The words of an abstinent pedophile’s girlfriend

We publish here the touching testimony of one of the thousands of pedophiles’ girlfriends, spouses, companions, who contact us to better understand their loved one and help him cope with his troubles. In a world more and more engorged with cynicism and indifference, it is primordial to remember that love exists and it can conquer the worst obstacles.

 

Hello Latifa,

Thank you for last week phone call and for your time. I had called to gain a better understanding so I could give the best support to my companion suffering because of his pedophile tendencies.

Going through your site and also during my own reflections and researches, it seemed more and more obvious to me that I had to support your work from my standpoint: that of a member of the intimate social circle of a pedophile person.

I will therefore offer my testimony, anonimously at first as my companion isn’t yet ready to perfom what we might call his “coming-out”.

How could he, in a society that doesn’t accept neither different sexualities or deviances, or even mental health issues? In this moralizing, rule-imposing, homophobic, misogynistic, psychophobic (and I’m biting my tongue) environment where there is no place for people outside the norm?

And yet my companion is beyond the norm. Not just because of his tendencies. He is because of his extraordinary intelligence, sensitivity and open mind.

His sexuality is what it is, because it is beyond him.

Did you choose, ladies and gentlemen, your heterosexuality? Did you know that homosexuality isn’t registered in the DSM and so it isn’t considered a pathology anymore?

I know that pedophilia and other paraphilias, on the other hand, are. But what makes my companion sick, his sexuality or the fact he can’t actually live it?

It’s from the impossibility of living this aspect of his sexuality that the suffering emerges. Partly because of the huge emotional and sexual frustration abstinence causes, and also from the sensation of not being able of being himself.

You read correctly: abstinence. For life. As my companion is a pedophile, not a pedosexual. Which means he forbids himself from acting out. He knows, thanks to his afore-mentioned qualities, that children aren’t wired for relationships with adults, and how much those can be destructive to them.

To quote him, he’d rather slit his wrists than act out.

Often a pedophile can truly love children. I know, that irks you. And when he loves them, destroying them would mean destroying himself.

Educate yourself. The more informed you’ll be, the less you’ll harbor prejudice. You will then be more capable to protect and inform your children. With less prejudice, you allow pedophiles to exist without being marginalized and isolated. Existing means being regarded as a human being, with its strength and weakness. It means sharing and finding the resources necessary to get help.

My companion isn’t just a pedophile. That is only a part of his sexuality and his emotional life (yes, he has feelings…). He isn’t a pedosexual. He isn’t a psychopath nor a pervert.

Why is there a hotline for abused childs but not for sexually troubled adults? There aren’t any real structures to support and counsel abstinent pedophiles. All the effort is always only about re-offending.

We wait for the fall of the adult and often of the victim as well, before providing help. To destroy the presumed pervert we created an even more perverse system…

Will we act now or will we wait for more suicides and rapes?

Thank you for reading,

The girlfriend of an abstinent pedophile

Thoughts of a film director and producer about our dialogue groups

During the Blue Angel Association dialogue groups, a little side space is sometimes reserved for neutral observers (professionals, students, etc), to show people how effective our work is and how real the needs it answers are, and also to start interesting them in Mrs Bennari’s methods. Here we publish the thoughts one of these observers wished to share with us.

Good evening Latifa,

I wanted to thank you yet again for inviting me to this dialogue group. I greatly regret that I wasn’t able to stay till the very end: I had no idea of the length of the exchanges and I really had to go to an appointment.

But what I saw made me understand why so many inmates had talked to me about your work with so much passion: nothing I witnessed there was anything like what I observed in prisons, psychiatric centers, or medical clinics.

Your very direct approach – without preambles, no false modesty, calling a spade a spade, intervening whenever necessary even when that meant interrupting, simply because you instinctively felt the moment was right to focus down, specify, guide – at first found me rather bewildered. But I had to accept the evidence that every time, through experience of course and, once again, instinct, you were always right on point.

You gave me the impression, I must say, of watching a funambulist during a storm, but such was your mastery that I never feared you would fall: soon, I was just looking to see how you would inevitably come out on top, to what point you would tenaciously get, as I understood that you always had a clear picture in your mind, and that you always knew where you were treading. What is even more impressive, is that the “regulars” of your groups seem to have taken exemple from you over time, and dare to follow your steps, and intervene in the discussion too without fear, at the right time and with goodwill – and they too just as instinctively. Maybe just thanks to their “experience”, but also, I think, to your kind influence.

The other thing that was to me unexpected (and welcome!) was the atmosphere, amazingly peaceful, relaxed but not at all jaded, that welcomed healthy laughs here and there, because it knew they can, when necessary, calm things down and soothe them; without ever, because that would be indecent, downplaying the importance and scope of the stakes.

To those like me who have had an interest in these matters for a long time, the strange simplicity, the strange evidence of these exchanges still leaves us necessarily stupefied and wanting to discover more.

All my gratitude, then, for welcoming me like you did.

See you soon,

Gérard X

Director, Producer

A father of three addicted to child pornography

You can read here an e-mail received by Mrs Bennari from the USA. Once again, we see how the lack of structures for support and counseling abandons people who struggle with pedophile desires (in real life or online) to themselves, alone with their pain and their secret. Many won’t be able to resist becoming sex offenders (in real life or virtually) alone.

I’m happy to discover your website and your work.

I’m from Europe originally, I married with an american woman and I now live in X, USA. I feel involved in the use of child pornography. Despite all the repressive measures in place here and the risk of being caught by the police, I can’t stop even though I tried many times. I don’t have any problems or desires with children in real life, even when I’m alone with them. I see a lot of myself in some testimonies of abstinent pedophiles. And yet I have three children I love and I’m just a good father for them and nothing more. I love and desire my wife, but that doesn’t stop me from diving again in this digital hell, knowing all too well that the children behind the scenes aren’t actors but real victims.

I discovered adult pornography when I was 12, in magazines hidden in my big brother’s bedroom. I watched them rarely at first, but little by little it became like a drug, and after a while, watching and looking for new stuff, I discovered child pornography at 18, and I felt like I was 12 again with my brother’s magazines, with the same arousal and excitement.

When I met my wife, I thougth this need would disappear but I was wrong. I tried to be reasonable and stay clear of websites with children, but I felt stronger urges in that direction. I started sweating heavily during the night, to the point that my wife worried about my health. She was miles away from imagining that I was in real need for a specific help and that if an association like yours had existed already I wouldn’t have gotten to this point of addiction.

Reading your website and all the news articles telling about your work, I found new hope. I’m ready to get help and, if necessary, I will come to France to participate in your dialogue groups. I read that the Blue Angel in the USA isn’t operational yet, do you know when it will open? I think America should develop your work as it perfectly matches the needs of thousands of pedophiles who are abstinent but use child pornography.

I don’t understand why these sites exist, why they are so easily accessible and why the producers and publishers aren’t prosecuted.

Thank you and bravo for what you do, and most of all please continue and transmit this wonderful and admirable work. I also saw that you published a book and I wait for its american release with impatience.

G

Hopes and Recent History of an ex-Teacher Arrested for Child Pornography

We publish here an e-mail received by Mrs Bennari the day after a dialogue group from one of the participants, a teacher fired after being arrested for downloading child pornography. He tells here about his latest doings and thoughts, and shares his hopes and intentions for after his trial.

 

Hello Latifa,

I hope you’re well and that your throat is better.
Thank you again for welcoming me yesterday.
As always, I was very touched by the various stories and testimonies.
Me, (I don’t know if that showed) I wasn’t feeling all that well.
Most of all I wanted to contain my emotion.

Sorry to write you like this, especially because of what’s to follow (yet another lenghty mail from me!), but I needed to.

I wanted to look back on certain points, mostly on questions you asked me.

When you asked me if I thought about going back to teaching, I said that something had been broken. I couldn’t say anything more as I knew it would be painful for me.
I chose that job because I loved it. I loved to work with and for the children.
I always tried to do it with professionalism, being considerate of my pupils.
Furthermore, work ethic is an important value to me (part of my parents’ upbringing).

When I learned that my situation was made public in my workplace, I felt I was being stabbed in the back. I felt abandoned by the great institution of teaching.
Of course what I did was a serious matter, and going back to what was the context at the time, I understand that the media coverage of other cases certainly weighed on my superiors’ decision. After all, they didn’t really know me and nothing could guarantee that I hadn’t done more than what I was accused of. They played it safe, and rightly so. I can’t blame them.

Even though the meetings at my workplace went well, even though today I understand that was a wrong to make a right, that “backstab” still makes it so I don’t feel “worthy” of being a teacher anymore. I feel like there will always be suspicion hanging over me and around me.

As I told you yesterday, even though I found some children, especially boys, cute (at my workplace or in the streets), I didn’t have any desire to do anything to them.

I don’t remember if I wrote this to you already, but some years ago (I was already in this deviancy) I gave private tuitions at people’s homes, and there was this young teenager : I gave him lessons in his room, like it usually happened with most of my private pupils.

One day, this young teenager found it hard to concentrate, he was restless and laughed at the drop of a hat. At one point, he was standing up facing me, in overalls, and I noticed he had an erection. That was very embarassing for me (I’m quite modest, actually very much so), and I pretended not to notice. I asked him to sit down and concentrate on his homework, which he eventually did.

I’d say that was the most dangerous situation I was ever in. It could have made me slip up, but I didn’t. I didn’t because the idea didn’t even came to my mind and it would have been impossible for me anyway.
With my pupils at the pool it was the same, I would have never done anything to them.
That the police, that the law would ask me that question, even though I understand why they would need to, still feel like I don’t have anyone’s trust, or not anymore.

The recent case of a school principal who used to film children at the pool made me think to myself: “I hope nobody thought I could ever do something like that!”. Because the very idea would never come to my mind, and frankly I would feel like I’d be violating the children’s intimacy.

Every year, I had taken the habit of tackling the sensitive subject of dangerous situations involving children. It wasn’t very detailed work, but I tried to raise my pupils’ awareness regarding these risks (on the Internet, the streets, etc), without upsetting them too much.
The only subject I didn’t dare approach was that of the dangers in the family midst.
What reassured me was that they were for the most part already well informed.

Today, I’m not beyond reproach anymore.
What hurt me the most was the meeting with my pupils. I don’t blame anyone for doing it, I understand why. There were rumors, concerns. But frankly, I ask myself: “how will those children remember me?”
Some parents and colleagues who contacted me again said they had good memories of me.
Let me point out: I never tried to be the most popular teacher, the coolest, the most loved. But over the years I could see (luckily) that for the most part I was appreciated, like many of my colleagues.

Yes, it’s hard for me to accept that this career is over. Yes, it’s hard, like you rightly pointed out yesterday, that no distinction is made between people who are potential predators and others who aren’t.
I myself have sometimes looked in the mirror and just spat on it, spouting insults.
And yet I love children in a noble way; and yet it is on top of this deviancy.

We talked about it yesterday at the end of the meeting, about the Internet “mighty tool”, as long as you know how to use it.
It is still so easy to find legal sites with sexually oriented content. And it’s true that youths are more easily exposed to this.
Also comments, especially during searches, with words that to me are very coarse, violent.

More and more today (and I know you’re all to aware of this) youths have mobile phones, smartphones. And through those they often happen upon difficult situations.
I don’t know how I would have lived my teenage years if I had access to this technology, but perhaps not serenely.
Internet giants (like Google, Facebook, etc) should be even more vigilant. And of course politicians should too.

You also asked me if I thought I would eventually have tried to stop by myself if I hadn’t been arrested.
For some time already (perhaps because of the news about the school principal?) I had started to admit that if I didn’t stop with child pornography I would be arrested some day. That didn’t stop me, yet again, from casting all that aside, putting a veil upon my eyes, and go back to the Internet…

Around a week before my arrest, I had (finally) decided to stop going on the Internet. I confess that at the start it was more to “lay low” for a while (I’m sorry to have to say this). But still, I told myself that maybe this time I would be able to get away from it all.
Alas, I was still far from being able to suppress all the images, the videos, but I thought that with time I maybe could get rid of them. It’s easy to say this now that I’ve been arrested and put on trial, but: yes, I regret not having forced myself more to try and stop by myself; yes, I regret not taking charge of my situation and talking to someone, and not contacting your association sooner.

What’s done is done, and like S told me yesterday, maybe I needed this arrest to be finally able to react.

Yesterday you rightly asked me what I wanted to do now, and how I was filling “the void”.
As I told you, merely contacting the association, meeting with you, participating to the dialogue groups, this all helped me a lot and I feel “useful”.
Helping others and most of all indirectly protecting children and teens, that is very important to me. Sure, it won’t erase what I’ve done, but it does allow me to give back some meaning to my life.

I want to continue on this path which to this day is the only one I found that looks commendable to me in regard to what I’ve done.

I keep dear this beautiful image of the couple from O that came to the meeting yesterday. I was very touched since, deep down, I would love to be in a couple, or at least to share a sentimental life with someone.
And most of all, I’d love to be a father. Many of you told me it’s not to late, that it would even be a further and stronger moral barrier.
I admit that today, as I told yesterday, I don’t feel ready to have a girlfriend/boyfriend yet. And what you told me is also what gives me pause right now: “It’s better to wait for the trial to end first”

I don’t know if I told you this already (I wrote so much!!!), but before the arrest I sometimes had this idea of going away, leaving everything behind, letting my family and friends have some news about me for a little while, with time they would eventually stop thinking about me and get used to my absence anyway. (I started thinking about this after falling in love with a young thirty years old man who didn’t reciprocate my feelings)

I didn’t realize (or I didn’t want to) that to people close to me (starting with my family) I was important, that they loved me. I know it’s strange to write this, but deep down I always felt I didn’t deserve the attention and love of others, even though I felt I needed it. Oddly (?), I’m very personable and sociable and today even more so, even though I’m very apprehensive about meeting people.

There are people around me who still trust me.
I owe myself to be up to that.

What’s certain, is that I don’t want people close to me to suffer, I don’t want to be a burden to them and society anymore.

That’s it, I will leave it here now, but I want to thank you for inviting me to a dialogue group again yesterday. Thank you also for giving me an opportunity to tell my story, and for presenting it briefly as a testimony that could be “very helpful” to stop before it’s too late, before waking up one morning with the cops at your door…

If my story (without being a specific reference) can help even just one user of child pornography to react and stop following this hopeless path, then it will be a plus for me.

Good sunday to you, good luck,
and see you soon, I hope!

You really are a wonderful woman! Thank you a lot for everything!

Sincerely,

S/P

P.S. I’m starting to be less paranoid, so I (finally!) could speak about my job. Sure, it wasn’t hard to guess what kind of work I did, but still it’s new territory for me, and it’s mostly thanks to you, so once more: thank you!!!

Preventing a Potential Fall

We publish here the testimony of a young teenager who had contacted us, like many others, because of his child pornography use. He wrote, redacted and completed this text with the help of Mrs Bennari aiming at making his story known to help others in a similar situation.

Hello,

I am 15 as I write this. I’m going to start at the beginning and tell everything that happened during my fall toward child pornography, exactly as it was.

It begun when I was about 11. I was reading a forum on the site of a well-known and very popular video game. Everything was great, until I clicked on some random link. I told myself “No big deal”, but instead of finding more games I ended up staring at homosexual porn. At first I was grossed out by it, but as I kept looking my curiosity took over and I started feeling a sort of fascination. That’s when I started watching pornography and feeling a need for it.

I watched porn for 4 years without understanding the consequences for a boy my age. I looked for content more and more unusual, new, sensational, up to the more violent images. I told myself there was nothing wrong with it. They were just fantasies, nothing to do with real life.

But as I kept looking for new stuff, I ended up on some child pornography images and I felt again that same thrill I had felt when I discovered porn for the first time. So I started looking for child porn sites which are actually easy to find. I was still mainly addicted to adult porn, but on some rare occasions I looked for child porn. It’s true that I wasn’t worried about those few times. I didn’t take my use of child porn seriously because I still felt a stronger pull toward adult porn.

But little by little I started doing more and deeper searching for child porn. I only found it on two sites. The minors that matched my preferences were between 11 and 17 years old. But I did once get off on the picture of a 4th grader girl (I’m extremely ashamed of that). I even downloaded a picture once, that I deleted immediately after even though the teenage girl in the photo was a nudist. Every time my libido brought me to masturbate to those videos and photos, but once the pleasure was gone I regretted it and felt betrayed by myself.

I totally got that the children “models” were the victims of criminals or unaware of what they were asked to do. I was filled with guilt and shame. I wanted to be a benefactor to people everywhere, and instead here I was.

My friends started calling me “pedophile” as a joke, because I often joked on the subject. But some of my pals thought my jokes went a bit too far and so they asked me: “Do you actually like little kids?”. I told them no, and actually in a sense it’s true as I don’t feel attracted to kids in real life. But that question made me doubt myself anyway. Was I like the men I hear about on the news? Am I like those I disapprove of? Am I a pedophile?

As I became more aware of how bad and wrong what I was doing was, I started searching informations about it online. I found the Blue Angel website and I saw that it was a place where I could find answers to my questions and my anguish, and also ask for advice to stop doing these things I hated.

I called the number on the french site. The president herself, Mrs Latifa Bennari, answered the call and listened to me before asking some questions and chatting with me. All this made me relax and I felt much better. She soothed my conscience pointing out my real life abstinency and congratulating me on my decision to call for help. She did also warn me about the danger I was into with my child porn use: of undermining my adult life and getting caught by the police with potentially devastating consequences.

Today I have decided to be a normal high school student, focused on studying, passionate about video games and with a mind fully opened to the world and everything and everyone in it, including sexuality. Because I have no taboos about telling what happened to me. This doesn’t mean that I won’t warn you about pornography, adult or pedophile: it is bad for young kids. Bad, I get it now, not just for us users but also and most of all for the minors exploited to produce it. I know now that there are many others in the situation I was into that are still too afraid to speak. And others who seeked help in vain for years and in the end found only the cops at their door.

I often ask myself what would have happened to me without the Blue Angel. Talking is often the cure for all evils. It’s also the best way to protect ourselves and others, so let’s do it.

Thank you, Latifa, for freeing me from silence and secrecy.

An opinion and a few words from Latifa Bennari

This testimony from a young man in contact with the Blue Angel shows the incoherence and aberration of most measures concerning pedophilia in place today. Too often they are taken and crafted in response to the high media coverage of a few sensational cases despite the fact that the offenders involved represent only a slim minority of the total pedophile population.

Such measures go against common sense and keep feeding an inadequate legal corpus that can only make an already alarming situation even worse. Written by ministerial staff without any real knowlege of the problem and of its complex ramifications, without consulting with any competent association actually working the field (especially on the subject of child pornography), they keep pushing forward a blind repression policy, showing a critical lack of judgement from our state representatives that can only make us wonder.

This testimony is a perfect example of the reality most users of child pornography live in. It is becoming urgent for society to start looking at this reality without the veil of prejudice that is preventing us from taking adequate measures to counter the potential effects on our population’s mental state of the proliferation of easy-to-access child pornography images (drawings, comics, photos, videos, etc).

This young man’s profile is extremely representative of the majority of virtual pedophiles who slowly and inadvertedly sink into an addiction to child pornography without truly measuring or understanding the seriousness of the consequences both for themselves and for the exploited children.

Helping them quit with an adequate and experienced support is the only way, preventing further use of child pornography and in some cases also any possibility of a real life acting out, even though we hasten to point out that there is no systematic link between using child pornography and acting out on real children, indeed such a jump is quite rare.

On the contrary, the silence, secrecy and fear pedophiles (abstinents, users of child pornography, ex-offenders, etc) are de facto confined into by the indiscriminate aggressiveness of the law and most medias only serve to strengthen their isolation and mental fragility, therefore increasing the potential danger they represent for society and especially for our children.

We have the choice to continue with methods which have been revealed as failures by their results during the last decades, or thinking about developping more effective ones. Today we expect from our representatives of state to acknowledge their failings and learn from past mistakes, putting in place a humane policy of prevention. Enough demagogy, purely electoral speeches and measures, enough senseless and misguided pushing of the principles of precaution and security, the abuse of which shows a complete lack of understanding of the problem at hand.