UPDATE: The researcher has found sufficient MAPs for his interviews, and is therefore no longer seeking participants.
Mikkel Rask Pedersen is an anthropologist from Aarhus University in Denmark writing his final Master’s thesis on the relationship between how minor attracted people shape and manage their identity in resistance to societal representation and definitions of pedophilia, illness and desire. This means that he is researching how minor attracted people position themselves according to statements such as ‘It is only a matter of time before they offend’, ‘you cannot live a life repressing you sexuality’, ‘if they are attracted to minor that must mean they want to have sexual relations with them’ and, ‘minor attracted people need extensive therapy and help to not offend’.
The purpose of his study is twofold. One, to gain a better insight into the lived experience of being a minor attracted person through listening to their life stories. Two, to explore how the discourses in western societies shape, influence and restrict the ways minor attracted people are expected to act. Mikkel wishes to challenge the ways we talk about and understand sexuality and desires to create a more nuanced understanding of how people are not entirely defined by their desires, nor that desire must also mean wanting to act.
The research, therefore, does not focus on how to stop minor attracted people from offending, but how minor attracted people experience exactly such a rhetoric and discourse, always being stigmatized as a reliability. He is conducting interviews through mail and skype, maintaining the anonymity of participants.
