Someone posted a question to Quora asking, “Pedophilia: What would you say to or ask a pedophile if you were face to face with him?”, and one woman who had first-hand experiences interacting with MAPs responds.

I’ll paste the full answer at the bottom of the post, but to summarize:

When she was 14 when she came across a forum for MAPs. Most were skeptical that she was actually a teenager and many told her to leave.

She kept reading and posting and started realizing that the many stereotypes about MAPs are not true, and that we come from all walks of life.

She slowly started gaining the trust of some users and was accepted into their chat room. She chatted a lot and made some friends, and eventually even starting having phone calls with one MAP. One thing led to another and she eventually met him and slept with him.

She doesn’t recall the experience as negative - in fact later she describes the MAPs as her friends and notes that not once did they harm her in any way. However the users had a negative reaction and berated both her and the MAP for this encounter. But nothing bad ever happened to the guy who met her, and now that it was confirmed that she was a teen girl and that she wasn’t out to harm them she started getting a lot more friends and phone calls.

They were happy to talk with her about anything and everything, and this helped her not feel alone anymore. She talks about how in some group calls her friends would say such loving things about her that it would even make her cry. She even sent some of them her address, and while they never went to her house they’d mail her gifts and stuff that she needed.

She attributed her desire to chat with MAPs to her having daddy issues and liking the attention these men gave her, but when she no longer yearned to be loved by anyone she decided to cut them off despite valuing their friendship.

She ends her story by answering the question and saying: “I’m sorry to tell you this, but we need to cut off contact in order for me to live a healthy life. I’ll delete your information, and I won’t ever retroactively decide to hurt you or hate you. I’m grateful you were my friend. I couldn’t have survived without you. Goodbye.”

That’s what makes her answer so heartbreaking. Clearly the MAPs whom she interacted with were an immensely positive influence in her life, and she made some great friendships that should have lasted a lifetime. And yet she felt that she needed to leave them behind.

Our society promotes such vile and unjustified hatred of MAPs that even in a situation like this, where MAPs were loving and supportive friends for many years and where she describes them as having saved her life, she still felt that there was something inherently “wrong” about their relationship. That she needed to move on to have a truly healthy life, because a healthy life cannot include MAPs.

Both her and those MAPs lost loving friends because our society is completely backwards, and that makes me immensely angry and sad.

Anyways, here’s the full text if you’d like to read for yourself:

Listen to me. I know.

I was a young teen wandering around on the internet, almost always unsupervised. I had a fascination with mental and psychological sickness and aberrance. It wasn’t a fondness for those things, not at all. I just found them mysterious in the same way you might find it mysterious when you wonder what it’s like for creatures that are born, live, and die in that dark, pressured land at the bottom of the ocean.

I don’t remember how, but I found a message board for pedophiles to congregate. No, not to share pics. No, not to write stories. No, not to tell tales of molesting. None of that.

To commiserate. To stop feeling alone.

I made up a username and wrote a post asking them what it felt like to be that way. I said I thought it was wrong to act on it but that I didn’t assume they acted on it. I said I knew it had to be horrible to deal with knowing everybody hated people like them. And I said I was a fourteen-year-old girl.

People who’ve never talked to a bunch of pedophiles have no idea how much they don’t want to hear someone say, “I’m a fourteen-year-old girl!” It’s the last thing most of them want. It means you’re either law enforcement, or you’re someone they might ruin their life by falling for.

Or that you’re too old to be automatically interesting, so they don’t care about you any more or less than they’d care about next person.

(There’s what they call the “AoA” - age of attraction. 14 is too old to fit within the AoA for many of them.)

Anyway, some humored me in my anthropological expedition. Others told me to go away. One guy with the username “lion” told me that if I was a real girl then he was a real majestic cat.

(He and I later on ended up friends. He was sheepish about that comment but always insisted it had been reasonable at the time.)

I found it all so… interesting. They didn’t seem at all like what I imagined. A mix if guys answering my questions blandly and guys telling me to go the fuck away? That wasn’t at all what I’d expected to find.

I kept posting. I read the things they said about how it hurt badly to hear their moms say every pedophile deserves to die. I read about the ones who found it bizarre that people assume pedophiles only like children and who had wives they loved. I read about the ones who were successful and hot and wondered why people think pedophiles are only physically repulsive men who live in their mummy’s basement and can’t get anyone their own age. About how they stayed attracted indefinitely to children who then grow up, the same way one might stay attracted to a spouse who started young and gorgeous and ended up, well, old and not gorgeous.

They taught me before anyone else that you don’t stop loving someone just because she grows older.

I kept posting. I mean, you know, anthropology! That’s all it was.

Right?

Well…

After I’d been posting a while, they let me into their chat room. They had rather weak requirements for who could get in. You just had to post long enough, often enough, and respectfully enough. I think it took me three weeks.

Wow, a teenage girl in the chat room!

As with my first post on the board, some were respectful and some wanted me to get the fuck out immediately. I was a stifling presence.

I imagine you think that, by “stifling”, I mean that around me they didn’t post porn images or whatever.

Dude, no. They never posted porn or anything close to it in that chat room. The rules were strict. It was meant to be a place for support, not a place for allowing or encouraging people to commit crimes. The rules were so strict that, months after I’d first joined, they kicked me out of the chat room one time for telling them I’d slept with a minor… even though I was one. That was simply an unacceptable thing to say one had done or would ever do, no matter who you were. I was miffed about getting banned for a week and told myself it was just because they were jealous, but it really wasn’t. I’d broken the rules.

So you’re wondering why I stuck around.

You’ve realized it stopped being just anthropological real early.

I stuck around because I was neglected at home.

Here, think about this: my crushes had always been older than me. I had daddy issues like crazy. In hindsight, I know that moment I showed up on that board it was all over for me. I was going to be hooked to those men who gave me attention.

I kept talking to them for that reason. Knowing that for some of them I (as a fourteen-year-old) was a wonderful, almost magical creature - I didn’t have to even do anything, my age was enough - felt so good. I’d never felt anything like it before in my life. I didn’t know what being loved felt like. I didn’t know I even deserved it. I didn’t know anyone could do that… Could love me. I think in those men I saw the potential to be loved. Finally.

I don’t think they knew that was why I stayed, and I didn’t either, but eventually they grew to trust me. I was constantly hanging around and chit chatting about everything under the sun, and after a while almost any faker runs out of patience. So they started, one by one, to believe I was a real teenage girl. (“And the wolves finally accepted me as their own,” the cheesy documentary would say.)

All it took was talking to one on the phone without me doing anything to hurt him. It was widely agreed that he was an idiot for giving me his real life number. People warned him, and they were a bit chilly to me, but they mostly stayed out of it. He and I talked a lot. Constantly. He said he loved me.

Yes, I was that girl who met a strange man from the internet and slept with him. Here’s how neglected I was: I was away from home with him for days without my parents noticing. Or caring. Whatever.

I wasn’t exactly impressed with his real life behavior and so I dumped him a few days later.

Everybody was up in arms. How could he have been so stupid? She could have been a cop! Even if she’s not, someone could find out and his life would be over!

I was a pariah for about a week.

They kept telling me off for endangering him.

And then nothing happened to him. Nothing at all. And they realized, holy shit, she’s real. Holy shit… she won’t hurt us.

…she won’t hurt us.

Many pedophiles have a warped and overgenerous views of young people’s capabilities to make autonomous, healthy decisions for themselves. They viewed my failure there as taking a legal risk, but didn’t question me about my assessment of what I was mature enough to handle. They mistakenly saw me as emotionally and psychologically equivalent to any adult. They were wrong, of course.

After that, nobody was wary of me anymore. I got more friends. More numbers. Lots of calls.

Calls all the time. You’re imagining they were asking sexual stuff of me, but they weren’t. They were just overjoyed that a non-pedophile who also happened to be a teenage girl found them to be human beings worthy of respect and care.

(Also I’m kind of fun to talk to. Am now, was then.)

I… I never had to be alone. No matter what hour of the day or night, no matter how trivial the topic I wanted to discuss, they’d be there, they’d listen. I read an entire book to one on the phone. Another let me sing off-key to him for hours. Others listened to me prattle endlessly about Harry Potter. Another was there when I stupidly ate a bunch of nutmeg and felt certain I was going to die.

They were always there.

Before, I’d had no one to be there for me. NOBODY. NOBODY.

Nobody.

They didn’t just listen to me though. I listened to them. I learned a shit ton about 401k’s, what it was like to have been alive when JFK was shot, and what it was like to feel a sort of love that is inherently wrong to act on. I was lonely, they were lonely. In that way, we matched.

They said about me, to each other, that I was a very smart girl and they were glad to know me and sorry I didn’t have better parents. They said I had been naive to trust them but they were glad I’d chosen them instead of assholes who might hurt me. They said they wished I’d agree to actually pay attention to my math classes but that it seemed impossible to convince me, so oh well.

How do I know what they said about me?

We got on the phone in groups of three or four sometimes, talking all night about anything and everything. Eventually I’d start to nod off. On those nights, their voices were my lullaby. On others, I pretended to fall asleep, breathing slowly and silently with the phone to my ear - they’d say my name over and over until they believed I was no longer awake to hear - and that’s when they said those things. The really loving things made me cry sometimes and so I had to gently set down the phone so my friends wouldn’t hear.

I gave several of them my home address. None ever showed up at my door. Instead they sent me mail and things. One of the presents was a box of books. One was a box of chocolates. Other things were random stuff I needed, but I don’t remember what. I sent a few of them thank you notes in return.

It went on like that for years. Bad things happened to me in those years but none of them were done to me by the pedophiles. I can’t know that none of these friends hurt a child, but I believe it to be true.

When I was nineteen I had finally reached a place in life where I no longer yearned to be loved by whoever, WHOEVER, would be kind to me. I ended my friendships with all of them, some of whom I loved dearly as human beings but knew I needed to let go of in order to live a healthy life, while letting all of them know I would get rid of their information and never use it to harm them.

One of their biggest fears had always been that I’d grow into an adult who regretted and hated my time knowing them.

What would I say to a pedophile?

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but we need to cut off contact in order for me to live a healthy life. I’ll delete your information, and I won’t ever retroactively decide to hurt you or hate you. I’m grateful you were my friend. I couldn’t have survived without you. Goodbye.”