Tom O'Carroll

Thomas Victor O'Carroll (born 1945) is a dual nationality Irish/British writer, activist for pedophilia and pedophilia advocacy, and a convicted distributor of child pornography. O 'Carroll is a former chairperson of the now defunct Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and was at one time a prominent member of IPCE, formerly known as International Paedophile and Child Emancipation.

In 1980 O'Carroll's book Paedophilia: The Radical Case was published, in which he advocates the normalization of some adult-child sexual relationships. In the book, O'Carroll states 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".

Reviewers of the book in the upmarket broadsheets and periodicals were sharply divided, ranging from scathingly dismissive to strongly supportive of the author, if not entirely of the "radical case" he had set out. The gay press was broadly sympathetic. Jim Monk in The Body Politic went so far as to say, "Someday there will be a school named after Tom O’Carroll". Response in the academic world was less immediate but more long-lived, with the book attracting over 90 Google Scholar citations. Sexologist Richard Green included O'Carroll's book as recommended reading for his criminology students at Cambridge University and in 2000 invited O'Carroll to speak at the annual meeting in Paris of the International Academy of Sex Research.

In 1981 O'Carroll was convicted for "conspiracy to corrupt public morals" over the contact ads section of the PIE magazine and was imprisoned. A barrister in the case, Peter Thornton, later a QC and senior circuit judge, wrote about it the following year in Rights, the journal 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. Also, Dan Franklin, who had edited Paedophilia: The Radical Case, wrote an afterword for the book’s American edition about O’Carroll’s two Old Bailey trials (the second followed a hung jury in the first) and imprisonment. Franklin, who later rose to become, in the words of a Guardian profile, “the publishing colossus behind Britain's superstar authors”, said the authorities had “shown themselves determined to punish this intelligent, articulate man to the limits of their power”. Franklin cited commentators of the time, including Alan Watkins in The Observer, who declared that O’Carroll had been penalised effectively for nothing more than campaigning to change the law.

Nor was this to be the end of O’Carroll’s legal travails. In 2002 he was again in trouble with the law, this time on charges 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 quashed 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". At the time, O'Carroll was working on a book about the musician Michael Jackson.

Later, O'Carroll was arrested once more on suspicion 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. He was arraigned 1 June 2006 on child porn charges. In September 2006, he admitted to two counts of distributing indecent images of children. On December 20, 2006, he was jailed for 2½ years at London’s Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court.

O'Carroll had been a working as a press officer with the Open University in the 1970s when he was told of PIE's existence after "coming out" as a pedophile 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. His subsequent activism with PIE cost him his job there following a blaze of adverse publicity. In 2003 he was a panellist in the TV discussion programme After Dark, chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. Fellow participant Esther Rantzen proposed on the basis of his views that O’Carroll should be committed to a mental hospital.

After a gestation of many years, O’Carroll’s book on Michael Jackson was published in 2010 under the pen name “Carl Toms”. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons, a 624-page work, essayed a comprehensive review of the late entertainer’s controversially intimate relationships with young boys. Published in the UK by Troubador (sic) Publishing Ltd, , the book received pre-publication endorsements from five professors: D. J. West, emeritus professor of clinical criminology, University of Cambridge; Richard Green, emeritus professor of psychiatry, UCLA; William Armstrong Percy III, professor of history, University of Massachusetts; Thomas K. Hubbard, professor of classics, University of Texas; and James R. Kincaid, professor of English, University of Southern California.

After publication, J. Michael Bailey, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, also gave high praise in a four-page review for the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Describing the author as “an unapologetic pedophile”, Prof. Bailey nevertheless advised potential readers to set aside any scepticism to which that might give rise. “The book,” he wrote, “is fascinating, challenging and discomfiting. Anyone wanting to understand Michael Jackson will need to read it.” Bailey noted that the book takes “a pro-pedophilic stance” and argues “persuasively” that Jackson was “almost certainly pedophilic”. Bailey, a family man, wrote, “The idea that pedophilic relationships can be harmless or even beneficial to children is disturbing to many people, including me.” But, he continued, “The lack of scientific evidence supporting my largely visceral reactions against pedophilic relationships has been one of the most surprising discoveries of my hopefully ongoing scientific education...O’Carroll argues against my intuitions and he argues well.”

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