Pierre Verdrager

Pierre Verdrager (b. 1970), is an independent sociology researcher. His research has focused on homosexuality, the epistemology of the social sciences, and the sociology of culture. His 2013 book L'enfant interdit: Comment la pédophilie est devenue scandaleuse ("The Forbidden Child: How Pedophilia Became Scandalous"), studied how positive, non-sensationalist and non-condemnatory discourses around pedophilia were tolerated in the late 1970s until the mid-1990s. The book has yet to be translated to English, but the preface has been translated alongside English-language discussion and criticism from a pro-c and MAP-friendly perspective. A second edition was published in 2021.

To our knowledge, he is a part-time librarian, and a volunteer associate researcher at the Centre for Research on Social Links (CERLIS) at the University of Paris-Descartes.

"The Forbidden Child" initially received little response outside of the MAP community and academic outlets. In 2020, however, when the Gabriel Matzneff affair erupted, the historical fact of dissident, critical, and open-minded thought among French intellectuals and French LGBTQ+ groups towards the social construction of pedophilia, pederasty, and child sexuality that the book documents, became widely known and discussed. The book discusses influential thinkers such as Michel Foucault, philosopher René Schérer, his former loved-boy and lifelong companion co-author Guy Hocquenghem, and the writer Tony Duvert.

The Forbidden Child

Verdrager dates the end of this tolerant literary / philosophical milieu to the mid-1990s, when the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) in 1994 ceded to pressure from the U.S. government, to exclude associations that expressed support for NAMBLA and/or mutually willing minor-older age-gap sex. In France, the Marc Dutroux affair, involving the brutal rape and murder of multiple young girls who had been kidnapped and held captive in a makeshift dungeon, saw an outcry against what many in the public and media interpreted as "paedophilia." Some dissident thought persisted, such as Philippe Sollers' L'infini magazine publishing a collection on the subject - Retour en enfance: La question pédophile (Back to childhood: The pedophile question) - intended to be "far from the climate of lynching and generalized right-[wing?] thinking." The review published the Answers from some forty writers and intellectuals to the following questionnaire:

• "I. How do you explain the impact of the Dutroux affair?
• II. What do you think we call a child today? What is a pedophile?
• III. Did you, as a minor, have you had a romantic relationship with an adult and what memories do you have of it? Do you personally have any memories of childhood sexuality?
• IV. Do you think that the specialists and spokespeople for children tell us everything? Do you have anything to add?"

Among the testimonies, framed by two contributions by Philippe Sollers and the lawyer Henri Leclerc, are those of Renaud Camus, René de Ceccaty, Roger Dadoun, Marie Darrieussecq, Florence Dupont, Annie Ernaux, Bernard Faucon, Philippe Forest, Jean-Luc Hennig, Jacques Henric, Michel Houellebecq, Alain Jouffroy, Mathieu Lindon, Gabriel Matzneff, Patrick Mauriès, Dolminique Noguez, Michel Onfray and René Schérer.

However, from this point on, due to the actions of one extreme rapist and sadist, perhaps a situational offender or perhaps a pedophile, a preferential attraction to children came to have an exaggerated associated with violence and murder, as opposed to love and affection.

Verdrager emphasizes the French journalist Jean-Luc Hennig, who even into the 2000s has stood-by their writings of the late 1970s, reaffirming that "a boy or girl of 13 or 14 knows how to love, whether he likes it or not."

According to French feminist author Maïa Mazaurette, in the ideological debates on the subject, pedophiles are supported both by the extreme right, which eroticizes asymmetrical relationships (perceived as aristocratic), and by part of the left fighting against patriarchy, the pedophile being seen as a "heroic savior of childhood" in the face of the pater familias.

For Verdrager, the context of the time was marked by the criticism of traditional values such as the domination of parents over children. The latter was called into question by the Children's Charter, a book by Philippe Alfonsi, Jean-Michel Desjeunes and Bertrand Boulin (1976). The 1976 charter proposed that the child be recognized as the equal of the adult and as a sexual being, the abolition of the offence of embezzlement of minors. It preceded by nine months, the first of the French petitions on the subject of age of consent reform, which were devoted to the Versailles affair.

See also

French MAP organizations:

• GRED
• CRIES