffered by paedophiles has close parallels with the cognitive distortions of child sex offenders that abuse is not harmful, but instead it is the socially imposed stigma/shame of abuse that harms children.”
Dr Eisenbarth lists “she/her pronouns” on her university information page, and recently co-authored an article for Newsroom titled “Can psychopaths be cured?” using a picture of former US president Donald Trump as the main image.
Noticer News contacted the researchers for comment but did not receive a response.
