1. A Journalist reported about Ipce

A Finish journalist, Matti Virtanen, has visited the Ipce Meeting in Berlin 2001. A new Finish member tells us that he was there to prepare a TV documentary that has been broadcasted in Finland. The new member was so kind to find and to translate the script of the documentary in short, but the Ipce part of it in full text. Here it follows. Some corrections have been made. 

We might remark that the text is nearly a good advertisement for Ipce, or at least a more or less objective report made by a critical journalist, not being a real member. 

It was a TV documentary by the Finnish state Broadcasting Company, the documentary series "MOT" by journalist Matti Virtanen (http://194.252.88.3/motweb.nsf/sivut/virtanen/  ), the man that was in Berlin. The program, titled "Child sex network", was aired in Finnish television on 9.10.2001.

The program "MOT" is famous for trying to create scandals, and not always checking their facts too well. Anyway, some of their documentaries have been very accurate and good and created very much discussion in Finland. The "Child sex network" program was not one of the better ones. The Berlin meeting was just one part of the program.

All the notes below are from the manuscript of the actual program, I found the manuscript at the following address (in Finnish) ( <  http://194.252.88.3/motweb.nsf/sivut/ohjelma?opendocument&pageid= Content53AB3 >) 

1. The program begins with a description of a man in Finland who tried to get money to monitor chat rooms for young people, he didn't get the money but turned out to be a child rapist...

2. The journalist goes in on a chat site and pretends to be a young girl, a man starts chatting with the "girl" and they arrange a meeting. The journalist phones the man and tells that it was a fake and interviews him. 

3. The journalist interviews Finnish and Swedish police and a representative for the Swedish "Save the Children" organization.

4. The journalist has found two Finnish internet sites with boy-love-content. He had e-mail contact with the webmasters of these sites and shows the sites on TV. One of the sites contains lots of pictures of boys in a Finnish school that can be identified. Just normal pictures. 

(The head master of the school actually arranged a crisis meeting for the parents after this program was aired, but the parents unanimously saw nothing wrong with the pictures and asked the headmaster to stop panicking! Anyway, both these internet sites went offline because of the program but today they are online again)

5. The Ipce-part of the manuscript

"Among the hundreds of pedophile internet sites that caught ones eye, there is one were the discussion is more legitimate. An organization called Ipce has collected a lot of literature on the subject. There are no pictures on the site and no links to child pornography.

It is possible to become a member of Ipce by application. We constructed a fake identity, a middle aged man who is interested in traveling and art photography. We produced an internet site for him and wrote a polite application for membership to the Dutch Ipce leader Frans.

He is a doctor of educational sciences with an extensive experience in helping troubled children. He has organized peer support group therapy in his home country Holland, with the idea to prevent pedophiles to sink into depression, commit suicide or engage in criminal activity. The results are said to be good: the risk of repeated offence in abuse crimes is lower than in forced therapy conducted by psychiatrists or psychologists.

Our fake internet site was good enough for admittance into Ipce. For a membership fee of 20 Euros we were allowed to participate in the discussions by the elite of pedophiles, at first through e-mail and later in real life.

The annual Ipce meeting was held in June in Berlin. About 20 pedophiles from different parts of the world gathered at a hotel favored by backpackers. Among them several doctors; medical doctors, sociologists, former teachers, several computer specialists, students and a couple of journalists. The vast majority presented themselves as boy lovers, but there was also some who likes small girls more. To this category can we also count the only woman in the group.

I tried to be as open as possible, I admitted to being a journalist, but I did not admit that I was doing a documentary for television. Regardless of this, my presence was rightfully considered suspicious. I also did not have the nerve to speak about my own sexuality, because I did not want to be under suspicion for being abnormal.

Filming or recording of the meeting was out of the question. The following is based on my notes.

[...] The organization used to operate under the gay and lesbian organization ILGA, but was thrown out in the end of the eighties.

The beginning of the meeting resembles very much a therapy session where everyone tells there life story and the happy and not so happy moments from the last year.

There are not many happy moments to tell about. Almost all the participants have at some point been in trouble with the law, even if they, according to themselves, have never done anything wrong to the children. So, how have they become pedophiles? Almost everyone say that they were born this way. This leads to the conclusion that the problems are to a great extent caused by society, who judges and limits the sexuality of children and "intergenerational relationships", as they are defined. One of the participants tells that he has been trying to commit suicide recently.

Many of the participants have been forced to move abroad because of the bad publicity they have got at home. Especially the English speaking countries seem to be distressing places for pedophiles. In the UK and USA the mentality is very close to witch hunt. Germany and Holland are considered to be more open minded.

Lets take a minor sexual offense as an example: masturbation in the presence of small boys at a summer camp. In Germany you get away with a fine of few thousand Euros, whereas in the US you can go to jail for several years for the same offence. 

The results of scientific research interest the participants. The discussion is especially intense about an article in the publication of the American Psychologist Union. The article concludes that sexual contacts between adults and children are not at all so damaging to the child as is generally thought. Especially for boys these encounters are often positive or make no difference to the boy. 

Unfortunately the American psychologist society has withdrawn its support for the article as a reaction to political pressure. There is disapproving at the meeting: the freedom of research is in danger if the editor of a scientific publication acts on the basis of moral hysteria.

Another interesting research have shown that as much as 25% of normal men get excited by child porn. If this is the case, pedophiles can consider themselves almost normal.

During the Ipce meeting there is also an interesting discussion about ethics. Chair Frans presents his principle: the child has to make the first move and the child always has to have the right to end the relationship. Sex is never a trade issue, i.e. it is wrong to buy a child. It is also wrong to ask the child to keep unreasonable secrets.

The chair thinks that the last point is most difficult, because the culture we live in considers a sexual relationship between an adult and a child unquestionably wrong. He recommends abstinence from sex with children for all pedophiles.

At the meeting the UK journalist Tom O'Carrol was also present, who's book from 20 years ago is the "bible" for pedophile activists. He thinks its unreasonable to tell all young pedophiles that they will never have a chance to fulfil their dreams. If a minor participates in sex out of own will and the sex does not harm him or her, what wrong could there be?

The meeting also closes the accounts and approves the budget. At the end of the meeting the host organisations pedophile groups present themselves. There are peer groups according to the self-help model in almost every bigger city in Germany.

The discussion is continued in the evening at a restaurant in Berlin. I wait in vain for the discussion to turn to child contacts or distribution of child porn. Ipce is an organization for responsible pedophiles and there are nothing illegal going on at the meetings.

The weekend at the pedophile meeting was confusing to me. The thing that bothered me the most was that there seemed to be no doubt what so ever among the participants that children want sex. If this assumption is proven wrong, the logic of the pedophile activists will collapse like a house of cards."