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When Consent Becomes the Boundary: Who Is Challenging the Laws Protecting Children?
The legal boundary — historical and contemporary reform advocacy, documented networks and the purpose of child-protection laws.
FCP AUSTRALIA | INVESTIGATIVE SERIES | PART 1 OF 6
Protecting Childhood - Consent, Culture and the Institutions Shaping Our Children
The first in a six-part investigation examining the laws protecting children, the ideas challenging those boundaries, and the institutions responsible for safeguarding them.
Some subjects return to my writing because I cannot put aside the questions they raise. The protection of children is one of them, and as a father and grandfather it is not an abstract one. I first wrote about this concern in December 2023 on Substack, when my research was less disciplined than it is today. That earlier piece set documented criminal cases beside claims of elite coordination that I could not fully demonstrate. My convictions have not changed. What has changed is that I am more careful about separating documented conduct from suspected intention, and an argument's possible consequences from evidence that those consequences have occurred.
That discipline matters especially here. The allegations can be disturbing, and carelessness can damage the reputations of people who have done nothing wrong. Survivors of sexual abuse deserve better than having their experiences recruited into an argument that the record does not support. Children deserve something better still: adults prepared to examine uncomfortable ideas without losing either their moral judgment or their commitment to truth.
In Children, Culture and Moral Boundaries, I asked how societies come to understand and defend moral limits. Here I want to investigate a narrower, testable question. Have individuals and organisations sought to change laws that protect children from sexual contact with adults? The historical record answers yes. Do contemporary proposals exist? Again, yes. But whether those proposals have obtained funding, institutional legitimacy or influence over Australian law is a different question, and it requires different evidence.
Running beneath that question is a second one, which gives this piece its title. Across fifty years of the record I examined, the case for lowering or removing these protections has kept returning in a recognisable shape. It moves the line from the child's age to the child's apparent willingness. It asks whether a particular young person agreed, rather than whether an adult should have been there at all. I am not suggesting that the people who made this argument in 1975, 1977 and 2024 were connected; similarity is not continuity. I am suggesting that when consent becomes the only boundary, the burden quietly shifts from the adult who should have known better to the child who must show that they did not agree.
What I have established is that historical campaigns existed; that in Britain and France arguments for reducing these protections reached prominent civil-society and public platforms; that in Germany a separately documented abuse of public authority placed children at risk; and that contemporary proposals continue to circulate. What I have not established is a centrally coordinated international campaign, major philanthropic funding specifically directed towards the 2024 proposal examined here, or evidence that Mu, Newgon or Yesmap has secured changes to Australian age-of-consent law.
Those limits belong at the outset. The documented history is serious enough without asking readers to assume connections or outcomes the evidence cannot demonstrate.
In this investigation
Explore the historical evidence, contemporary proposals and questions of institutional accountability.
Australia has already investigated this advocacy
On 20 November 1995, a Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority tabled its report Organised Criminal Paedophile Activity. Its chapter on public advocacy groups recorded that the Australian Paedophile Support Group had included among its announced aims the removal of the age of consent. The committee described the later group BLAZE and considered a submission from an Australasian association claiming Australian and New Zealand members and international contacts.
The same committee supplied a necessary corrective. It described the openly operating Australian groups as small and recorded police advice that some had ceased operating. It did not find persuasive evidence of large, hierarchical paedophile organisations resembling conventional organised crime groups. Nor did it establish that advocacy membership, on its own, proved criminal offending. These distinctions are essential. The committee documented real efforts to legitimise adult–child sexual contact without finding the vast criminal structure sometimes imagined around them.
I include that limitation because the first finding is serious enough on its own. It tells us that appeals to children's supposed sexual freedom were not invented by today's online culture. They have an identifiable history in Australia, recorded by Parliament, and that history can be examined without exaggeration.
When Australia's public broadcaster gave the argument a microphone
There is another Australian example that deserves attention, one that economist and commentator John Adams brought back into public view in October 2025. On 14 July 1975, the ABC Radio programme Lateline, hosted by Richard Neville, broadcast a discussion titled Pederasty. Three adult men were given the opportunity to discuss and rationalise sexual relationships with underage boys. The programme's existence is confirmed by the State Library of New South Wales' archival catalogue, while the Australian Queer Archives records a transcript published in Nation Review on 25 July 1975.
Accounts of the programme, both at the time and since the recording resurfaced, describe an attempt to distinguish what participants called “pederasty” from coercive abuse by reference to the boy’s purported willingness. Whether Neville personally adopted every argument advanced is a separate question from whether the programme gave those arguments a hearing. The framing goes to the heart of this article: it shifts attention from an adult’s conduct to whether the child seemed to agree.
What concerns me is not that a public broadcaster investigated a disturbing subject. Journalism sometimes requires confronting ideas that society rightly finds abhorrent. The question is how those ideas are presented and challenged. The broadcast attracted criticism for allowing the men to explain their conduct without sufficiently confronting the exploitation of children.
The then ABC chairman, Professor Richard Downing, defended the decision to broadcast the discussion. In an editorial titled ABC licence, published on 19 July 1975, the Sydney Morning Herald attributed to him the statement that “in general, men will sleep with young boys and that's the sort of thing the community ought to know about.” The relevant passage from the newspaper editorial was subsequently reproduced by Gerard Henderson in June 2015.
That statement is not, in itself, an express endorsement of the conduct. There is, however, an important distinction between examining why adults seek sexual contact with children and allowing those adults to present their justifications without adequate challenge. Where someone invokes a child's apparent willingness, the interviewer's responsibility becomes especially important.
The controversy did not disappear entirely. In a 2016 Senate Estimates question, Senator Eric Abetz reproduced the statement attributed to Downing and asked whether the ABC would consider apologising for both his remarks and the 1975 broadcast. The ABC declined, maintaining that child abuse was a legitimate subject for journalistic coverage. Its response did not independently verify the words attributed to Downing.
In 2018, the ABC told a Senate committee that it had no records of the original interview. The following year, in correspondence published in October 2019, then ABC chair Ita Buttrose stated that she did not condone the statement attributed to Downing, while acknowledging uncertainty about its original context and meaning. She also distinguished reporting on disturbing subjects from endorsing the conduct being discussed.
The matter resurfaced again on 30 September 2025, when ABC Managing Director Hugh Marks formally corrected the earlier parliamentary answer, acknowledging that ABC Archives did hold a recording of the 1975 broadcast.
Adams later made the recording public after the ABC refused permission. According to Gerard Henderson's Media Watch Dog, the ABC had also warned him of legal action, while telling him it was "now of the view that the 'Pederasty' program does not meet the ABC's current editorial standards." The incorrect archival answer warrants accountability, although it does not by itself establish deliberate concealment.
For me, this episode illustrates something the historical parliamentary investigations would later bring into sharper focus. Arguments seeking to justify sexual relationships between adults and children were not always confined to obscure organisations operating beyond public scrutiny. At times, they were afforded space within respected institutions. That does not establish that those institutions formally endorsed the arguments, but it does raise a question that remains relevant today: when does giving an argument a platform become a means of conferring legitimacy upon it, particularly when the people requiring protection are children?
Britain: when an argument acquired institutional access
Britain provides a clearer example of what institutional legitimacy can look like. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse examined the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which operated from 1974 until 1984 and openly campaigned to lower the age of consent. In a 1975 submission to the Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee, it proposed the age of consent's abolition. The Inquiry found that PIE was "accepted as a legitimate voice of an oppressed sexual minority" by the National Council for Civil Liberties and the Albany Trust, and that it "was not simply tolerated as part of the authorities' proper commitment to freedom of speech."
The inquiry's finding was not that every civil-liberties supporter shared PIE's objectives. It was that a group advancing those objectives obtained affiliation and a hearing that gave its case a respectability it did not deserve. The Inquiry also recorded that PIE made little headway with politicians beyond some civil-libertarian and gay-rights circles, and that its leaders faced prosecution, with its chair convicted at a retrial of conspiracy to corrupt public morals. Institutions make judgments about whom they welcome, publish and present as credible; those judgments matter even when the law never changes.
The funding history raises a further question about institutional accountability. In 2014, the British Home Office commissioned an investigation into allegations that it had financially supported PIE. The investigator found no evidence that the Home Office directly funded PIE, or that grants made to two organisations with links to PIE, the Albany Trust and Princedale Trust, were used to support PIE. However, the surviving records were insufficient to rule out indirect funding categorically, and the investigation could not determine whether any of those grants indirectly supported PIE's activities. The investigation also had an important limitation: it did not interview Tim Halbert, the former Home Office official whose allegations had prompted the inquiry. That omission was subsequently challenged in the House of Commons.
A subsequent review by Peter Wanless and Richard Whittam QC acknowledged that the surviving records were insufficient to provide categorical assurance about whether direct or indirect funding had occurred. The matter was later examined by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which also identified shortcomings in earlier investigative efforts. Nevertheless, after considering additional testimony and documentary evidence, the Inquiry found no independent evidence establishing that PIE had received Home Office funding.
I think both findings matter. An institution commissioning an investigation into its own historical conduct deserves scrutiny, especially where witnesses have not been properly pursued and records are incomplete. But a failure to establish wrongdoing is not itself proof of concealment. What remains troubling is that PIE had documented connections with established organisations, some of which received public funding, while the surviving records could not answer every question about how those relationships operated. That is precisely why institutional accountability requires more than assurances from the institutions concerned.
When institutions drew the line: the United Nations and Dutch Courts
On 16 September 1994, the United Nations Economic and Social Council suspended the consultative status of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) pending assurances that its membership did not support the legalisation of paedophilia. This was a genuine institutional controversy.
It would be misleading to stop there. ILGA's historical account says that it had adopted a child-protection resolution in 1990, expelled NAMBLA and two other pro-paedophile organisations, the Dutch association MARTIJN and Project Truth, in June 1994, and never endorsed their aims. The membership failure and the subsequent repudiation both belong in the story. They do not justify associating contemporary gay and lesbian organisations, or people who identify as LGBTQ, with advocacy for adult sexual access to children.
The Dutch courts later went further. On 18 April 2014, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered the dissolution of MARTIJN, one of the groups ILGA had expelled twenty years earlier. The Court found that the association trivialised and glorified sexual contact between adults and young children, and that the particular vulnerability of children justified the exceptional restriction of freedom of association. Its decision was not a general prohibition on unpopular views; it was a judgment about this association's activities and their effect on children's rights and safety.
It is worth noticing who still reaches for the earlier history. Mu, the contemporary organisation I examine below, describes in its own FAQ NAMBLA's past ILGA membership and Pride participation as "historical examples of unity between LGBT and MAP communities." ILGA's 1994 decision is the answer to that claim, and so is the warning from the Australian researchers I discuss later that comparisons between paedophilia and same-sex attraction risk undermining LGBTIQ+ civil rights. The attempt to borrow that legitimacy is the advocates' move, not the gay community's.
For me the enduring lesson is a question of institutional judgment: how do organisations distinguish legitimate advocacy for adults' civil rights from arguments that would remove protections owed to children? And what do they do when that boundary has been crossed?
France and Germany: where the argument reached further
France offers the consent argument in its own words. On 26 January 1977, Le Monde published an open letter concerning the impending trial of three men accused of offences involving children under fifteen. The signatories included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes and Gabriel Matzneff. The letter said the children had described themselves as consenting, despite the law denying them legal capacity to consent. It then compared a young adolescent's capacity to be held criminally responsible with the legal refusal to treat the same adolescent as capable of consenting to sexual relations.
That comparison matters because the contemporary proposal I examine below makes a similar argument using Australia's debate over the age of criminal responsibility. Similar reasoning across decades, however, does not demonstrate coordination between the people who used it.
Forty-three years later, Vanessa Springora offered a very different account of what consent could mean to a child. In Le Consentement (Consent), published in 2020, Springora described being drawn at fourteen into a relationship with Gabriel Matzneff, then in his fifties, a man who had been appointed an Officer of France's Order of Arts and Letters in 1995. Her title was the indictment. The word that had been offered as a defence of men like Matzneff became the name of the harm she described.
French law provides another illustration of why the distinction matters. In 2017, a 28-year-old man had sexual intercourse with an eleven-year-old girl in a case later heard at Pontoise. Under the law then operating, sexual activity between an adult and a child under fifteen could be prosecuted even where the child appeared to agree, but a rape charge generally required proof of violence, coercion, threat or surprise.
Prosecutors initially pursued the lesser offence of unlawful sexual activity with a minor, and that decision provoked considerable controversy. The matter did not end there. On 4 November 2022, the accused was convicted of rape and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, with the court finding that the acts had been imposed through coercion and surprise. On 15 March 2024, the conviction was upheld on appeal, although the sentence was reduced to six years. That subsequent conviction and its confirmation on appeal are essential parts of the record.
Separately, France's Law No. 2021-478 of 21 April 2021 introduced specific offences under which sexual penetration by an adult of a child under fifteen can constitute rape without the earlier requirement to prove violence, coercion, threat or surprise. Under Article 222-23-1 of the French Penal Code, subsequently amended in November 2025, the provision generally requires an age difference of at least five years, with specified exceptions involving payment or promised material benefits. Its current wording also expressly covers certain oral sexual acts. The reform strengthened protections while retaining important legal distinctions. It could not be applied retrospectively to the 2017 case.
Germany shows how much more serious the consequences can become when academic claims and administrative authority converge. From the late 1960s, the sexologist Helmut Kentler supported placing vulnerable children and young people with men known to have sexual interests in children; Berlin youth-welfare arrangements facilitated such placements.
The University of Hildesheim's 2020 investigation and its February 2024 final report documented networks across research, child welfare and public administration in which abusive arrangements were facilitated, tolerated, justified or concealed. These are findings concerning identifiable institutional practices, not a licence to attribute the same conduct to unrelated academics or child-welfare organisations.
There is also a more recent example of how such advocacy has entered Germany's parliamentary processes. Dieter Gieseking, founder of Krumme 13, a group that advocated decriminalising sexual activity between adults and children, submitted petitions seeking constitutional recognition of children's rights and sexual identity.
In October 2023, the German Bundestag approved a committee recommendation forwarding a broader children's-rights petition, with which Gieseking's submission had been grouped, to government ministries for consideration. His submission appears as petition 043821, item 22, on page 3 of the official parliamentary record. The decision did not address or endorse his additional demand concerning children's sexual self-determination.
When his separate request to recognise paedophilia as a constitutionally protected sexual identity was considered, the Bundestag closed those petition proceedings on 26 September 2024. That decision appears under petition 044636, item 34, on page 4 of the parliamentary record. In a subsequent investigation published by CORRECTIV on 25 October 2024, the Bundestag's press office confirmed that the proposal had been rejected.
The distinction matters. This example demonstrates an attempt to gain recognition through established parliamentary processes, not acceptance of the underlying advocacy. It also demonstrates that, on this occasion, the parliamentary process maintained that boundary.
These are not Australian findings, and I do not offer them as evidence that a comparable scheme operates here. Nor are they all examples of the same kind of institutional conduct. The French open letter demonstrates public advocacy; the subsequent criminal-law debate illustrates the consequences of legal distinctions that were later reformed; and the Kentler investigation documents failures of public administration that exposed children to abuse. The more recent German petitions illustrate a different outcome, where advocacy entered the parliamentary process but its wider demands were not accepted.
Their shared lesson is not evidence of a continuous international campaign. It is that arguments concerning children's purported autonomy can have different consequences depending on who gives them a platform, what decision-makers accept and whether the institutions responsible for protection maintain their boundaries.
The contemporary proposal is not imaginary
On 4 September 2024, two contributors using the names Brian Ribbon and Percy Shelley published "16/12: Pro-Reform's position on AMSC" on the website of Mu, an online organisation representing people who describe themselves as "minor-attracted".
AMSC is the site's abbreviation for adult-minor sexual contact. The document proposes an age of consent of twelve, with a complaint-based offence for twelve- to fifteen-year-olds where an adult "deceptively exploited" a young person's lack of sexual knowledge or interest, and an unrestricted age of sixteen. This is not merely a plea to avoid criminalising two teenagers close in age. It expressly seeks to reconsider laws protecting children from sexual contact with adults, and it describes the task as "managing the tension between prevention of harm and respect for autonomy."
The authors describe their framework as "a personal position and not necessarily agreed upon by all members of Mu." That distinction matters, and I have no intention of attributing beliefs to people who have not expressed them. But it should not obscure other facts. The proposal sits in Mu Perspectives, which the site describes as the writings of "Mu Committee Members and Staff Writers", and both authors are listed among its four lead authors.
Brian Ribbon was identified as a Mu co-founder in news reporting on a September 2024 controversy in Vermont. More significantly, Mu's own statement of principles, an organisational text rather than a personal essay, says: "We also think the law should clearly distinguish between voluntary AMSC and coercive child sexual abuse." The same page describes one camp within its community as "pro-c", which it glosses as "pro-choice or pro-consent". While Mu maintains that it has not adopted a formal organisational position on age-of-consent laws, these are not arguments appearing on an unrelated website without its knowledge.
This brings me back to the ABC's 1975 broadcast. I do not argue that interviewing someone amounts to endorsing their beliefs, just as publishing an individual contributor's proposal does not automatically make it formal organisational policy. But providing a platform is itself an editorial decision. Its significance depends on the venue, the prominence given to the argument, the framing around it and the opportunity for meaningful challenge.
There is also a distinction between an independent broadcaster examining controversial arguments and an organisation publishing proposals advanced by its own contributors. A disclaimer can clarify whose views are being expressed. It cannot, by itself, answer why the organisation has chosen to publish the proposal or whether its surrounding materials treat the argument as one it is willing to place within serious discussion.
The proposal also reaches for Australian law. It treats Victoria and Tasmania as jurisdictions recognising informed consent by twelve-year-olds because both provide limited similar-age defences. But Victoria's Crimes Act 1958, section 49V, and Tasmania's Criminal Code, section 124, address tightly defined circumstances involving people close in age.
For twelve-year-olds, the Victorian provision requires a partner no more than two years older; Tasmania allows a gap of no more than three years. These limits are not a general authorisation for adults to engage in sexual contact with children. Nor does a debate about when a child may incur criminal responsibility settle whether an adult should be allowed sexual access to that child. The proposal invokes exceptions designed for particular circumstances as though they were evidence for a much wider reform.
What troubles me most is the substance of the proposal. It invites society to reconsider criminal protections for children as young as twelve, placing extraordinary weight on their purported willingness to engage in sexual activity with adults. Yet these protections exist precisely because apparent agreement cannot settle questions of maturity, manipulation, unequal power and vulnerability. A young adolescent's physical development does not make that child the equal of an adult in experience, judgment or responsibility. Children should not be required to demonstrate that an adult exploited them before the law recognises their need for protection. The duty belongs first and foremost to adults.
There is another distinction I want to maintain. The clinical expression paedophilia generally concerns persistent sexual attraction to prepubescent children, whereas criminal protections extend to minors who may already have reached puberty. Such terminology must not obscure the legal or moral responsibilities of adults. At the same time, experiencing an attraction, advocating a change in the law and committing a criminal act are different matters. Not everyone experiencing such attractions advocates sexual contact with children, and research or treatment genuinely directed toward preventing abuse deserves recognition as a protective activity. We can acknowledge those distinctions without giving ground to arguments that would weaken the safeguards children depend upon.
The contemporary organisational relationships are limited but real. Yesmap calls itself the public face and communications hub of Newgon, says Newgon funds its server, and describes offering publishing facilities, online organising and public-advocacy training. Yesmap also gives its approach a name, 'Radical Incrementalism', with the slogan 'Radical Philosophy, Moderate Demands'.
Separately, Mu's account of its relationship with Newgon acknowledges that one of its founding committee members previously held a strategic role there, while denying that this makes Mu responsible for all Newgon publications or projects. Mu's own FAQ discusses proposals for adult–minor sexual-contact law reform, while differentiating between members who support contact and those who oppose it. These are disclosed organisational, editorial and personnel relationships. They do not establish a single command structure, a substantial external funder or any Australian legislative success.
Nevertheless, the contemporary argument is not confined to isolated individuals expressing private opinions. There are publishing platforms, named contributors, declared organisational connections, statements of legal-reform objectives and, in Yesmap's case, a declared incremental strategy. I do not need to infer that strategy; the organisation describes it.
What I cannot demonstrate is that it has achieved its legislative goals. The questions that remain are concrete: what editorial scrutiny preceded publication of the 2024 proposal, and does Mu consider the proposal's core premises acceptable for its own platform? What legal changes, if any, is it seeking in Australia? Has it put proposals to government, and can any external funding be tied to that specific purpose? These are open questions, not findings of an undisclosed campaign. Their answers would require records that I have not obtained.
When research is asked to carry an argument it was never designed to prove
What interested me most in the 2024 proposal was not its provocative language but the research it invoked to justify its conclusions. One citation is to a 2015 paper by Irma Hein and colleagues concerning children's competence to consent to participation in clinical research. The advocates cite a finding about the decision-making abilities of children around eleven or twelve and apply it to their proposed sexual-consent law.
But the original researchers were examining children's competence to decide whether to participate in clinical research, using a structured assessment of understanding, reasoning and appreciation of consequences. The sentence the proposal quotes says that children from 11.2 years "can generally be considered decision-making competent" and continues, "although they need a supportive context." The paper's recommendation was a dual-consent arrangement involving both the child and the parents from around age twelve. The proposal kept the child's half of that recommendation and left out the parents'.
It also describes twelve as an age at which young people gain "the right to consent to elective medical procedures", which is not what the study examined. The researchers did not study whether twelve-year-olds could meaningfully consent to sexual contact with adults, recognise grooming or negotiate the unequal power in such encounters, and they acknowledged that more research was needed to validate their cut-off.
This is more than an imperfect analogy. It is a category error. Demonstrating competence in one decision-making setting does not establish capacity for a fundamentally different situation. Clinical research can itself involve serious risks; the point is not that a medical decision is trivial. It is that sexual contact with an adult presents different legal duties, adult interests, power imbalances and risks of manipulation, without the safeguards of supervised research and parental consent. Adolescents develop genuine understanding and agency. That does not transfer to them the responsibility that properly belongs to adults, or justify weakening criminal protections against adult–minor sexual contact.
The proposal also cites Leiden legal scholar Hoko Horii's discussion of age-of-consent law, crediting her with explaining the tension between harm prevention and autonomy. Horii advances a serious critique of laws that may punish adolescent conduct without adequately examining exploitation, harm or power. Her paper is not merely descriptive. Yet she states expressly: "I am not arguing for the abolition of statutory age of consent law." That is a crucial distinction between what an academic argues and the particular proposal later advanced by people citing that academic.
We can trace the direction of a citation: the advocates used the scholarship. We cannot infer from that citation that the scholar approved the proposal, helped draft it or intended the use made of her work.
What does the evidence say about harm?
Another argument in the 2024 proposal is that contact between adults and adolescents should not be presumed harmful, drawing in part on disputed research associated with Bruce Rind and colleagues. Their 1998 meta-analysis examined college samples and challenged assumptions about reported outcomes. Its methodology, sampling and generalisability became subjects of substantial scholarly dispute, and in July 1999 the United States Congress formally condemned its suggestion that sexual relationships between adults and "willing" children might be less harmful than believed. The 2024 proposal cites that condemnation as evidence of persecution. A resolution of Congress is a political act, not a scientific refutation, and I do not rely on it as one.
That line of research has continued in mainstream venues. In 2023, Rind published in Archives of Sexual Behavior an analysis of a German national survey of how adolescents and young adults remembered their first intercourse. It measured retrospective feelings, not harm. Even on that measure, girls whose first partner was an adult man were the least favourable group, with 47 per cent recalling the experience negatively and 32 per cent positively. The study's publication in a peer-reviewed journal makes it part of the academic record, but it does not establish institutional endorsement of the legal reforms advocated by those citing it. More importantly, its own figures do not provide the reassurance those advocates seek to draw from such research.
It would be wrong to suggest that every person subjected to childhood sexual abuse reports the same symptoms, or that observational associations by themselves resolve every question of cause. Individual experiences differ, and scientific precision matters here too.
But the broader evidence cannot be reduced to selected reports of people who did not retrospectively describe an experience as harmful. A 2019 umbrella review of nineteen meta-analyses, drawing on 559 primary studies and 4,089,547 participants, found associations between childhood sexual abuse and 26 of 28 examined adverse outcomes. The authors acknowledged variation in study quality and the limits of observational evidence; the reviews on post-traumatic stress disorder were among those meeting high-quality standards. This body of research is not a study of every possible adolescent-adult relationship in identical circumstances, but it gives no basis for presenting adult-minor sexual contact as generally safe.
The Australian evidence points the same way. The Australian Child Maltreatment Study, published in 2023 from a nationally representative sample of 8,500 Australians, found that 28.5 per cent had experienced sexual abuse before the age of eighteen, and that sexual abuse was strongly associated with mental disorders including major depression and generalised anxiety. These are not abstractions imported from elsewhere. They describe the people we sit beside in church, at work and at home.
There is a deeper error in requiring a child to demonstrate measurable injury before an adult's conduct can be judged impermissible. Age-based protections are preventive safeguards: they recognise foreseeable vulnerability, unequal power and the risk of exploitation. They are not contingent on every individual case producing the same symptoms or on a child proving the full extent of injury afterward.
The academic vocabulary debate is contested
Australian researchers Christina Farmer, Michael Salter and Delanie Woodlock reviewed thirty papers published between 2015 and 2023 that used the expression "minor-attracted person". They note that the term "originated within online pro-pedophile groups" before being adopted by some academics as a neutral alternative, and they conclude that, without adequate self-reflexivity, "academic collaborations with pro-pedophile groups can produce work that minimizes the risk and harm of child sexual abuse." Their concerns include terminology drawn from advocacy communities, recruitment of research participants through those communities and the assumptions that can accompany such practices.
Mu's own account of the term is consistent with that origin. Its FAQ traces the label to MAP activists in the 2000s and says that academics and the community came to prefer it partly because "it didn't carry the same stigma." The organisation also offers its "help to journalists and academics who want to learn more." On where the vocabulary came from, the critics and the advocates agree.
That interpretation has been contested. Craig Harper, Rebecca Lievesley and six co-authors argued that the review mischaracterised parts of the literature and failed sufficiently to distinguish prevention research from advocacy. Salter, Woodlock and Farmer replied, defending their methods and their concern about the origins and use of the terminology.
Readers should know that the debate exists. Research aimed at understanding attraction, identifying risk and preventing sexual offending can serve a legitimate child-protection purpose; it is not, by virtue of its subject or terminology, advocacy for sexual contact with children. Equally, research methods deserve scrutiny, including recruitment through advocacy communities, sample selection, funding disclosure and the assumptions embedded in key terms. A claimed prevention purpose does not establish methodological reliability, and criticism of a study does not make its participants criminals.
A more recent Australian controversy illustrates why the language used in child sexual abuse prevention deserves careful scrutiny. In November 2026, The Daily Declaration reported growing criticism of material associated with Stop It Now! Australia, a federally funded prevention service delivered by Jesuit Social Services.
Critics questioned whether language encouraging self-acceptance among people experiencing sexual attractions towards children, including material linked from a UK-based service, risked normalising those attractions rather than sufficiently emphasising moral responsibility and restraint. The concerns deserve examination, particularly where public funding and the protection of vulnerable children are involved.
The service, however, has a legitimate preventive purpose, arising from recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Its published guidance discourages deliberately engaging in sexual fantasies involving children, while its frequently asked questions explicitly affirm that children cannot consent to sexual activity with adults. I have found no evidence that the service advocates weakening age-of-consent laws.
Nevertheless, compassion for those struggling with harmful sexual interests must never be confused with moral acceptance of exploiting children. The question for publicly funded prevention programs is whether their language, methods and measurable outcomes consistently reinforce that distinction, and whether independent scrutiny provides sufficient assurance that children are being protected.
Does any of this reach Australian law?
My investigation has identified genuine historical campaigns, a contemporary proposal, publicly acknowledged online relationships and identifiable academic citations. I have not found documentary evidence that Mu, Newgon or Yesmap has secured an Australian age-of-consent amendment, or that major philanthropic grants have been designated to finance the 2024 proposal. That is a limit on what I can report, not a claim that every private contact is publicly visible.
In earlier reporting, including Who Funds the Redefinition of Sex?, I traced how philanthropy, advocacy and institutional relationships can form an identifiable pathway into Australian legal debates. That work does not entitle me to transfer the same funding allegation to a different set of organisations. A donor's support for human rights, sexuality research or abuse prevention is not proof that the donor financed advocacy to permit adult sexual contact with children.
Australia does not have a single national age-of-consent law. The legal age is sixteen in six jurisdictions and seventeen in South Australia and Tasmania, with differing provisions and exceptions. The Australian Institute of Family Studies provides a useful comparison. Commonwealth legislation offers additional protections through the Criminal Code Act 1995, particularly concerning child sexual exploitation overseas and offences involving online grooming and abuse material. However, ordinary age-of-consent offences within Australia remain primarily matters for state and territory law. Any proposal to weaken those protections must therefore be examined against the legislation of the particular jurisdiction concerned.
This is also where the Australian legal boundary must be described accurately. Section 49 of South Australia's Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 makes sexual intercourse with a person under fourteen an offence carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, and sexual intercourse with a person under seventeen an offence carrying a maximum of fifteen years. Its limited defence under subsection (4) applies only where the younger person is at least sixteen and the accused was under seventeen or held a reasonable belief that the younger person was seventeen or older. Separate provisions protect people under eighteen where the other person occupies a specified position of authority, including teachers and religious leaders. Crucially, subsection 49(7) provides that the young person's consent is not a defence to an offence under that section.
Set against the September 2024 proposal, the contrast is stark. Sexual intercourse by an adult with a twelve-year-old is an offence under South Australian law carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment; the child's purported agreement cannot serve as a defence. South Australia has no comparable similar-age defence for children under sixteen under section 49. France's 2021 reform establishes a related protective principle for specified adult–under-fifteen offences, but through a different legal framework and with an age-gap threshold and exceptions. The statutes should not be presented as identical. Both nevertheless show why a child's apparent willingness need not determine whether the law protects that child.
There is a difference between an exception designed to avoid disproportionate treatment of peers and a legal entitlement for adults to pursue much younger adolescents. Neither legal discretion nor a defence for specified circumstances means that the law positively encourages teenagers to become sexually active.
Teaching a child to say no is not the same as making consent the whole ethic
This distinction matters outside the courtroom too. The National Office for Child Safety teaches children that they may refuse unwanted touching and explains expressly that children cannot consent to sexual activity with adults, even if they appear to say yes. That is a protective message, not an argument for weakening age-of-consent law.
The International Commission of Jurists likewise clarified that its 8 March Principles did not call for abolishing statutory minimum ages or decriminalising sex with children. The Principles' discussion of factual agreement and legal consent still deserves legal analysis, including careful attention to how exceptions operate, but the institution's express clarification cannot responsibly be omitted.
We have a separate and legitimate debate about what children should be taught in schools, at what ages, and with what parental knowledge. I have explored the underlying questions in Who Shapes the Child? The full audit of curricula, providers and public funding belongs in another investigation. Here, it would be a serious error to imply that teaching bodily boundaries is evidence of coordination with advocates seeking adult sexual access to children.
Yet I do not think teaching children to negotiate permission exhausts the adult responsibility to guide them. Consider a hypothetical twelve-year-old exposed to pornography who asks a ten-year-old to imitate something he has seen. The younger child's apparent willingness would not resolve the questions of maturity, power, safety or understanding. Both children may need protection and appropriate support. Nor would this example prove that pornography caused the behaviour in any particular case.
It is worth noticing what the 2024 proposal says on this point. It blames "the low quality of sex education that is driven by conservatism and adult anxiety about sex", and calls for teaching focused on "healthy sex practices instead of outdated and impractical notions of abstinence and purity." I have seen no evidence that Australian curricula draw on that document, and I do not attribute its view to Australian educators. But it does tell me which teaching the advocates themselves regard as an obstacle. If a proposal seeking to permit adult sexual contact with twelve-year-olds explicitly rejects abstinence and purity as outdated, Christian parents are entitled to ask whether chastity, self-restraint and the freedom to postpone sexual intimacy are receiving the positive attention they deserve in contemporary education.
What, then, are we teaching children positively? Not simply that they can say no to an unwanted act, important as that is, but that they may say no to sexual activity itself; that patience and self-restraint are strengths; and that physical capacity, curiosity or peer approval do not create an obligation to become sexually active. These are meaningful educational questions even for families that do not share my faith.
Within Orthodox Christianity, and across Roman Catholic and many Protestant traditions, chastity is part of a larger understanding of the human person. Marriage is intended as faithful, lifelong, self-giving union between a man and a woman, not a licence to demand intimacy. Those called to marriage are asked to practise fidelity and sacrificial love; those outside marriage are not lesser people. In neither case is desire, authority or another person's acquiescence the final measure of what is good.
That is a moral argument, openly stated as such. It does not substitute for proof about what any named organisation did or intended.
Where the boundary should hold
The historical record tells us that people have sought to dismantle protections for children, sometimes openly, sometimes while seeking legitimacy through established organisations. The contemporary record shows that the argument has not disappeared. But it also shows institutions rejecting that argument, researchers disagreeing about what their evidence supports and legal systems preserving protections that mere agreement cannot displace.
I do not believe the answer is to assume a hidden plan wherever we find an unsettling concept. Nor is it to dismiss a demonstrable proposal because its authors are obscure or its implications uncomfortable. I am not describing a plot. I am describing an argument that keeps returning in the same shape, and institutions that have had to decide, again and again, how much room to give it. We should inspect the original words, trace the actual relationships, distinguish institutional access from institutional approval and look for the point, if any, at which advocacy became policy.
Every person in this story bears the image of God: the children whose protection is at issue, the survivors whose experiences have too often been argued over, the men and women who experience attractions they did not choose and do not act upon, and those who argue publicly for changing the law. None is reducible to the worst thing they have said or done. That conviction is why I can reject the argument without despising the person. Dignity does not license desire. It calls each of us, whatever our inclinations, to restraint for the sake of those more vulnerable than ourselves.
The final question is one of responsibility. Children are not miniature adults whose dignity depends on proving that they can make decisions on adult terms. They are persons made in the image of God, entrusted to adults who owe them protection, honesty and moral care. For me that duty begins in the family, reaches into the school and the church, and extends to legislators and institutions wielding public power.
When someone proposes moving the boundary that protects a child, I want to know who is asking, what evidence they are using, what authority is being sought and who would be answerable if protection fails. Why should a twelve-year-old be made to carry the burden of demonstrating resistance when South Australian law has already placed an independent duty on adults?
What should organisations publishing proposals to weaken age-based safeguards be willing to disclose about their editorial decisions, their legal objectives and their funding? And what are we teaching children, positively, about the worth of waiting? None of these questions requires us to presume guilt or invent a hidden network. All of them require us to take children seriously.
“Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me.” — Mark 9:37 (KJV)
Coming next in the Protecting Childhood series: Beyond Consent — Teaching Children the Freedom to Say No
If the law is intended to protect children from exploitation, what are we teaching them about the choices they face before those legal boundaries are ever tested?
In the next article, we move beyond legislation to examine how children are being taught about consent, relationships and sexual activity, and whether we have neglected something fundamental: the freedom to say no, the virtue of self-restraint, and the responsibility of adults to guide and protect them.
Thanks for reading.
God Bless
Mark.
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