Tom O'Carroll

Thomas Victor O'Carroll (born 8 August 1945) is an English writer (with dual Irish/British nationality),^[1] paedophilia and paederasty advocate, and convicted distributor of child pornography.^[2][3] O'Carroll is a former chairman of the now disbanded Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and was at one time a prominent member of the International Paedophile and Child Emancipation (now known as Ipce).

Earlier life

O'Carroll was working as a press officer for the Open University in the 1970s when he was told of PIE's existence after coming out as a paedophile to lesbian members of the OU Women's Group. At that time, he was editor of the OU staff newspaper Open House and had been covering a Women's Group meeting on homosexuality.^[4] His activism with PIE cost him his job at the OU, and he was dismissed in February 1978. O'Carroll appealed to an industrial tribunal which ruled in May 1979 rejecting his complaint as he had placed himself in a position which meant that he could not do his job effectively because of his connection to PIE.^[5] At the time O'Carroll sat on NCCL's sub-committee for gay rights.^[6] Although PIE had campaigned for the age of consent to be lowered to 4 years old, O'Carroll stated that his personal view is that full sexual relations should be allowed at 12.^[7]

O'Carroll's book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case, was published in 1980. "I am not interested in why I am a paedophile", he writes "any more than others are interested in why they are 'normal'."^[8] He advocates the normalisation of some adult-child sexual relationships. O'Carroll asserts his belief that each stage of the sexual relationship between an adult and child can be "negotiated", with "hints and signals, verbal and non-verbal, by which each indicates to the other what is acceptable and what is not... the man might start by saying what pretty knickers the girl was wearing, and he would be far more likely to proceed to the next stage of negotiation if she seemed pleased by the remark".^[9] The book gained mainstream reviews which were either scathingly dismissive^[8][10][11] or sympathetic.^[12][13]

In 1981, O'Carroll was convicted for conspiracy to corrupt public morals over the contact ads section of the PIE magazine and was imprisoned for two years.^[14] A barrister in the case, Peter Thornton, later a QC and senior circuit judge, wrote about it the following year in Rights, the newsletter of the National Council for Civil Liberties (later Liberty). Thornton was critical of the charges, which he said had been "too remote from any tangible misdemeanour" and he suggested that O'Carroll had been convicted on little evidence.^[15]

Since 2002

In 2002, O'Carroll was temporarily found guilty of evading a prohibition on the importation of indecent photographs of children from Qatar. He was given a nine-month sentence on the basis of three images, a sentence later overturned by the Court of Appeal which held that the trial judge had been overly influenced by O'Carroll's campaigning. The photos were described in the ruling as having "the quality of indecency in the context in which they were taken, but were of the kind that parents might take of their children entirely innocently".^[16]

In 2003, he made an extended appearance on the TV discussion programme After Dark, alongside, among others, Jeremy Coid, Christian Wolmar and Esther Rantzen.

O'Carroll was convicted in 2006 of conspiring to distribute indecent photographs of children after supplying an undercover Met police officer with a cache of child pornography obtained from his co-defendant Michael John De Clare Studdert's vault of 50,000 pornographic images.^[17][18][19] He was arraigned 1 June 2006 on child pornography charges.^[20][21] In September 2006, he admitted to two counts of distributing indecent images of children.^[20] On 20 December 2006, he was jailed for 2½ years at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court.^[2][3]

After a gestation of many years, O'Carroll's book on singer Michael Jackson was published in 2010 under the pen name Carl Toms.^[22] Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons, concerns the entertainer's intimate relationships with young boys. It was published in the UK by Troubador.^[23]

After publication, J. Michael Bailey, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, gave high praise in a review for the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Describing the author as "an unapologetic pedophile", Bailey observed that the book takes "a pro-pedophilic stance" and argues "persuasively" that Jackson was "almost certainly pedophilic". Bailey wrote, "The idea that pedophilic relationships can be harmless or even beneficial to children is disturbing to many people, including me." But, he continued, "O’Carroll argues against my intuitions and he argues well."^[24]

In 2010, O'Carroll's writing was affected following complaints to Amazon.com about a book by another author, Phillip R. Greaves, which encouraged sexual contact between adults and children. After a campaign by outraged Amazon readers, Amazon dropped the book, along with several other books that appeared to promote paedophilia, including O'Carroll's earlier book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case.^[25]

In December 2015, O'Carroll faced charges of indecent assault and gross indecency against two brothers aged 9 and 10. At Caernarfon Crown Court on the second day of his trial, O'Carroll pleaded guilty to one count of indecently assaulting one boy and one of gross indecency with the other. He was formally acquitted of the remaining counts. He was given a two-year prison sentence suspended for two years, placed on the sex offenders' register for ten years and made the subject of an indefinite sexual harm prevention order.^[26]

O'Carroll joined the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn became party leader in September 2015. When this became public knowledge on 16 February 2016, via a report in The Times, John Mann, the Labour Member of Parliament for Bassetlaw, and other party figures advocated his immediate expulsion.^[7] A Labour Party spokesman told ITV News a few hours later that O'Carroll had been suspended on the basis that he is a "safeguarding risk".^[27][28] The next day, the party confirmed that O'Carroll had been expelled.^[29]

Interviewed by Julie Bindel for a September 2015 article in Standpoint magazine, O'Carroll considers himself and others, such as Jimmy Savile, victims of contemporary moral attitudes.^[6]

References