Prostasia Foundation

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Logo, 2021

Prostasia Foundation is an American non-profit organization founded in San Fransisco, August 15, 2018.[1] The Foundation's activities include, but are not limited to the provision of public forums and funding/promotion of private chats for MAPs, the provision of child abuse prevention training and consultancy services to corporate and other clients, and grants for researchers. Prostasia Foundation has also been seen to carry out awareness-raising activities in the form of numerous public media and social media engagement campaigns.

As of May 2023, Prostasia's current Executive Director is Gilian Tenbergen, a Sexologist and CSA Preventionist.[2] Her predecessor was Jeremy Malcolm, a Trust and safety professional and intellectual property expert with prior experience at the EFF.[3]

Prostasia receives funding through crowd finance, memberships and anonymous donations (Bitcoin and Monero are options according to their website). They have also supposedly received money from an institutional investor.[4] Ultimately, with anonymous donation a possibility, there is no way of telling who their critical benefactors are, at this point.

MAP Support Club

See also MAP Support Club on the anti-c MAP Wiki.
An earnest view held by one moderator on Prostasia Forum

Prostasia is in public partnership with MAP Support Club[5], an online chat for MAPs who are committed to a non-offending lifestyle (NOMAPs). In October 2021, a member reported on Boychat.org, that chats were visited by 3-10 users at most times of day. A group administrator then clarified that MAP Support Club had over 100 active users.[6] MAP Support Club has posted a series of strict rules for participation. While most of these were said to act as a deterrent, the user did confirm there is a strict prohibition against advocacy for Age of Consent reform. Some of the rules follow:

  • 4. No talk about lowering Age of Consent (AoC), whatever it is where you live.
  • 5. No talk about adult-child sex being fundamentally OK and only harmful due to societal attitudes and reactions to its discovery, nor discussions of the topic. There are other places on the internet to have these discussions. This is not one of them.
  • 11. No images or videos of children if they would be arousing to an average pedophile (shirtless, swimsuit, underwear).
  • 12. No images or videos of children for the sake of sharing “cute” or “hot” kids. If relevant to an ongoing discussion, an occasional image will be allowed as long as it doesn't violate rule #11.
While the management of Prostasia has often faced controversies surrounding their "too soft" stance on MAPs, they have been known to rely on volunteers who have acted in threatening ways towards them. In this 2023 screencap, Alan ("Mya/Chie"), a moderator on Prostasia forum can be seen calling on hostile members of the public to report legally compliant pro-c accounts.

Rule #5 appears to be a prohibition against pro-c viewpoints, and could even be used against some clearly stated consequentialist anti-contact positions. However, what seems more realistic, is that topics such as consent reform are just deemed irrelevant and not discussed.

Open MAP Community and Pediverse are less-strict alternatives to MSC.

Controversies

Prostasia has been involved in a string of social media controversies concerning the "normalization" trope. They have also been attacked by abuse industry figureheads such as Michael Salter and John Carr. We cover examples that made the mainstream media, or became common social media talking points.

  • Prostasia has often come under-fire for positions taken by former communications spokesman, Noah Berlatsky. One often-repeated example is his piece in the New Republic, Child Sex Workers’ Biggest Threat: The Police.[7] Later attempts to scandalize Berlatsky as the former spokesman of a "pedophile advocacy" group after he wrote a Bloomberg hit piece on a film depicting Operation Underground Railroad, fell on deaf ears after only going so far as the conspiracy media and a feminist blog.[8]
  • There has been some confusion in Prostasia's messaging - whether minors as young as 13 are separated from adults in MAP Support Club's online chats. In reality, this is almost impossible to police.
  • Prostasia's defense of sex doll use among MAPs is seen as "unconventional" for a child protection charity, although use of dolls appears to be unrelated to offending, or otherwise underexplored.[9]
  • In early to mid November, 2021, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University, Allyn Walker received widespread coverage after partaking in an interview with Prostasia, advocating the destigmatization of pedophilia. At that point, Walker had written a book, published in June 2021.[10] Walker has since been hired by Johns Hopkins, and started work as a postdoctoral fellow for the Baltimore school on May 24, 2022.[11]
  • Early in 2023, Reduxx (an online radical feminist publication) published an article claiming to link various online profiles of Prostasia's general manager, alleging that he "admits to being a pedophile".[12]

Criticism from MAPs

Unusual angle and choice of marketing material

Since its inception, Prostasia has attracted a lot of mainstream attention throughout social media due to its unconventional anti-CSA messaging, which incorporates kink, BDSM and Sex Worker Rights with child protection. MAPs have also expressed incredulity towards the idea that said messaging is not intended to be deliberately provocative. This includes the choice of Noah Berlastsky (who no longer works at Prostasia) as a communications spokesman, a "Social Justice Warrior" and "Anti-Gamergater" whose Jewish background further triggered the alternative-right.

The forum section of Prostasia's website is run by volunteers, some of whom appear to support censorship and anti-MAP extremism.[13]

See also

References

  1. ↑ https://prostasia.org/event/official-launch/
  2. ↑ New Exec Director
  3. ↑ Jeremy Malcolm Bio
  4. ↑ https://archive.fo/0kSVP
  5. ↑ http://mapsupport.club
  6. ↑ https://boychat.org/messages/1579713.htm
  7. ↑ Bertlatsky: Child Sex Workers’ Biggest Threat: The Police
  8. ↑ Daily Wire: Berlatsky's Bloomberg Hit Piece
  9. ↑ Harper and Lievsley: Exploring the psychological characteristics and risk-related cognitions of individuals who own sex dolls
  10. ↑ Allyn Walker - Book and download link
  11. ↑ Johns Hopkins child sex abuse center hires trans professor, 34, who was forced to resign from Virginia school for DEFENDING pedophiles as 'minor attracted persons' (Daily Mail)
  12. ↑ EXCLUSIVE: Prostasia General Manager Used Pedophile Forum, Joked of “Trapping” Kids
  13. ↑ See for example, the before and after of a discussion focusing on the MAP Flag origin (comments by Jim removed without explanation). There appears to be disagreement among moderators over this - the comments were initially removed, reinstated, and then removed again.

External links

Retrieved from "https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/index.php?title=Prostasia_Foundation&oldid=29443"