Tom O'Carroll's Publications

Thomas O'Carroll

This page archives the publications of Thomas Victor O'Carroll (born c. 1945), an Irish/British journalist, academic and advocate for MAPs, best known for being the most influential chairperson of the now defunct Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), and author of Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980). This page is a backup and secondary archive of a BoyWiki article, but includes more recent publications this page missed out.

Tom O'Carroll's Publications

1978: Paedophilia: Some Questions and Answers. Authored jointly with Keith Hose, former PIE Chair, and "John", a nominee of the partly government-funded Albany Trust, which commissioned the work but withdrew from publishing it after coming under attack from socially conservative campaigner Mary Whitehouse. This booklet was distributed by PIE to every Member of Parliament.

1978: Chemical castration, Gay Left 7, Winter 1978-9, pp. 37-8. See Activism, above, for more on the theme of this article.

1979: Is PIE sexist? Magpie 12, January 1979, pp.7-9

1979: Paedophilia: A Response, Gay Left 8, Summer 1979, pp.13-17

1980: Paedophilia: The Radical Case. Peter Owen Ltd, London, 1980 (hardback); Alyson Publications, Boston, Mass., 1982 (paperback). ISBN 0-7206-0546-6

1983: The Age Taboo, by Daniel Tsang: a review. This review has a colorful history: there were questions about it in UK Parliament. O'Carroll wrote the review while in Wandsworth Prison for conspiracy to corrupt public morals... The review was written on prison stationery, complete with his prisoner number, L20711, and sent as a letter to PIE member Charles Oxley, who later turned out to be the founding headmaster of a private school based on "old-fashioned moral values", and also an amateur spy. Oxley's efforts resulted in Eldon Griffiths MP raising the matter at Question Time in Parliament. On 11 November, Griffiths, Conservative Party spokesman for the Police Federation, asked Secretary of State Sir Patrick Mayhew whether paedophile literature was permitted in Her Majesty's prisons; and why a prisoner at Wandsworth was allowed to receive and review for publication..."a book on the subject of sexual intercourse with children". The question prompted an equivocal reply, and an apology on behalf of the prison governor. (Minor Problems 1, 15 April 1983, pp.10-11)

1993 A Jackson jury on the streets, NAMBLA Bulletin, 14(8):14-16,November 1993. This article was based on O'Carroll's own informal public opinion survey in relation to Michael Jackson's alleged sexual contact with young boys, a story that broke in August 1993 and was still dominating the tabloids months later. Already, O'Carroll was researching the book on Jackson that would eventually be published in 2010.

2000 Sexual Privacy for Paedophiles and Children, Symposium on Sexual Privacy at the annual meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research, Paris. O'Carroll was a speaker at the invitation of Dr. Richard Green, founder president of the International Academy of Sex Research IASR, and president for a second term in 2000.

2001 Is paedophilia violent? World Congress of Sexology, Paris. O'Carroll's proposed paper was given sustained encouragement over nearly a year by Dr. Marc Ganem, President of the WCS. However, the paper was eventually rejected without explanation by the organization's Scientific Committee. After repeated demands for an explanation went unanswered, O'Carroll was finally able to talk to Ganem. In a phone conversation, Ganem indicated that the President of the Scientific Committee, Dr. Willy Pasini, appeared to be concerned not about the scientific quality of the paper, but by the controversy to which it might give rise. It seems the committee did not want to upset the major pharmaceutical companies sponsoring the congress, nor the politically sensitive World Health Organization (WHO) with which it was associated. In order to combat this censorship, O'Carroll's supporters attended the congress, where they distributed his paper on a CD, along with a flyer titled Censored: The Speech They Didn't Want You To Hear.

2001 A gay view of 'child abuse': Review of The Abomination by Paul Golding.

2002 Sentencing in child pornography cases: A Response to the Sentencing Advisory Panel's Consultation Paper. This was a 55-page, detailed, extensively researched submission made in response to a call for submissions from the public. When the press got wind of it, though, a rather different impression was given. The Sunday Express headline (15 September 2002) was "Scandal of pervert on top legal panel". O'Carroll had never been a member of the panel. Reporter Luisa Metcalfe wrote: "The panel was set up by former Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1999 to encourage consistency in sentencing. Its softer sentencing advice to the Court of Appeal caused controversy last month." The implication is that O'Carroll's paper had influenced the judges, which had of course been his intention. In reality, though, the "softer" advice was very limited.

2002 Review of Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)

2003 'Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Super Ped!' Review of The Moralist by Rod Downey (Great Mirror Press, Ormond Beach, Florida, 2001)

2006 A wasted opportunity. Review of Be Careful Who You Love: Inside the Michael Jackson Case by Diane Dimond.

2006 Around Jackson, not ‘on’ him; Review of On Michael Jackson by Margo Jefferson.

2009 An epic voyage of non-discovery Review of The Michael Jackson Tapes: A Tragic Icon Reveals His Soul in Intimate Conversation, by Schmuley Boteach

2009 Aphrodite's new angle is just as slanted as her old one: Review of Michael Jackson Conspiracy by Aphrodite Jones.

2009 Brüno meets Jacko Review of Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson by Ian Halperin.

2010 Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons. Leicester: Troubador, ISBN 1848762267.

2011 Comment on The Role of Androphilia in the Psychosexual Development of Boys by David Riegel. International Journal of Sexual Health, 23:3,157-157

2011 Love is confoundedly complicated! Review of Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir, by Margaux Fragoso. O'Carroll brought this review in draft form to the attention of leading academics on a specialist online forum in December 2011, together with his views on a journal article by feminist philosopher Claudia Card. The forum, with access by invitation only, comprises nearly 400 scholars, mainly specialist academic researchers and clinicians in sex-related fields. A day of so later one of those academics, Michael Seto, author of the most authoritative recent book on paedophilia (Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children: Theory, Assessment, and Intervention, published in 2007 by the American Psychological Association) posted to express his appreciation of O'Carroll's "informative and thoughtful posts" over a sustained period. This could be seen as significant given that Seto is a leading world expert in, effectively, combating child sexual abuse. Unsurprisingly, Seto added that he and O'Carroll "may not agree on any number of points, but ..."

2012 Of Goode and evil; Review of Paedophiles in Society: Reflecting on Sexuality, Abuse and Hope, By Sarah D. Goode; Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2011. A review for the Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology, Humboldt University of Berlin.

2017 Review of Arthur P. Wolf: 'Incest Avoidance and the Incest Taboos, Two Aspects of Human Nature.' Sexuality & Culture 21, pp. 323–329.

2018 Childhood ‘Innocence’ is Not Ideal: Virtue Ethics and Child–Adult Sex. Sexuality & Culture 22, 1230–1262. An open-access publication which responds to a 2017 scholarly article by Agustin Malon, which had used virtue ethics rather than consequentialist, harm-based arguments, to attempt to reconcile past philosophical approaches which have failed to condemn age-gap sex and have granted that mutually willing sexual contact is not always harmful and can therefore be ethically permissible. O'Carroll's large article gained over 65,000 views, an enormous amount for a scholarly journal, and it is likely one of the most viewed article the journal has ever published.

2019 Review of The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development: Childhood and Adolescence, ed. by Sharon Lamb & Jen Gilbert (2018), Sexuality & Culture 24, 345–354.

2023 Commentary on the Book Entitled Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse by Nick Basannavar. Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-83147-9, Sexuality & Culture 28, 918–928.