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.

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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.