A survey has been published which offers a detailed breakdown of members of The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a pro-paedophilia activist group in the UK established in the 1970s.
The organisation received government funding, and counted several political figures as members. It campaigned under the pretext that it hoped to liberate children’s sexuality and often lobbied the government to reduce or remove the age of consent completely. Despite its campaigns, which also conflated underage sex with gay rights, PIE was widely believed to be nothing more than an attempt at facilitating adult men wanting to have sex with children. PIE officially disbanded in the 1980s.
The survey itself can be found on BoyWiki, a site for male-oriented paedophiles, which aims to encourage paedophiles to work together to record paedophilia’s history and culture.
The questionnaire, which has been uploaded onto the French BoyWiki site, was produced by PIE, and ran from 1975 to 1976, over a period of eight months, in an attempt to gather information about its members.
The total number of members as at 29th March 1976, was 127, with 114 of those being from the UK. Of those, 96% were paedophiles, with 87% being from the UK.
Whilst the majority of members were male homosexual paedophiles, information about two female paedophiles, recorded only as paedophile A and paedophile B, can be seen inside the survey. The survey tells us that neither woman was married at the time, did not have any children and were aged 22, and 26 respectively. Paedophile A appears to have been attracted to children aged between 5-9 years. Paedophile B, the survey tells us, was unsure about her preferences at the time. Both confirmed that their first sexual experiences were with women.
The survey reveals a startling fact about PIE’s female paedophiles: Much like PIE’s male members, both women say that their first sexual experience took place while they were small children.
There is a lot of detailed information inside the survey, from members’ marital status, precise sexual orientation, age groups which are most attractive to PIE’s paedophile membership and a detailed report below the survey itself, written by Keith Hose, who was one of PIE’s chairmen. The report offers general conclusions about the data, but also tries to analyse why its female membership is so low. This is an extract from the report:
“The low number of females in our sample needs more explaining. Our advertising was limited to predominantly male homosexual publications at first. But as we became more widely known it could be expected that the number of female paedophiles in our sample would increase with the number of male heterosexual paedophiles. This has not happened.
One possible reason is that we are an organisation run by males. It is well known by those in the Women’s Liberation Movement that women tend not to join organisations run by men, especially when discussion of intimate aspects of the personality is involved. While this may be part of the explanation of the low number of female paedophiles in the survey, the major reason may be concerned with definition. The word paedophilia may be more applicable to an adult male, since it is used to describe a sexual attraction toward children. Sexual feelings and acts have been defined in various different ways from culture to culture. Acts such as two men embracing are defined to be sexual in some cultures but not in others.
In our culture such an act is defined as sexual for men but not for women. It is the difference in the treatment of the sexuality of the sexes which makes comparison difficult. The role of woman in our society allows her far more tactile contact with children than the role of man allows him. Some contact between a man and a child would be regarded as sexual while the same contact between a woman and a child would not be regarded as such. There is even a tendency to deny the full sexual nature of acts which do not involve heterosexual coitus. Therefore, it is easy to see that a man could be more easily defined to be paedophile by either himself or others than a woman.”
Many thanks to Maggie Tuttle for sharing this survey with us.