Leonardo Arce Vidal

Leonardo Arce Vidal (photo taken from one of his online academic profiles)

Leonardo Alfonso Arce Vidal, or Leonardo Arce, is a scholar associated with the University of Chile who has written philosophical academic works problematizing the figure of the pedophile. He completed his MA thesis Pedophiles and infants: folds and folds of desire in 2016, with his advisor/supervisor being Olga Grau Duhart (born September 21, 1945), a full professor and philosopher who specializes in gender, sexuality and childhood studies. At the University of Chile, she is the coordinator of the Philosophy for Children program and director of the " Comunidad de Indagación en Filosofía e Infancia en Chile" (CIFICH) (Community of Inquiry in Philosophy and Childhood in Chile).

Arce has also written Pedophilia and childhood: a possible relationship? in 2016. Along with the 2020 BA student thesis of Mauricio Quiroz Muñoz entitled "The pedagogue's denied wish: being a pedophile", supervised by Marcia Ravelo Medina, both Arce and Muñoz became the subject of twitter cancellation and university investigation in 2023. Arce's 206-page thesis was attacked for being:

Dedicated to boys and girls with a restless desire, so that they can ever touch and be touched without fear or guilt. To pedophiles with guilty desire, so that they exorcise their discomfort and their fears for loving those they love.

The theses went viral online, with university figures condemning the works while an official statement argued, as one article put it, after

admitting that the issues addressed are "highly sensitive" and that "they allude to a reality that always deserves the most serious and respectful approach possible as a matter of study, the institution assured that "we consider that the aforementioned investigations correspond to academic works of a purely theoretical nature, which do not report intervention on human populations , and which, even taking into account how debatable their content turns out to be, met the requirements of the academic evaluation process, according to what is established and what was required by the academic commissions that at the time were in charge of the respective task.

Our commitment and challenge as a faculty will be to duly investigate what happened, to establish the responsibilities that could be established and redouble our efforts to systematically review the actions that ensure the integrity of research and teaching, in unrestricted attention to your ethical dimension and our social responsibility," added the note.

Arce and his supervisor have received death threats at their publicly available email addresses and are currently subject to university investigation. While abstracts can be read at the links provided, the two student theses of Arce and Muñoz are no longer publicly accessible via the university's online repository. Two articles by Leonardo Arce are available to download via google scholar.