The thing about pedophilia/hebephilia (minor attraction) is that it blares in your face. If you have this condition, there’s no ignoring it. You simply have feelings of sexual/romantic attraction toward minors that you know “should” be toward same age peers. There’s no getting around it either. You’re born with it, develop it, or both. Whatever the cause, it feels like it’s hardwired into your brain. You feel the attraction regardless of choice. Fortunately for me, I have a secondary attraction to adult women. I think I was able to maintain it because I normalized the minor attraction fairly quickly. I’ve talked to older pedophiles who believe their secondary attraction is not as strong as earlier in life, due to fixating on minor attraction (exacerbated by self-hate and anxiety). It might have been different had they received support and learned coping skills at a younger age. I had these, and benefited from it.

There are some pedophiles who believe they’re exclusively attracted to minors. This may be the case, since there is so much variation in how humans experience sexuality. Still, many teenagers and young adults, who are minor attracted, are uncertain about their sexuality. I tell them that sexual contact in general can be enjoyable, even with an adult, and that they still have the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of a committed, adult relationship (provided they find a partner that loves them as a whole person).

Here is a key point. Just because someone is a pedophile doesn’t mean they have or will harm a child. It just means they have a minor attraction. Statistically, the majority of pedophiles do not offend. It amounts to making intentional decisions not based on feelings. Everybody does that… a married couple chooses to remain faithful, a teenager chooses not to look at porn, or a woman says no to a man who wants sex on the third date. Sexual attraction just “is”; we as humans decide how we’ll handle it. As horrible as it sounds, it’s possible for a dad with typical attraction to recognize that his teenage daughter is becoming a woman, but he chooses not to entertain any sexual thoughts toward her. In the same way, a person who is minor attracted has the power to decide how they’ll think and act toward children. It’s just that pedophiles are more likely to offend when there are the added risk factors of self-hatred, depression, and isolation.

I’ve been blessed with a wife and children. My wife knows about my attraction, and I am completely open and accountable with her. My family and close friends know as well. I have set a boundary of not forming personal relationships with children outside my family. Also, I’ve chosen not to work with children in my career. I like to think I am many steps away from harming a child, but between God and me, I believe these are good boundaries. Living with pedophilia requires self-understanding, coping skills, intentional choices, and support. This is a formula for success for anyone facing challenges.

The question will come up of whether I’m safe with my kids. I answer, Yes. I think it’s different with your own children. A father with normal attraction doesn’t feel the same way about his older daughter as he does other women. It must be something built into us humans. However, there are parents who do sexually abuse their children. I think this likely involves a breakdown of person decisions, and is not simply indicative of pedophilia. Nevertheless, as for me, I keep a sober recognition that I’m capable of evil – which I don’t believe is limited to pedophiles.

I know God is real, and I believe Jesus was God-made-human, who came to make a way for us to be saved from evil. I believe that God will have a one-on-one relationship with anyone who invites him. Also, when Jesus died and rose to life, he made it possible for us to have new life inside, “born again”. This reality has completely affected my experience of being a pedophile. Were it not for God, I would have a different perspective. I would still think children are harmed by sexual contact, but I would probably try to embrace pedophilia and find positive outlets. I do believe God is real, however, and that there is more available to us.

I believe God can give someone a victorious life, even if they are minor attracted. That certainly means not harming children, but it also means having hope, purpose, and love in life. I don’t think God is stumped by pedophilia, and I don’t think a Christian should expect anything less from God’s promises just because they are a pedophile. Jesus said that he came to set the prisoners free, and to give us life abundantly. He’s conquered the devil, the world, and sin. He can do that in each of our lives.

I still have minor attraction, but it doesn’t occupy my thoughts and life. Instead, I know that God has called me to something higher – that which we are all called to – and I press on toward everything Jesus opened up for me through a relationship with him.

When I was twelve, I started to notice something different about me. Instead of feeling attracted to girls, I started feeling attracted to my friends. I had no idea why. One of my strongest memories from this time was when one of my friends and I decided to get naked and watch TV in the downstairs area of his home. Even though there was no physical contact, I remember clearly the strong deep emotions. Just being naked with one of my friends made me feel comfortable, loved, valued and accepted. It just felt right.

High school was brutal. Mum’s anger from her past abuse started to rise to the surface. She became almost sociopathic and would scream at me for hours on end for no apparent reason. This happened all the way through high school. When I was fifteen I was baptized. When I was seventeen I came out to myself as gay but I decided to keep following the Lord. That same year mum started drinking and getting violent. When I told people about what was happening they didn’t believe me. Yet in all this, God was my refuge.

I completed high school and went on to university. I wanted to be a music teacher so I studied music, then teaching. The teaching segment put me under a tremendous amount of pressure. At the school I was allocated the children were horrible. I’d get treated like trash when I was at school and treated like trash at home. I cried a lot. My life was horrible.

One day after teaching, I felt so low, I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to feel good about something in life. I was so tired of feeling pain and feeling nothing. I remembered how good it felt being naked with my friends when I was twelve. I was desperate to relive that which I had experienced, desperate to feel loved and accepted, and in a moment of foolishness and weakness, I opened my laptop and looked up naked teen boy selfies. Afterwards I felt so horrible I just blanked it all out of my mind. As far as I was concerned, it never happened.

The following year everything in life fell apart. For a couple of years prior, my dad had been having a secret relationship with a teen boy from the church and now someone had found out. That same day, my parents split up and I cut myself off from dad. For days I felt sick because of the shock and the stress that it all put me under. Everything was too much. It was also at this time I decided to move out. As the months went by I fell into depression. I was in total darkness. I felt cursed by God. There were many nights where I would lie awake; completely immobilized because of fear. It was hard to believe this was all happening to me.

One evening I was sitting in my car parked in the church car park after attending a midweek evening service at the church. I reached the very end of everything I was able to bear. I cried out “God I hate everything! I hate my family! I hate being gay! I hate Christians who don’t understand my pain! But most of all God…I hate you!” Then I picked up my knife. I decided the only thing I could do was to kill myself by stabbing myself in the heart. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wanted to get back at God and kill as many Christians as I could before killing myself.

Suddenly the presence of God filled my car and everything became still. Never before had I experienced anything like this. I was so afraid I couldn’t move or speak. But at the same time I felt like God loved me for who I am, not for who I was trying to be. When the presence faded, I drove home perplexed at what had just happened.

From this point onward, things were different. I was still trying to make sense of what had just happened. My sexuality didn’t change, but deep down I felt loved. Why else would God save me? Very slowly I was learning how to trust Him for everything.

At the end of the following year, I completed my teaching qualification and started working as a casual teacher at the local high school. I was good as a teacher, and the school gave me plenty of work. I loved my students too, but I felt conflicted inside. Every day I was fighting a secret battle to keep the darkness at bay.

Six months later, it all came crashing down. One of the mums from church noticed I was a little too physical as a Sunday school teacher. Later that afternoon she phoned up and told me that I was no longer welcome at her house. As soon as I hung up the phone, all the strong emotions hit me all at once. I remember looking at my hands. They looked like the claws of a monster. In my deep anguish and confusion I took myself to the hospital. I told them everything but I didn’t receive any support whatsoever.

This set in motion a systematic process that locked me out of everything even remotely relating to working with children. I knew this would happen, but it still hurt. I felt so low. I had no job, no dignity, no support, and nowhere to go. Only in part did my pastor seem to understand the horror I was going through. Then when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I received a false accusation in the mail from the Office of the Children’s Guardian.

Feeling overwhelmed, I got in my car and drove. All I wanted to do now was drink as much vodka as I could and gas myself in my car. In hindsight I definitely would have, but since God had already saved my life previously, I decided to keep trusting Him. I thought if God could get me through one sexuality crisis then he could get me through another.

After a series of letters to the Children’s Guardian, the false accusation was dropped. But this negligence cut deep. Maybe someone had it in for me. For the next couple of years I was in emotional turbulence. By the grace of God things have become a lot more settled. Through this entire process God has shown himself to be unimaginably faithful and kind.

My story isn’t over yet. But I look forward with great anticipation as to what the future holds. My goal is to glorify God through sharing my story. The blood of Jesus really can wash away even the darkest of stains. This is incredibly good news for people like me. Hallelujah!

Therefore, I started to be involved in some activities with children, kind of Children Theater, and some activities in my church and so on. Until I realized I wasn’t a monster because of pedophilia, that I could be a good person even though there was this bad thing within me. Every time that God helped me to win my internal fights, I could see that although I had a monster within me, he didn’t rule over me. But unfortunately, I started to become depressed, and I started to quest God about the sense of all of this. Why am I a pedophile? What is the reason for it all? Does God hate me? What did I for deserving it?

I became very suicidal and I even planed my suicide… In the darkest moment of my life, I heard the music “House on a hill” from Amanda cook, and that was kind of my own God speaking with me through that music. God loved me. Why? I don’t make any Idea.

However, He showed me it through a lot of his signals, He sent me to this very forum, He used people to help me to see pedophilia in another way, and at the night of my suicide, he sent a person to help me and say to me that I wasn’t alone and that he loved me, and wouldn’t let me die. God healed me from the depression and gave me a mission, I should help other pedophiles to find him and become healed as well.

This is the main message of my testimony, you should stop asking God “Why?” and start to ask “For what?” God has a plan for our life, and he can use you even as a pedophile, because He’s God, and He’s the only one that can take all your pieces and transform them into the most beautiful vessel.

I discovered my mission as a pedophile. I’m a Brazilian guy that suffered alone with pedophilia. There’s nothing like this forum in Portuguese. In Brazil, the only things that are shown when you google pedophilia are things kind of “A pedophile arrested”, “How to protect your children from the pedophiles”, “How to recognize a pedophile” and so on… If I didn’t know how to speak English, I’d be in great trouble. In addition, if we consider that at least 1% of every country’s population is composed of pedophiles, just in Brazil, we have more than 2 million pedophiles. If we consider the number of Portuguese speakers in the whole world, this number is even bigger. For this reason, after being healed by God, I started a cooperation with the Christian Pedophile’s developers to translate this website to Portuguese.

If you’re a Brazilian or a Portuguese speaker, soon we’re gonna have this website in Portuguese and we’re also going to offer support in Portuguese through the Email contact. I also believe that God is gonna send even more different people, from other countries to help us in this mission! and I’m sure that in heavens we’ll receive our reward for doing it! And about you? Why don’t you start to seek for the purpose of God in the midst of all your temptation?

Back to that night at 28… I muted my Instagram friend to not see her posts and started doing the same with everyone I knew or followed who had children in her feed. That day I died. Since that day I don’t go outside as much as I did before. I stopped playing a video game where I made teenagers have sex with adults with the excuse of “I like when women are younger than men”, ignoring the unconscious evil intentions behind that statement. I remembered that I watched teen porn on a few occasions through my 20s. Too many things started arising in my mind through this living hell journey of digging in my own memory how pedophilia was so undeniable present in my life. The time I was flirting and too physical with a younger friend. That lolicon manga I read at 18. After that night, I deleted the game and felt like a monster like the most vile thing on earth and still do. Suicidal. Everything made sense. I woke up. The amount of stuff I been done over the years my subtle behavior towards minors, how uncomfortable they may feel. Today I realized they could sense my attraction. I was a problematic person.

I was mad at God, I was mad at my brain for trying to hide this information from me for years. I felt cursed and alone in a world that sees people like me like the scum of society and I agreed. I used to hate pedophiles and now I was hating myself. I was filled with so much hate. I stopped going outside, church included ( I hadn’t attending for a year at that time). I didn’t want to be triggered by the presence of children.

But God just wanted me to come to the light. He was there all the time. Watching. He is so merciful it does not make sense.
God was saving me in time and I didn’t realized it at the moment. He want me to see sin the way he sees it. I went to his presence asking him to take my life. “Kill me” I said to him. I don’t deserved to be alive. I cant live with this truth. the truth of the monster I am. I started fasting. I was starving. I felt like an inmate. Hiding in my room all day. Not eating, crying. Hating myself. I felt like a criminal. “I’m not this. No im not like them” these people are sick. How ironic. How in denial I was.

But God has made me understand that I am not the victim of my attractions even though I did not ask to be born with them. And although now sadness invades me every day . I want to leave this world having done the will of God and know that I’m forgiven by him. But only with his strength and with his help. I can’t alone. No one can alone. This road is lonely and sometimes the measures I have to take to avoid temptation seems drastic and crazy. But I must understand that I cannot trust myself.

This is the most hard thing I have ever wrote in my life. But there is no way God can make you a new creature if you don’t admit your wrongness, how lost you are and how much you need to be saved. So He can restore your life and the lives you hurt or affected.

I tried so many ways to distract me to convince myself i wasn’t a pedophile. But it is better to accept it and getting the help you need. Because ignoring this condition can make it worse. I’m different, my brain is different. The care, the precautions, and the lifestyle has to be different. No matter if others don’t understand. God understands. He understands.

God I cant wait to see your face.

Several months later (Summer of 2012) I had a chance to attend and volunteer at that same summer camp. I knew I had to take this chance to come clean. After building a friendship with one guy, I told him about my porn use. He was able to help and encourage me, and a couple weeks later, I also came forward to him and a few other friends about my unwanted feelings of same-sex attraction. That was a very good and healing time, and I was starting to experience the peace of repentance God had been calling me to for years. I worked up the courage to tell my parents these things, and that went much better than I expected. I am greatly blessed to have loving parents. But I knew that wasn’t everything I needed to do.

So I contacted a friend, and told him about the instances of sexual contact with my family-member. I didn’t know at the time, but because of his job, he was a mandatory reporter. The next day, a sherif’s deputy and a social worker showed up at my family’s house. Really bad day. My parents were very surprised, but buckled down, and we as a family started down what would be a long road. There was a standard investigation, and from the start I was completely honest and open about what I had done. I didn’t realize at the time how much sexual abuse harms children, but to the extent that I did know, I wanted to do what was right for my family-member.

A few months later, in early 2013, I was arrested, and spent most of 3 weeks in county jail. Several months after that, I was justly convicted in court. I was expecting I would spend a few years in prison, but by the grace of God, I was sentenced to 5 years’ probation without any further time incarcerated, and required to complete a sex-offender treatment program. During that time leading up to my conviction, my parents and I had been actively working on our relationship, which helped me get through one of the most difficult times of my life.

It’s a very brief summary, but I spent most of the 5 years on probation in a therapy program, and working a couple different jobs. The therapy program was a mixed bag; some parts of it were good and beneficial, though some parts were really not. I learned a lot about myself, how to have better self-control, how abuse harms victims, and related things. I took a very detailed look at my life, and the complex series of choices that lead to those abusive actions. During that time I experienced some challenges to my faith, and dealt with some mental health problems. These were partially caused by a couple different therapists I worked with, who attempted to use an abusive form of Reparative Therapy to forcibly eliminate my feelings of attraction to children. Since finishing probation, I’ve been working to build back a relatively normal life. Though it took time, I’ve rebuilt a relationship with the family-member I abused. I’m very grateful and humbled that they chose to forgive me, and wanted me to still be a part of their life.

I finished probation in 2018. I still experience attraction to children as well as adults, but God is with me every day, showing me how to walk with him in repentance and faith. I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I know God doesn’t want me to keep silent about “the hope that I have”, and the things he has brought me through.