My High-School Advisor was Arrested for Child Pornography
It is hard to stop problems that are so painful to think about.
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a newsletter. Owen Muir, M.D., writes it. This is a challenging article to attempt to write. This article is about child sexual abuse and a person in my life. This person didn’t abuse me or anyone else directly, as far as I or the FBI knows. I am not generally a trigger-warning enthusiast — this is an exception: Child Sexual Abuse Will Be Addressed. I began writing this before the impending nightmare of generative AI trained on abused children was uncovered by the press. Now it has been.
One of my most important advocates in high school was my advisor. High school sucked. My school had advisors. They were tasked with writing reports about us every so often. Here is a quote from one of mine:
I only hope that Owen is getting what he wants out of his life. He does look like someone in deep thought many times. He seems to be asking himself many questions and he seems to be finding his way around, socially. He still needs a helping hand from time to time, as we all do.
—My High School Advisor, 1996
This person, to the shock of almost no one in retrospect, was arrested for being a child pornography-collecting pedophile. I will define that term:
An adult with a sexual preference for prepubescent children (typically 13 or under) of either sex, though some prefer one gender. The term can be used to describe anyone who fantasizes about, is sexually aroused by, or experiences urges toward children, whether or not they act on them.
The rate of pedophilia in the population is about 4%1. To put this in context, here is the list of most popular names of kids in 2022:
The prevalence of pedophilia is a staggering number. That list of baby names was also a way to introduce the impact of the pedophiles—and others—who offend. It’s also notable that child sexual abuse (CSA) is also horrifyingly common:
In the United States, the National Center for Victims of Crimes, as reported in Finkelhor et al. (2009), states that one in 5 girls and one in 20 boys are victims of CSA (Crimes, 2012).
I’m using baby name frequencies to make an unsettling point about the scale of this problem: if we include 100% of all girl’s names on the top 20 list from 2022, we only hit just over 10% of girls. 100% of the top 20 named girls would have to be abused, along with another 10% of all girls, to get to the prevalence of CSA in girls in the US. To include boys abused, the numbers add up to the equivalent of every:
Noah
Oliver
James
Elijah
William
Henry
Lucas
Every boy with those names born this past year is approximately 4.8893%, close to 1/20th (5%). Unsettlingly, only 50% of the CSA is perpetrated by pedophiles:
The other 50% of individuals that have abused children are those who do so without a sexual attraction to children2
Thus, even if we could, by magic, round up all pedophiles? It’s only half of the people sexually abusing children. Not having children abused is very much the goal.
As a child and adult psychiatrist, the experiences of children who suffer from CSA are related to me over and over again.
Today? It means telling the story of a pedophile in my life—a man who was, in my experience, more supportive than any adult outside my immediate family. At the same time, his use of child pornography was part of a horrifying market for abusing children. It is nightmarish to a degree we’d all rather not think about—but must, with some seriousness, or nothing changes.
Mr. D was an avid consumer of child pornography. I will include some publicly available facts to frame the conversation. Early on a Tuesday morning of December 4th, 2004, Mr. D. was arrested by the FBI:
The criminal complaint alleges that on Oct. 24 and 27, a law enforcement agent logged into a publicly available Internet file-sharing program and downloaded images of child pornography from shared directories maintained by Mr. D., according to the release.
And after the FBI showed up, my former teacher:
"He admitted to downloading child pornography images from other users, as well as offering images for other users to download," (according to the affidavit).
He was eventually tried and convicted. He wasn’t a “casual user;” he had over 4000 images he turned over to the FBI. He was a teacher for 41 years, and for about the same amount of time, since 1972, he was viewing and sharing child pornography at night. The most important fact, such as it is, is that as far as the FBI could tell—and my teacher was forthcoming in court records—
[his] attorney said in his sentencing memorandum that [D.] never touched any children.
The ick factor here is difficult to…anything. Child pornography—before the era of Generative AI3—absolutely, positively needed to involve the sexual exploitation of children to create it. As we have all now learned, our Image Generation Models have trained on data sets featuring abused children:
Criminals are using older versions of AI models and fine-tuning them to create illegal material of children. This involves feeding a model existing abuse images or photos of people’s faces, allowing the AI to create images of specific individuals. “We’re seeing fine-tuned models which create new imagery of existing victims,” Sexton says. Perpetrators are “exchanging hundreds of new images of existing victims” and making requests about individuals, he says. Some threads on dark web forums share sets of faces of victims, the research says, and one thread was called: “Photo Resources for AI and Deepfaking Specific Girls.”
It's a source of tremendous suffering for children exploited—and now can be used to hurt more people than ever, thanks to the acceleration of technology. Adults who purchased, shared, bought, and sold this content contribute to horrific crimes and immeasurable trauma—the following is from the FBI. It is at the heart of my question in this article:
“It is difficult to comprehend how the defendant could be charged with guiding and educating children by day and then derive sexual gratification by viewing pornographic pictures of children at night.” Miller wrote.
It is difficult to comprehend. This is also what happened. Most everyone won’t want to confront this revolting reality. However, some adults are sexually attracted to children. A smaller cohort will do what my teacher did— use child porn in their homes, perhaps interacting with other people aroused by images of children. A smaller number will offend with children in real life. The volume of children exposed to sexual abuse is not small—
“To be clear, the government has no evidence the defendant had sexual contact with any child. The defendant’s profession and his focus on child pornography, however, are plainly disturbing.”
Most pedophiles are male humans. There are rare exceptions. They also share several variations compared to non-pedophiles4:
Sexually offending and incarcerated pedophilic men show increased rates of left-handedness, have shorter stature, experience twice as many head injuries before the age of 13 as normal counterparts, and seem to have lower intelligence than teleiophilic men (Blanchard et al., 2003, 2007; Cantor et al., 2004, 2005, 2007).
There are differences in the brains of pedophiles:
Noticeable structural and functional differences in size and function of the left and right dorsolateral prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex have been found in pedophilic men with a history of contact sexual offenses against children (Burns and Swerdlow, 2003; Schiffer et al., 2007, 2008a,b; Poeppl et al., 2011).
Further:
The temporal-limbic theory tries to explain pedophilia through structural and functional differences in the temporal lobes, thus focusing on the misattributed emotional salience and valence toward children. Several case studies highlight temporal and amygdalar lesions or functional activation differences that might contribute to the development of a pedophilic sexual preference (Cohen et al., 2002; Joyal et al., 2007; Schiltz et al., 2007; Walter et al., 2007; Sartorius et al., 2008).
Human behavior is controlled by brains.
There are reasons brains do the things they do— we can attempt to understand those mechanisms with science. I will return to this point. Pedophiles have an internal experience—It is “difficult to comprehend.” They have impulses that are so off-putting to most of us that we can’t stand to think of them.
[Mr. D] apologized in a written statement to the court.
“What I did was inexcusable, tremendously hurtful, unthinking and morally wrong, very wrong,” [he] wrote. “I am so sorry for what I did. There is no excuse. I accept my failing. I own my actions. I am certain with the help I have been getting, I can move on and start repaying.”
He never abused me. To my knowledge, he never touched any kids. I don't know for sure—but it seems like a thing the FBI would have picked up on.
He was kind to me. This will sound creepy now, but it was not at the time. It would've surprised no one: he was weird, gay-ish, and a drama teacher. Everybody has suspicions about the drama teacher. Because “there's something off about them,” and in those days, being gay was bad. It’s not; I can’t say that forcefully enough.
The rate of CSA perpetrated upon girls versus boys suggest that there are vastly fewer pedophiles and non-pedophile abusers interested in boys than girls—most perpetrators are male and “heterosexual” in their predation. It’s overwhelmingly a crime of those who are not “gay.” Further, being a pedophile is different from being a perpetrator of CSA. There's a subgroup of pedophiles who don't ever harm kids. There is a group of perpetrators who are not pedophiles, conversely. The advent of generative AI trained on abused children accelerates the harm, however. Now, children once abused can be repositioned, re-humiliated, and re-harmed with infinite photos of horrors that both happened and didn’t. The lack of consent in capturing the original images feeds back upon itself in the nightmare hellscape of AI-driven CSA.
Almost no one wants to ponder the internal world of such abusers. Some of us— pediatric subspecialists, therapists, police, and child protective services professionals— are forced to think about it. It’s horrifying. Even if no one was abused by the individual personally, there is a deep and appropriate stigma associated with such desires. The person who was the most supportive of me, of all the teachers in my school, was later found to be such a pedophile. We wish we could round “someone wasn’t a monster to me” to “not a monster”—and yet the monstrousness technology makes possible makes this hedge untenable.
We don't always get to know “the truth” about people. I do know that my high school advisor was arrested for child pornography. He is now in jail. He will never be anything but a sexual predator in the minds of the community, although he will be released from prison in a few years.
What follows is one of the reports he provided to me and my mom back in the Fall Semester of 1995-96:
[Mr. D.], High School Guidance Councilor, December 19961
Advisor’s Report to The Dean
"There always seems to be so much there in his eyes. There seem to be high expectations of himself and of his accomplishments in his look. Owen has always been on the verge of great things. Well, finally, some of this really great stuff has come to fruition. LOST IN YONKERS was a wonderful success and Owen was a major reason for this. His performance as the grumpy, snappy son in the family really came through. The city feeling was dripping all over his accent. Every part of his body was reveling in the show as if to say,' Look what I can do'. It's always great to see this sort of success. It just seems to spill out all over everything else. His sense of accomplishment and his confidence took a great step forward. I would not be surprised to find out that when Owen looks back on his stay here at —-, he will remember LOST IN YONKERS as one of the true highlights of the stay.
Looking at his grades, you are left with your mouth hanging open! The pre-exam grades are WONDERFUL! WOW! A 5.08 average !!! Almost all A's in efforts !! You really can not ask for anymore than what Owen gives. A truly remarkable academic achievement. Yet, he seems concerned about his final test outcome. But, it is great to see that he can accomplish this while doing so many other activities at the school. He knows how to organize his time, I would say.
When you talk about Owen, you talk about someone who likes to walk down the road less traveled. He seems to revel in this direction and he asks others to join him. It is a pleasure to see someone so gifted enjoy so many different parts of his life. I only hope that Owen is getting what he wants out of his life. He does look like someone in deep thought many times. He seems to be asking himself many questions and he seems to be finding his way around, socially. He still needs a helping hand from time to time, as we all do. But, someone with this much potential needs a guiding hand somewhat more often.I really hope that Owen plans on doing more theater and extra projects. He needs to test himself and to accept challenges because this is what will bring his true potential out."
1 This is a real document from my life.
What, if anything, can we do?
I am a hopeful person who is in the “addressing hopelessness” line of work. I find myself wondering…do we have a brain target for this problem? Chemical Castration—using Lupron or similar medicines—has been used.
In Korea, this is done by law:
For the first time in Asia, in July 2011, Korea introduced using chemical castration on sexual offenders. Under the current law, perpetrators of sexual crimes against minors aged less than 16 yr are subject to chemical castration.5
There is limited evidence.6. This has not prevented guidelines from being drafted.7
Surgical castration, in the Korean data, is highly effective:
Surgical castration reportedly produces definitive results, even in repeat pedophilic offenders, by reducing recidivism rates to 2% to 5% compared with expected rates of 50%
And given its lower burden of medical complications and reversible course—a blessing and a curse in this context—hormonal castration is another option. On the order of $5000/year in Korea, it's not without cost.
To me, these sound like treatments that are likely to be helpful after one is already an offender, and less so if one is simply suffering with these desires silently and not telling anyone about it. I can only imagine the rate of adult male humans who will book a chemical castration follow-up with a PCP is likely to be low. This leaves us without easily accessible and palatable options for those who would prefer not to perpetrate CSA— or ever think of it again.
This brings me to targets in the brain. There is already data that GLP-1 medicines like Semeglutide—Ozepmic—reduce cravings for more than food8. Clinical trials are underway in alcohol and nicotine use disorders. My patients report fewer cravings sexually. This will be an open question. Perhaps it will be a plausible way to reduce risk. People could request the treatment without having to scream, “I am a pedophile.”
I wouldn’t be an Interventional Brain Medicine doctor if I didn’t note— we already have FDA clearance on the brain stimulation with variants of TMS for smoking cessation— some of which line up with imaging findings in CSA perpetrators. Neurofeedback guided by fMRI might also be a plausible option.
Prevention of CSA is the only plausible way to reduce the rate of CSA—law enforcement, alone, hasn’t done remotely enough. Can we create options for those who might offend before they do to reduce the risk? We will need to have uncomfortable conversations and offer acceptable treatments as a first line to increase the chance that people will manage any such impulses before offending.
Millions of children are counting on us to get it right before they, too, fall prey to CSA and our neglect, as scientists and society, of serious prevention strategies to pair with legitimate law enforcement action.
To quote Mr. D, we need to:
needs to test [ourselves] and to accept challenges because this is what will bring [our] true potential out
The utter horror of Child Sexual Abusers who “just consume” child pornography, however, isn’t where it stops. Not anymore.
Tenbergen, G., Wittfoth, M., Frieling, H., Ponseti, J., Walter, M., Walter, H., Beier, K. M., Schiffer, B., & C. Kruger, T. H. (2015). The Neurobiology and Psychology of Pedophilia: Recent Advances and Challenges. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00344
Beier K. M. (1998). Differential typology and prognosis for dissexual behavior – a follow-up study of previously expert-appraised child molesters. Int. J. Legal Med. 111, 133–141.
The creation of pornographic material absent humans in those sexual situations is now a reality, which, of course, has been trained on the very same horrors that this article is about in the first place.
Tenbergen, G., Wittfoth, M., Frieling, H., Ponseti, J., Walter, M., Walter, H., Beier, K. M., Schiffer, B., & C. Kruger, T. H. (2015). The Neurobiology and Psychology of Pedophilia: Recent Advances and Challenges. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00344
Lee, J. Y., & Cho, K. S. (2013). Chemical Castration for Sexual Offenders: Physicians' Views. Journal of Korean Medical Science, 28(2), 171-172. https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2013.28.2.171
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A hard piece to write and to read. Thank you.
Whew! That was a lot. I worked with a PhD Nurse Midwife doing research on PTSD models of pregnant women with a history of CSA. It was difficult research as slogging through this article made me remember. We need other choices than like : (