I've let my parents think I might be gay.
I don't think they could really handle it.
My sister said, "Well yeah when you were teenager
we kinda thought you always had little girls hanging around you.
But we figured you'd outgrow it."
Well I didn't outgrow it.
I'm attracted to young girls between the ages of 6 and 11.
You're afraid of yourself, you're afraid of people around you, what they might be saying.
They're not like us. They're not in our communities, they're not in our families,
they're not in our schools.
Where of course the reality is they are us.
They are in our communities, they are in our schools
You do think that maybe you are
horrible.
Maybe you are bound to offend.
Everybody's saying it, surely it must be true.
I work in the health industry,
I volunteer,
I don't annoy my neighbours with loud music.
By all accounts I'm a model citizen really.
Just with one flaw.
My name's James and I'm 27 years old
I'm attracted to young girls.
Specifically to girls between the ages of 6 and 11
with the peaks of that being 7 to 9.
That's kind of the sweet spot.
It's kind of a misconception that all paedophiles are attracted to all children,
which simply isn't the case.
Just like there's attractive women and not attractive women,
there's attractive children and not attractive children.
A virtuous paedophile is a paedophile
whose chosen not to act.
They recognise that
that they can hurt people
and so they make a moral decision simply to not.
Have you ever acted upon your attractions?
No.
-Never physically, never with any child? -No.
What about child pornography?
No.
-Never? -Never.
I would much have sooner killed myself,
and have attempted to do so
a few times.
I had a long period of mental illness,
depression, extreme paranoia.
Just keeping it under wraps was quite hard.
The research is increasingly showing that
if one has paedophilia and also lacks impulse control
that can be something of a dangerous combination.
I'm Dr Kelly Richards and I'm a criminologist at QUT, specialising in sexual offending against children.
Studies show that somewhere between one and five percent of adult males will have pedophilic interest.
A much higher proportion, closer to one in five will respond sexually to young children.
So this is not an insubstantial number of people.
There are a billion people on this planet who have some level of sexual attraction to children.
My name is Gary,
I've been sexually attracted to little girls for the past 60 years,
but I choose not to act on it.
The 25 years of my first marriage,
my paedophilia simmered in the background.
I knew that I was attracted to kids
but there's a big difference between attraction and action.
My faith has been very helpful because I do believe that God can help me to make the right choices.
Y'know just praying about it, is good.
Lord help me not to abuse a child, but having a plan, how to prevent it from happening.
Not being alone with a little girl for example,
that's an important part of it too.
We have between us 6 children, so
Gary has 3 children I have 3 children.
We'd been married 12 years.
He was energetic, he was very kind.
His children liked him, that was an important thing to me.
His children liked him and he liked his children.
To me frankly, being around groups of children is quite therapeutic.
It makes it less likely that I would act on it.
It's kinda like being in prison for 20 years and never having sex.
You come out, you're desperate.
So you might go have sex with almost anybody.
"Yes, I’m attracted to little girls, but I’m trying not to abuse them."
"You believe that he’s never acted on the urges."
"I’ve seen no evidence of it."
"I did not do that."
"I did not do what she said."
"I’m not making this up. It’s not
fake."
"I’m sorry you’re struggling Jasmine."
"You know I care a lot about you."
"You give no validity to what she’s saying?"
No, I did not rape Jasmine Holden,
and I have not raped any
girl.
I think if he'd done something like that
he wouldn't be coming and just declaring that he had been sexually,
that he was sexually attracted to young girls.
So I have to believe it but I have no, I have no proof.
Dr Phil wanted to have us on the show,
it created a lot of flack in our community,
one of our neighbours threatened to mow us down with his sixteen wheeler,
people were threatening to kill us,
our church banished us immediately,
dismissed based solely on my sexual orientation.
“If I had my way, this is on the record, I would chop their nuts off.”
“An these cunning predators use their anonymity as weapon.”
"Rolf Harris has been found guilty of indecently assaulting a 7 or 8 year old autograph hunter."
The public revile this group of people.
They typically don't understand that there are people who have pedophilia but who don't act on that.
So there's a lack of understanding of that distinction,
the public tend to sort of tar them all with the same brush whether they have offended or not.
This really started when I was 13.
I mean you spend so long being fed the idea that
paedophiles are horrible, horrible monsters and
then to realise you're one of them,
you feel like you're not human anymore.
A kid of 13 or 14 recognises they're sexually attracted to a child
where can they go?
They can't put their hand up in class and say excuse me I think I'm a paedophile
because of what would happen to them.
Can they tell their parents?
I've let my parents think I might be gay
I don't think they could really handle it.
My mum would probably be supportive of me,
but I know the idea would eat at her.
It causes me grief that I've lost my relationship,
close relationship with my son
and most of my other family members.
Does it help children
for you folks to be so hateful to people with paedophilia
and to push it under the rug, where they can't get help?
It actually causes more child abuse.
We need I think to move away from this narrative that they are
somewhere else or they should be somewhere else.
And accept the reality that they are here
and that as a community we should respond in a rational,
sensible way to minimise the risk that they pose.
It's easy to demonise the people you see on the news,
who've committed an offence.
But I'd ask them, what if it was their brother, their son.
It's an attraction.
There's nothing you can do about it.
You don't choose it.
You'd be mad to choose it.