Historically, attempts to change sexual impulses have included arousal reconditioning, which involves, essentially, getting men to masturbate to fantasies of their preferred target and then switching to something more socially acceptable right before climax. But there is also the opposite, like satiation training, where patients masturbate to fantasies over and over again until they are drained of desire.

I suggested to Letourneau that talk of sexual reconditioning strongly echoes the tactics of gay conversion therapy, a harmful and wholly unsuccessful pseudoscience, and she was quick to distance herself. “It’s a horrible legacy of psychology and psychiatry,” she agreed. “It seems kind of archaic, actually. And, frankly, ethically challenging to do with kids. So coming up with a viable way that is respectful of the person, the child and the parent, but also effective… I don’t know what that’s going to look like. I have no idea. I don’t want it to look like arousal reconditioning, I can tell you that.”

Dr. Klaus Beier doesn’t believe in sexual reconditioning. He leads the team behind Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a therapeutic program based in Germany that targets potential offenders. He believes that minor attraction is a fixed part of someone’s makeup, that it’s “fate and not choice.” His program is considered the global gold standard of preventive treatment, and its practitioners help adults manage their attraction to children rather than try to change it. “In my view, it’s not the inclination that’s a problem,” he said. “And I wouldn’t condemn the inclination, I’d condemn the behavior.” The program consists of weekly therapy sessions for up to 12 months. They favor cognitive behavioral therapy, but also offer libido-reducing medication, otherwise known as chemical castration, if a patient needs to reduce his sexual drive in order to benefit from treatment.

The cornerstone of the program, according to Beier, is confidentiality. Germany doesn’t have mandated reporting, and that, he said, makes it easier for men to seek treatment. The project’s aim is to bring as many undetected men forward as possible, which is more easily achieved when you remove the threat of punitive action. This includes men who have already molested a child in addition to non-offending pedophiles. In English, Dunkelfeld translates to “dark field.” Beier said most cases of child sexual abuse go unreported, and though it can be ethically challenging to suggest that sex offenders evade immediate prosecution, he and his colleagues believe that it’s better to bring them into the light for the sake of preventing further instances of abuse.

“Telling the police would not be the first step we would choose,” said Dunkelfeld’s research coordinator, Gerold Scherner. “If we know about this, we will talk about it frankly and openly: What happened? What can you do? How safe is the child?”

In the United States, researchers can apply for a Certificate of Confidentiality. These federal certificates, if granted, protect the privacy of research study participants and can offer temporary exemptions from mandatory reporting laws. But there has been only one certificate granted in the area of pedophilia research. Between 1977 and 1985, Dr. Gene Abel interviewed 561 unidentified sex offenders in order to better understand this under-researched population. No one has been given one since.

It’s a hard ask, but Letourneau is considering applying for a certificate when she launches her new program. She doesn’t know if she’ll have much luck. “I’d like to be able to include youth who have offended but who are undetected, and the reason for that is that if they’re undetected they’re gonna stay undetected,” she said. “Do you want them to get help or not? For my money, you really want to be working with the kids who have already started offending, because those are the ones most likely to offend again.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to see a therapist,” said Mike, a 21-year-old on the West Coast. “It’s just that I don’t feel that I can see a therapist.”

I had been speaking with Mike online for two months before he agreed to let me fly out and meet in person. We met in the parking lot of a local supermarket and wound up talking in front of a Starbucks. He is pale and slight, and has a long face dominated by high cheekbones, wide brown eyes and dark, curly hair. Unlike Adam, he is outwardly confident and unguarded; he talks fast, casually jumping from one topic to the next, and has no reservations about discussing his attraction to children. He explained that he maintains a clear distinction between those he feels sexually attracted to and those with whom he feels a close paternal bond. He told me he only feels an erotic pull to girls aged seven to 12, and that for two-to-six-year-olds it’s more of a protective, almost brotherly instinct. He said this is what makes him such a good preschool teacher.

He is currently studying child development, and substitute teaches part-time for a pre-kindergarten program. He plans to continue working with kids up to six when he graduates from college, and said his connection to children helps him relate to them better. “I’ve had people say, ‘If you don’t go into teaching you’re doing the world a disservice. Like, you’re brilliant, why would you not?’” he said. “I never felt like I shouldn’t be here, this is dangerous… Long-term maybe this is a bad idea, but in the moment, right now where I’m at, I’m fine.”

Mike first noticed his sexual interest in children at 13, when he developed a crush on a girl he used to babysit. She was around three at the time and would strip naked and run around the house. “I was aware of it but it was like, well, it will go away,” he said. “I’m 13, so I’m transitioning from girls without boobs to girls with boobs.” He said he never acted on it, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t tempted, admitting that he would find himself overcome with curiosity when he changed her diaper. “I’d want to touch her and that’s kind of as far as anything went,” he said.

When he started his teaching placement, he created a strict set of rules: staying away from the bathroom area where possible and avoiding any physical contact with the children. He said he would tense up when the more playful kids approached him for a hug. This wasn’t so much to keep the children safe, he told me, as to ensure people wouldn’t become wary of him. Which was something his dad warned him about when he first started. “He’s like, ‘People are going to be suspicious of you simply because you’re a guy. Don’t do anything stupid,’” he said. “And, honestly, I wonder if that had anything to do with it, because that kind of freaked me out.”

Adam asked Mike to be the first one to join the group in mid-2011, and they’ve communicated almost daily since. He said he’s not worried that Mike will abuse the children in his care, but he does wonder why he would leave himself open to temptation. “As much as I support Mike, and I’m definitely very close with him, his becoming a teacher is never something I’ve supported,” he said. “And not because I think he’d slip up, because I honestly believe very firmly that he wouldn’t, but I think he’s going to torture himself a lot in that position. I think that’s not going to make him very happy.”

Like Adam, Mike grew increasingly depressed while grappling with his desires. He never made active plans to commit suicide, but told me that he thought about it and knew what to do if the time came. “If I had a sawn-off shotgun, that would be it,” he said. “I don’t want to take pills because I could come back from that.” Ultimately, he felt he couldn’t kill himself and leave his family with no context for what he had done, and instead hoped that God would take care of matters for him. “But at the same time, I was still… It would be nice if I got hit by a car or I got really sick,” he said.

More than anyone else I spoke with, Mike seems like he could benefit from having a professional to talk to, and not just because of his proximity to children. I was taken by his urgent need to disclose information others might have a hard time expressing. Late one afternoon we were sitting in his car in the parking lot of a different shopping mall. After hours of conversation, I suggested that we wrap for the day and he flat-out refused, telling me in an uncharacteristically abrupt tone that he had to get it out. We continued speaking until the encroaching shadows finally met and turned to darkness, stopping only when the center’s cleaning staff began arriving for their night’s work.

In place of therapy, Mike leans on Adam and the group. They talk via email, text, telephone, and Skype, but their primary tool of communication is Gchat, where they can speak in groups or have multiple conversations at the same time. If arguments break out among members they look to Adam, their default leader, for advice.

In the beginning they were all pretty fragile, wrestling with this dark secret and what it meant for their futures. But once they’d exhausted talk of their attraction to children and the unique set of issues that come with it, they turned to far more routine topics: chatting about computer games or The Walking Dead, or sharing random YouTube clips.

Adam told me that sometimes they’d tease each other about peer-aged crushes, offering relationship advice and egging each other on to ask people out. “I talked to Mike a fair bit about dating. Partly about the guy I dated for a little while and partly about this girl in his class who he wanted to ask out. He’d find every excuse in the world not to do so, and I’d be supportive by trying to push him to take the leap,” he said. “We did talk about everyday things that most everyone else in the world has to deal with.”

James, 22, is another member of the group, and the only registered sex offender. In May 2011 he was convicted of indecent liberty with a minor and sent to prison. Adam was reluctant to break the group’s most fundamental rule by letting him join, but eventually became convinced of his commitment not to reoffend. Since then, they’ve grown close. “We talk about the obvious subject of being a pedophile, you can’t get around that,” James said, adding that it’s lost some of its urgency over the years. “We just think about it as if we’re both fans of this sports team. We sit there and talk about it in that same direction, but we can immediately turn around and talk about something else. To other people it’s a huge deal, but to us it’s just life. Life as it is. We’ve been living with it our whole lives.”

When I asked Adam to show me examples of their chats, he said they no longer keep records for security reasons. But, after some digging, he eventually found a handful of logs from the early days. The conversations in the documents he sent me veered from mundane to earnest, among them a discussion of whether shotacon or lolicon — manga and anime depictions of intergenerational sex — are morally acceptable alternatives to child porn. On several occasions it seemed like they were testing the waters with each other, admitting suspect behavior and then waiting for the other one to respond.

1:46 PM Mike: so you’re right i do have a problem i’ve started googling pictures of girls in their underwear and such on a regular basis so fucking awful 1:47 PM Adam: …you need to stop this before it’s too late if I can, so can you Mike: yeah ive even seen some CP show up in the results Adam: :o Mike: that was really disturbing it wasn’t serious Adam: did you look at it? Mike: no admittedly I kinda wanted to though 1:48 PM Adam: you need to stop

Adam’s group of young pedophiles isn’t the only such self-help resource on the internet. There is B4U-ACT, a Maryland-based outfit with around 100 subscribers, which offers peer support services to pedophiles and guidelines for accessing mental health providers who might be willing to help. However, the moderators of B4U-ACT claim that because they’re not a research organization they can’t say whether all instances of adult-child sex are intrinsically harmful. “But we do support and would advocate for minor-attracted people to live law-abiding lives,” said Matthew Hutton, the group’s spokesperson, who uses a pseudonym to protect his identity. “Even though we acknowledge the existence of research in the past that might say that some sort of contact between teenagers and older people might not be so harmful.”

This ambiguity made Adam and some others uncomfortable, and it’s why he didn’t stick around for long after signing up. A splinter group was formed, named Virtuous Pedophiles. Now the largest pedophile support group in the U.S., its 318 active members are clear in their belief that sex with children is wrong. The founders, Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin (also pseudonyms), both family men with children, enact this policy with tight moderation. If someone is seen to be voicing the opinion that minor sex is acceptable, he gets a warning. Repeat offenders are ousted from the group. The membership list is also restricted to those aged 18 and over, lest they be accused of wrongdoing.

While Adam contributes to discussions there from time to time, his focus remains on the young men who come to his own group for help. James, for one, speaks with a clear reverence for Adam. Though his status as a sex offender means he must attend court-mandated therapy, it is Adam and the others that he credits with helping keep him on the right path. It’s also not lost on him that, for everyone else, it is the only lifeline they have. “If they want help, if they want to be better, to try and fix their behavior and be a better person, he’s never given up on them,” he said. “He didn’t give up on me, he didn’t give up on Mike, he never gave up on any of us.”

When I told Professor Letourneau that I was in contact with a group of young, non-offending pedophiles, she seemed taken aback. In her 25 years in the field she’s had plenty of experience with juveniles who have abused children, but she had never met a pedophile who hasn’t. It seemed strange to me considering her line of work, but she explained that, because such pedophiles rarely come forward, researchers have no way of accessing this particular segment of the population. “I don’t know anyone else who has made it a goal to talk to young people who have an attraction to younger people,” she said.

I asked her if she’d like to be put in touch with the group, and she jumped at the chance. After speaking with four of them over the phone, which she described as “kind of a life-altering experience,” she flew out and met Adam face-to-face, and has been speaking with him regularly ever since. She said they have taught her things about pedophilia that she didn’t know before, and it’s giving her a clearer understanding of how these attractions develop. She’s now using this information to modify her proposed treatment plan and has brought Adam on as an official advisor.

“I’m not a teenage boy attracted to children, and so I don’t know what that experience is like,” she said. “They all describe years of just agonizing self-hatred, agonizing fear of being detected as having sexual interest in children, viewing themselves as monsters, being afraid to look for help… If they could have just turned to someone to talk about this, a professional who’s going to treat this objectively and see them as a person of worth, who’s going to know that they’re not bad kids, that they’re good kids but they have this aspect of them that they really need help controlling. That’s what they’re looking for and that’s what I hope we can provide.”

Adam’s input has helped expedite the pilot program she’s putting together, aimed at pedophiles aged 17 and under. If successful, it will provide the foundation for a comprehensive preventive model, which she hopes to eventually expand to include pedophiles of all ages, that will be rolled out online and to therapists across the country. Though it’s in the early planning stages, Letourneau imagines it will involve disabusing them of the notion that sex with children is ever appropriate, improving self-esteem in light of a situation that might not change, and strengthening social interaction with their peers. In many ways, it’s an extension of what Adam has been doing with his group for the past three years.

The last time I saw Adam in person we found ourselves sitting, once again, in his car. We had been talking for a few hours and were about to finish up when I asked him what it feels like to be not only a pedophile, but something of a pioneer. He paused for a moment before answering. “It’s one part of what defines me. You know, a small part of the puzzle,” he said. “Part of me is a pedophile but that’s not all I am. I’m also, I think, a very decent person in a lot of other ways. I’m definitely a very caring person… I have hobbies, I have interests, I have studies, and things like that all put together define who I am.”

This story was written by Luke Malone. It was edited by Mark Lotto, fact-checked by Hilary Elkins, and copy-edited by Lawrence Levi. Illustrations by Simon Prades. A version of this story first appeared on This American Life.

Read more: Editor Mark Lotto discusses the graphic nature of this story, and art director Erich Nagler talks about how to illustrate the most horrifying piece in the world.

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