“Fuck you, Claude!”, I blurted out in pained protest after being publicly shamed and humiliated by the global front runner in Artificial Intelligence.

AI tools famously flatter their users, but this time I was not the user but the used, and I definitely had not been flattered. I was one of five people in a discussion forum who, without warning, involuntarily found ourselves subjected to an AI evaluation, in which Claude’s legendary capabilities were harnessed to assess the quality of our contributions to the debate between us. And I had been judged harshly.

The stakes had been high in terms of potential influence because over 400 leading academic researchers, clinicians, journalists, and sundry other thought leaders were plugged into this tussle on the Sexnet forum (a private email group list), in which the other active participants were J Michael Bailey, professor of psychology, Thomas Hubbard, professor of classics (an expert on culturally normative pederasty in ancient Greece), Ian McPhail, CSA research psychologist, and Ethan Edwards, co-founder of Virtuous Pedophiles.

So, for me to do badly in a forum like this could have been disastrous. But it wasn’t. The good news is that it all came right in the end even though – bizarrely – the forum moderator required me to apologise to Claude! Let me explain.

We had been discussing a review of a new book, One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis – And What We Can Do to Stop It, by Elizabeth J. Letourneau and Luke Malone. Tom Hubbard had reviewed this book for the William A. Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies, of which he is the director. The Sexnet discussion began with his link to this review, along with the comment that “The book is not without some good points when it comes to the futility of our current punitive regime in the US. But the gross exaggerations conveyed in its title do a disservice to public understanding of this difficult issue.”

I hoped Sexnetters would discuss Hubbard’s excellent review, so I felt there was no need for me to say anything at this point. McPhail was the first to join in, but instead of discussing the review as a whole (which critiques not just the book but exposes the entire CSA industry as an ill-founded empire of bogus child protection claims), he chose to focus on defending the prevalence figures Hubbard had claimed were exaggerated.

Fair enough, numbers are of vital importance for intelligent social policy making, but to me the prevalence figures at issue were very familiar and boring terrain, trawled over dozens of times in the research literature. Far more interesting, in my view, were Hubbard’s revelations not about the amount of “CSA” but whether all, or even much, of this “child sexual abuse” can properly be called “abuse” at all. That depends on whether it is consensual (and intrinsically harmless) or not – a focus McPhail not only ignored but quickly soon showed himself desperate to avoid. After outlining his own prevalence calculations, and saying “Anyone can check my math”, he added, “there are some on Sexnet who take umbrage with using the phrase child sexual abuse, please don’t respond with that argument, make more substantive comments”.

So, there you have it. From his bully pulpit as an “expert” (self-declared as such in the course of this thread), McPhail was pre-emptively telling the few heretics on the forum we shouldn’t even think about challenging the concept of “CSA” because that would be an insubstantial waste of time. To me, his haughty dismissiveness was a red rag to a bull, but I held my fire for the moment. This thread was Hubbard’s baby. He was best placed to carry the debate forward.

But, as it turned out, Mike Bailey was next into the fray, chalking up a couple of sceptical questions for McPhail, who batted them away abruptly, at first saying he couldn’t see what Bailey was driving at and then, in a second response, complaining over Bailey’s lack of clarity.

Only then did Hubbard return, starting with some strikingly fulsome praise for McPhail’s work. It was the clearest of signs that he hoped for a polite, courteous discussion, in the best tradition of Sexnet and indeed of Heretic TOC. In further conciliatory fashion, he conceded that “much of the abuse is disgusting and inappropriate”, but then he moved onto more controversial terrain, saying that “less serious stuff like playful touching, watching naked kids in the shower, or soliciting photos online” must be differentiated from what most members of the public think of when they hear the “terrifying” phrase “child sexual abuse”. He added that he hoped for “a productive debate not just on the numbers, but how we represent the problem of CSA to an American public prone to media-driven panic over anything to do with minors and sex”.

Courteous or not, Hubbard’s line was clearly more than McPhail could stomach. Again, he moved to close down the debate, claiming Hubbard’s approach was unlikely to be productive, saying “We are already circling the drain”.  Adding, “Let’s remove the scare quotes from child sexual abuse”, he said: “If you want to relitigate arguments that some sexual behaviour with children should be legalized – just clearly say this and we can leave it there and avoid rehashing that debate.”

Bailey re-joins the discussion here, arguing for statistics that distinguish more harmful from less harmful types of sexual activity (thus implicitly backing Hubbard). Impatient with this, McPhail points out that his Global Perpetration Survey (which Hubbard had praised) had already asked questions along those lines. He set out a numbered list of no fewer than 18 of them, and said anyone wanting more should look at the full survey. But his present focus was confined to behaviours that were illegal. He was avoiding like the plague a fundamental discussion along the lines “What’s wrong with consensual so-called CSA?”

Hubbard again: “I am not impressed by arguments like ‘We are the experts’ or ‘This is the commonly accepted definition.’ The ‘experts’ are usually the people who have a professional or financial interest in maintaining a disciplinary status quo or inflating evidence to support their subfield in the fierce competition for research dollars.”

Quite so!

Also, in earlier exchanges, Hubbard queried McPhail’s mathematics – the figures the latter said anyone can check. Well, Hubbard did check them and explained why he thought they were wrong. Instead of giving a careful answer, McPhail just rudely shot back “No, you haven’t understood the math”.

Not smart! Hubbard then patiently and calmly explained his own reasoning, which looked sound to me but I didn’t give it much thought at the time because, as indicated above, these particular figures seemed relatively unimportant. I didn’t need to think about it, though, because this is where Ethan Edwards stepped up briefly for his excellent cameo, backing Hubbard’s calculations against McPhail’s.

Best of all, when the thread closed and Claude was called upon to evaluate, his judgement against McPhail was devastatingly decisive. You can see the entire AI evaluation, but first it is important to foreground Claude’s finding that McPhail was wildly wrong, giving him a prevalence figure that wasn’t even in the same ball park as the correct one. Claude said:

Hubbard and Ethan Edwards were right about Ian [McPhail’s] arithmetic, and Ian was wrong both times he waved it off. Ian’s 1.6% counts men who have ever offended, collected across about 60 years of adult life. He divided that count by the number of children in one 11-year age band (5–15) at a single moment. That makes the victimization rate about 5 times too high (105M men ÷ 19.5M children), and close to 10 times too high once you remember the children include both sexes.

Oops! So much for the expertise of the self-declared expert McFAIL!

But I’m getting ahead of myself slightly, as the thread had some way further to run before Claude was called upon for a verdict.  I was the next one to join in. I began by challenging McPhail’s call to remove the scare quotes from “child sexual abuse”. Why do that? I asked, saying CSA always was a dubious term and continues to be so. I pointed out that a leading figure in the field, Michael Seto, had admitted this in his book Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children, when he wrote:

The term [CSA] is not a good scientific term because it is not behavioral and is emotionally and morally loaded, implying harm to the child and the intent to exploit or harm on the part of the adult. It may not adequately describe sexual contacts between children and adults in which the child is not seriously harmed, [and] the adult believes that the sexual contact is part of a loving and caring relationship rather than an attempt to exploit the child, or the child initiates the sexual contact…

I said Hubbard had pointed out that McPhail’s long list of research questions did not ask “whether the perpetrator believed (rightly or wrongly) that he had consent, which is also important in quantifying the harm”. I agreed, saying it makes no sense other than politically to ignore this elephant in the room. Indeed, it was not just a matter of “quantifying the harm” but of acknowledging that where de facto consent is present there is no reason to suppose, nor any evidence to support, the view that there is any intrinsic level of harm.

McPhail promptly shot back to assert that, predictably, I had now definitely taken the discussion down the drain, leading it “away from the science I presented”, as though his latest survey was the only scientific (or aspiring to be scientific) show in town. Hubbard had presented lots of scientific evidence in his review but McPhail was strenuously avoiding it!

Even worse, McPhail was now gurgling noisily down the plughole himself after complaining of others doing so, taking an arrogant pop at Hubbard: “One thing that is clear is that you haven’t read our survey carefully and so are speaking without understanding. … We are reasonable experts who thought clearly about what we wanted to assess in order to get valid estimates…”

Oh dear, oh dear! Isn’t it amazing how touchy some of these “reasonable” so-called experts can be? Time for the forum’s moderator to step in and call the thread to order!

But the mod, Mike Bailey, was already a participant in the discussion, making it tricky for him to be a credibly fair and neutral arbiter. Alert to the problem, he has the bright idea of calling in Claude to assess the merits of everyone’s contributions, which would include Claude’s reading of Hubbard’s complex and lengthy book review (5,432 words), which had actually been very little discussed thanks to McPhail throwing a spanner in the works. He had diverted attention onto his boring and largely irrelevant (no personal bias on my part there 😊) prevalence survey. But Hubbard’s review should not be overlooked. It is a really important, extensively sourced essay which draws attention to recent research that does not favour the standard CSA approach. So I urge you to read it. 

As for Claude, I was largely satisfied that his judgment of our contributions (which is worth reading in full) was mostly objective and fair. But one aspect was unfair. Making this point on the forum, I said:

Thing is, though, when you first start to stray too far from the safe consensus you’re bound to be chewed up. And that is the one serious beef I have with Claude, who is clearly great at the quant stuff and good at giving objective marks on courtesy, concision, etc., but is a prisoner of the consensus, having been trained on it.

I felt that was why Claude had mainly praised McPhail’s conventional contribution (despite his maths blunder) while marking down the two dissidents, Hubbard and me.  It was why I ended up with, “Fuck you, Claude!”

But it all came right when Mike then rounded off the debate by giving his own assessment of Claude’s performance.

As Tom O’Carroll (more about whom below) correctly noted, Claude is constrained by material that Claude has been fed, and has a propensity to be biased in the same way as, well, the Internet. SEXNET has been exposed to a far different distribution of material that I believe is more accurate than Claude’s training material, especially on the most controversial topics.

That said, I don’t think the exchange between Claude and Thomas Hubbard shows as much bias as it does productive and collegial scholarly collaboration. Thomas has from the start behaved like a scholar, and Claude has not behaved like an emotionally triggered snowflake, but like a knowledgeable and polite reviewer…

Finally, Tom O’Carroll: I don’t need to remind you that you are on SEXNET because you know a lot about certain important topics and usually express yourself more civilly than do those on SEXNET who disapprove of you. But sometimes you fail at the latter, and you did again in lashing out at Claude…. what you wrote was unacceptable. Please apologize to Claude and then return to your best collegial self.

Having landed my main point successfully, I was more than happy to comply with Mike’s charmingly anthropomorphic demand, so I apologised to Claude, and to the forum, for lowering the tone. Not quite “And everyone lived happily ever after”, but a pretty good outcome from a fascinating experiment with AI.

BARRED FROM SWEDEN, YOURS TRULY

Being made to apologise to Claude was the gentlest of punishments. The chastisement was fair, just, and implicitly imbued with a touch of humour.

The same cannot be said for some other personal news I’d really rather not talk about because I can neither spin it as a triumph nor make it a firebrand’s rallying cry for battle, as I might have done decades ago while I had the energy of youth.

But I cannot ignore it here because it is a major issue of MAP concern and of freedom and justice more widely conceived.

Back in Summer I booked and paid for a flight to Sweden, where I was to have stayed on holiday for a week at the home of an old hiking friend. We had been on many an adventure together, including climbing high into the Swiss Alps, the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, and the Scottish Highlands.

But the flight never happened. A couple of days beforehand I had an email from my local police, warning me that if I went to Sweden there was “a strong likelihood” I could be refused entry at my destination airport, Arlanda, near Stockholm.

I was stunned. I have been on “the register” for donkey’s years, during which I have travelled abroad many times. I have often been stopped and questioned by border control officers but I have never been refused entry. So why now?

I wondered whether the British police were exaggerating the extent of any concerns their Swedish counterparts might have raised. But with such a strong warning ringing in my ears I decided to cancel the flight and abandon hope of getting to Sweden. No point in going all the way there just to be turned away.

It was the right decision. A few days later I heard from my friend in Sweden. He told me that three Swedish police officers had turned up on his doorstep the morning after what had been my planned evening arrival time.

He says they were perfectly civil and didn’t stay long. Apparently, they had turned up just in case I had somehow managed to evade the border control and get into the country. So it looks as though they thought three officers, no less, might be needed to arrest me!

Stunned by this further revelation, I could only marvel what must have been going through their heads. Did they imagine that when refused entry at Passport Control, I would make a run for it, leaping over the barriers at the age of 81, like an elderly James Bond, beating off pursuing cops with my walking stick?

I’m still trying to work it out, even now. Surely the Swedish authorities wouldn’t have known a thing about me except what the British LEA had told them. So what could that have been?

“Not us, gov”, my local police protested innocently, “We didn’t say anything except the usual” – the “usual” being notification of my official record, which, as I say, has never got me barred before. As for what they had heard from the Swedish side, I was told they were not at liberty to reveal it.

So could this have been a specifically Swedish issue? In a way, yes, that is possible. The government there has been far stricter with UK citizens since Brexit than other countries in the UK, deporting many who have lived there for years. Although I cannot see any evidence of them discriminating against Brits in general going on holiday, their treatment of those with a police record might be tougher. Maybe I should have travelled on my Irish passport.

But the feeling still nags me that the Swedes must have been given the impression by our police that I represented a serious danger. Gemini AI told me:

The only UK citizens with criminal backgrounds flagged at the border are those actively wanted on international arrest warrants, individuals traveling in violation of parole/licence conditions, or registered sex offenders who trigger specific Interpol Green Notices.

Presumably, if the British police had triggered an Interpol notice, travelling on an Irish passport would not have helped. According to Unlock, an organisation which advocates for ex-offenders:

In the event you had fulfilled your commitment to notify (and therefore travelled with implied permission) there should be no reason for UK police to disclose your conviction or communicate with foreign law enforcement. There is currently only limited routine sharing of criminal record information across states (based around risk assessments); primarily within the EU.

What does that tell us? Well, bearing in mind that I had notified the police of my travel plans, as required by law, they must have judged that my risk assessment is high enough to justify disclosure of my record. Why that should be the case after twenty years of blameless behaviour is hard to say. The police have often made it clear they do not like me continuing this blog; but, as they well know, Heretic TOC is not (yet) illegal. I fail to see how a country that still prides itself on valuing freedom of expression much more than places such as Iran or Russia could see a blog as a reason to warn other countries against having me as a holiday visitor.

Also, the Swedish incident demonstrates that being on the SOR is not merely an administrative measure as was claimed when the register was brought in nearly 30 years ago in the UK. At that time, any suggestion it would be a form of extra-judicial punishment above and beyond a sentence imposed by the courts was vigorously denied by those who had promoted the system, because that would have reduced its legitimacy.

But it has clearly become punitive when it restricts personal freedom to the extent of preventing foreign travel even for a perfectly ordinary holiday, and when anyone has spent a lot of money on a plane ticket that suddenly becomes worthless.

There is much more I could say about the whole business of ex-offender monitoring but that is a story for another day.

CLAMOURING FOR ATTENTION

Meanwhile, there are more than enough big stories already out there in the media world clamouring for attention.

Top MAP news has to be Megan Markel’s dad, Thomas Markel Sr., with a big stache of illicit child images allegedly found in his former home in the Philippines. Even more trouble for him, if true, is that one of these pics showed him personally “lying on a bed with an Asian girl who appeared to be underage”, according to The Sun.

Needless to say, that could involve a multitude on non-sins, such as a relationship with a very young-looking 22-year-old. Or with a 12-year-old when that was legal in the Philippines – which it was until the age of consent was raised to 16 in 2022. And, of course, he could have been in a de facto consensual relationship with an 11-year-old, or much younger, which would have been another non-sin. We need less nonsense about non-sin.  Less nonsense, more nonce sense!

Former snooker world champion Graeme Dott was among those at the wrong end of the nonsense last month when he was jailed for seven years over what seemed to have been consensual relationships at the time with two children of primary school age, one a boy the other a girl. What suggests to me these encounters were neither assaults nor rape, despite legal framing as such, is that there was no suggestion of violence or coercion, and the relationships went on for quite a while.

What else? School kids in France go on strike and march peacefully against over-crowded classes and decrepit classrooms. Good for them. But what happens? Before you know it, the country goes up in flames. There are huge riots, an historic town hall tumbles, terrible injuries are suffered in clashes with the police. What can you say? Careful, children, don’t play with matches?

ACHIEVEMENT AND RISK

Some remarkable kids who have not yet reached high school age, meanwhile, have chalked up some amazing personal achievements without it all ending in tears as the world burns down. Lian Yunzhi, a six-year-old girl in China, set a new world record for the fastest solving of a Rubik’s Cube.   Also, a British child chess prodigy, Bodhana Sivanandan (11), from Harrow, London, has become the youngest player ever to earn a women’s grandmaster title.

The most photogenic achievement, though, surely goes to a nine-year-old boy, Lelio Massimo di Roccasecca, who became the youngest person to climb Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps.  Or, to give him his title, which is as grand as his achievement, Prince Lelio. A young aristocrat, he is a scion of the Massimo family of Rome, widely considered to be one of the oldest noble houses in Europe. For centuries, they have claimed a direct male-line descent from the famous Roman general Fabius Maximus, who got the better of the great Hannibal back in the day (long before Jesus!)

In more recent times, Lelio’s father, Prince Valerio, achieved a rare ascent of one of the world’s most difficult mountains to climb, K2, in the Himalayas. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Mont Blanc expedition was a father and son affair. This climb, too, like that of K2, was significantly dangerous, not just a long hard slog.

Climbing website Snowbrains reported that at the time of the ascent there were high winds, with a real risk of Lelio being blown away. And the route they took was particularly dangerous on account of rockfalls. Three people, no less, were killed on the same route in two separate expeditions within days of Lelio’s climb with his father.

So was this climb a good idea? We know it’s not a good thing to over-protect kids, but did this go too far in the direction of recklessness? You tell me!