This transcrpit has been edited for clarity.

Episode 047 – Understanding Sex Crimes Against Children, with Experts Dr Shiloh and Dr Scott: The Case of Steve Griesen (Husband of “2^nd Chapter of Acts” Singer)

August 28^th  2024

 

T: Hi, I’m Tracey.

S: And I’m Sharon. And we are Feet of Clay…

T: Confessions of the Cult Sisters! Ohh, well first of all folks, I want to thank you so much for your patience in waiting for us to return from our little break.

S: Yes.

T: But for those who have been paying attention, during our break we did do one episode, Sharon!

S: We did.

T: We did a follow-up to the plane crash on the anniversary of July 28^th from the 1982 plane crash. That’s episode 46, so we’ll put that in our show notes, and we also did an interview with our favorite bros from down under, Troy and Brian.

S: Troy and Brian! Yaay.

T: Yes, our little bros. So we’ll be sure to link that episode on there as well.

S: That was on their podcast, I Was A Teenage Fundamentalist.

T: Yes, yes it was. So we haven’t just done nothing, Sharon.

[laughter]

S: That would be nice for a change!

T: That would be nice. And of course all of that was happening all the while we were also doing some research for this podcast, and unfortunately this isn’t as cheery as the one that we did with our bros, Troy and Brian.

S: No.

T: We had mentioned in our last episode that we were preparing for a really difficult topic, and as it turned out there’s a whole lot more complexities that are intertwined with other stuff that we originally anticipated.

S: That’s right. So brace yourselves, everyone, this is going to be another one of those multi-episode topic situations.

T: Yes, because we are so good at that.

S: So good!

T: And I was thinking that’s the beauty of this medium, right? We don’t have so many pages that you have to keep in a book that – you know Sharon, it’s our podcast and we can have as many episodes as we want!

S: We can take our own damned time, we can do what we want to do. Yeah. And we are going to delve pretty deeply into those unexpected interconnections that we started to see specifically with the Jesus movement of the 1970s and then of course, the unhealthy ramifications of the purity culture that morphed from that.

T: Uggh yeah, the purity culture. I mean, I think that’s how we started our podcast, we did this whole series on purity culture, and Sharon, it’s just like the toxic shit that keeps on taking, and keeps on reappearing, and it’s like – god, ugh.

S: The gift that keeps on giving! But not. Taking!

T: Taking! That’s what I said. It just keeps on taking, taking, taking.

S: Yeah. But look, instead of keeping everybody hanging in suspense with all of this preamble that we are also very good at, we’re going to just drop the big bomb now, and then we’re going to take our time sifting through the rubble and the collateral damage.

T: Yes, so at this point I do want to offer a very important trigger warning; we are going to be talking about sex crimes against children. I hate that we are going to be talking about that, but we are, so please be mindful as to whether this is appropriate for any others who – if you’re listening in the car, might be present – and of course, if this is a particular trigger warning for you; be mindful as well, so that you take care of yourself.

S: Yeah. And opt out at any point if you need to. So, here goes. This involves Steve Greisen. He is the owner of the “Christian” film company Exploration Films. Steve is also the husband of the really beloved singer from 2^nd Chapter of Acts, the music group, for those of you who may not be familiar with that; the husband of Nelly Ward. So in September of 2022, Steve was arrested in Colorado Springs for solicitation of a trafficked 14 year old girl. It just gives me chills to say that again. And then in March of 2023, six months later, he pled guilty to this felony sex crime.

T: Mmm. And as you can imagine, this has been incredibly shocking and also, Sharon, intense for us. For those who really aren’t in this sphere, Steve and Nelly were a part of the band 2^nd Chapter of Acts. We’ll put links to that music, it has really incredible memories for us, right?

S: Gorgeous music, yeah, gorgeous music.

T: And you know, of course, they were also our next-door neighbors out in the ranch in Texas that bordered to the Last Days Ministries property. So very, very intense for us. Really personal for us on many levels, and it’s one of those things I think if you hear this in other circles it’s ok, tell us something new, it’s another headline right, another headline from a preacher. It’s really easy to lose that personal connection, and it’s very different Sharon, when you’re reading these headlines and it’s a public persona, but it’s also someone that’s very personally connected to us.

S: Yeah.

T: And of course he was intertwined in our former community, some of those out there who may know 2^nd Chapter may not at all be familiar with the name Steve Greisen because he didn’t necessarily have the public persona that everyone would have name recognition, of course his wife did. But for us, he was very interconnected. We talk about the little Christian Hollywood that was out in the Garden Valley Lindale Texas area – very well known in the production side of things and in scheduling. Very prominent in this sphere.

S: Yeah.

T: It was something that hit me, and then Sharon, it’s been very interesting for me to see how much more it has hit you.

S: Yeah, I have been surprized by the emotional impact on me as well, because you know, here’s someone I could never in a million years have imagined him committing such a crime. My relationship with Steve and Nelly over the years – of course, it wasn’t like we were best friends, not that at all, but it was definitely much more than just casual acquaintances. We had social, non-ministry time interactions, and it’s just been a giant mountain of intensity for me. Of course, anger and disgust and pain are there, thinking about all this, but also compassion and just a deep, deep heartache thinking about Nelly and their two sons who are obviously adults now, and we’re going to have a lot to explore about all of that in a subsequent episode. To sum it up, I was absolutely stunned. Absolutely.

T: Yeah, and I just want to punctuate that; we talk about these headlines that are so easy to read. When you have that personal connection and you know the sons of this family, and the wife of this family – it really does make these incidents all the more painful, so I appreciate you calling out that compassionate side because there’s always fallout with this, right. There’s always people that are caught up in the fallout of all of this shit.

S: Yeah. Tracey, on the one hand we could say this is sort of old news, right, because Steve’s arrest was almost exactly two years ago right now…

T: We’re always the last to know, Sharon. Always the last to know.

S: Are we? I mean, that flew totally under the radar right? At least for us, because neither you nor I had heard a single word about it! Not a whisper. Nothing!

T: Nothing.

S: Nothing up until about two months ago when one of our listeners sent us a link to a news item from March of 2023, and at first when I read the headline and I saw the mug shots, I just thought, this is a ridiculous joke really bad taste. It just seems so outlandish and I was sure it was a total fake, a total scam, like a clickbait thing, and – it was funny because I immediately messaged you Tracey, I warned you – don’t click on this! This is messed up!

T: Yeah, I was driving at the time, and you not only messaged me, it was actually also in response to the person who sent the link of like, this is a scam, I don’t know who this person is! So I’m driving and I’m looking at it, and I know this person and I’ve been corresponding with this person, and I’m like, oh no, no, no! No, no, he’s not scamming us, but I still did not have any clue what the link was because I hadn’t clicked into the link, and I was absolutely not prepared to read what then we read.

S: Yeah.

T: Again, saying we can be so desensitized to these kinds of stories; I know I followed a couple on Instagram or on TikTok and people are now just going, what else is new, right?

S: Right.

T: But this one, as we said, just hit so close to home. I think that since it flew under the radar people can be like, well why didn’t you let it keep flying under the radar? Why are you going to bring this up? And especially for those who are connected from our former circles. What would be our purpose to bring this back up?

S: Check our hearts, right? Check our hearts again.

T: Yeah, we had that whole thing of do a heart check; what would be a reason? What would be the point of causing pain for some people who may not have known that this happened, and I think for me Sharon, this is something that happens time and time again. Even looking at the stories of Mike Bickle; I don’t think any of us were prepared for the stories that came out of him being with a minor; of him committing – you know, sex crimes against a minor. These things are beyond our imagination…

S: Unimaginable!

T: It is! Especially with the circles and the amount of holiness and the amount of character and the amount of teachings that we had on that, and knowing that these people weren’t just charlatans out there trying to make as much money as they could (or are they) but really felling that we knew a level of commitment that we experienced being in that close proximity. So seeing these things – why is this continuing to happen in these spheres so much? My theory has always been that is there something in these circles that – you know, Christianity is supposed to be exempt from all these kind of terrible sins that the world commits, but is there something happening in these fundamentalist circles that’s actually creating the problem?

S: Or magnifying.

T: Or magnifying the problem. And we just thought it would be important to explore this very human problem, but is there information that we can dive into – with ultimately Sharon, the hope of preventing more people from becoming victims of these horrible crimes.

S: Right. Yep. That’s why. That’s why. And as I said, we’re going to have a lot to say about this from several different angles. We mentioned the kind of unexpected connections, the whole glorification of the 1970s Jesus People movement, but first things first; so after I kind of started to get over that initial out of body shock experience…

T: Yeah, which took you a pretty long time, right?

S: Yeah, it was like a week or so, yeah.

T: And weren’t you having dreams, Sharon?

S: Oh my god, every night. Every night I was having dreams about Steve and Nelly and the situation. It was heartbreaking. So I felt really surreal for a number of days and then after that, the first thing you suggested and I totally agreed with was that no problem can be solved if we collectively don’t truly understand it, so we knew we needed to talk with an expert to help us get some better insights about these sexual crimes against children and teens, and the psychology behind it, and what’s happening on the inside of the people committing these unthinkable acts?

T: Yeah, because it’s more than just the devil, right. The devil has marked them as a special vessel for God so they’re just attacking them more – we know that’s not the answer.

S: No.

T: So we did reach out to some experts even in these reconstruction spaces that talk about purity culture and its negative impacts, but Sharon, I have to give it to you – your dogged research, you ended up finding not just one expert, but two experts who our audiences most likely have not been able to hear before. So, good job Sharon! Good job!

S: Well, thank you. They are not in the religious deconstruction space, at all.

T: Which is so great. I think it’s so great to be able to hear it completely from outside of these circles, so I was very, very excited that you were able to find them. So that is where we are going to begin today. We are going to be talking to these experts to help us start really just sifting through. I think this is fair to call it the shit ton of shit, big buckets, right, through this pile of shit.

S: No, no, this is a megaton. This is a megaton, just when we thought the shit tons couldn’t get any shittier – surprize!

T: Ugh.

S: Oh god.

T: Yeah, and we were able to record the following conversation just two weeks ago, so folks, we weren’t all on break when you haven’t necessarily heard from us. And honestly Sharon, I was so honored to be able to sit with them and I think we are particularly honored to share this with our listening audience. Again, I know we’re laughing because you and I – I think, have to attack some of this terrible stuff with some humor.

S: Yes.

T: But it is a very heavy and complex topic, so please, please, again – take time for yourself. If at any point you can’t handle it, opt out.

S: Do what’s best for you personally. Ok.

T: With no further ado.

…

S: So we have some really amazing guests today. The hosts of a podcast – guys, this one is just incredible. I’ve been binging it like crazy. LA Not-so-Confidential, and we are so fortunate to be joined today by the hosts of that show; Dr Shiloh and Dr Scott. So we’ll tell you just a little bit about them; they’re based out of Southern California, they both have advanced degrees in Psychology, and they have specialized expertise in forensic psychology and sexual criminology. Obviously that’s why we’re looking and leaning heavily on them to help us understand this shit. So in addition to their clinical private practices, they also work alongside local and state law enforcement.

T: Yes, so say hello, Dr Shiloh.

Dr Shiloh: Hi Sharon, hi Tracey, how are you guys?

S: Wonderful.

T: Great! Dr Shiloh is a licenced forensic psychologist. She spent 14 years working with high risk sexual offenders, alongside probation and parole. When in private practice she provided clinical services and assessments for individuals facing the criminal justice system. And alongside her, we have Dr Scott. Say hello, Dr Scott!

Dr Scott: Howdy. Good morning.

S: Wait, I just had a flashback to Rocky Horror Picture Show. Dr Scott!

T: I know, I know! I was gonna say that.

Dr Scott: Rocky!

T: I was gonna say that…

Dr Scott: Janet!

T: …but I was going to wait until I told the audience a little bit about Dr Scott.

Dr Scott: And that’s so my generation, by the way. I mean like, that is my generation.

T: I’m sure we’re not the only ones who have said that. So, Dr Scott is a licenced clinical psychologist and marriage and family therapist, and has worked in the California Department of Corrections. In his private practice he focuses on specialized populations; family therapy, anxiety disorders, and identity development, which is going to be perfect for what we want to discuss today.

S: Yes. And as I’ve mentioned already, their podcast is amazing. I’ve been binging it like crazy, I’m up to almost 20 episodes now, and guys, I absolutely love your tagline, which is psychology, true crime, and snark. Trust us! We’re Doctors!

[laughter]

S: So, welcome Dr Shiloh and Dr Scott.

Dr Shiloh: Thank you. I hope the tagline warns people to not take us too seriously, even though our show can be incredibly clinical at times, and it’s not for everyone, but we’re just human beings too.

T: Awesome.

S: Excellent.

T: So, I think our listeners are very used to the snark factor.

Dr Shiloh: Excellent.

T: We are constantly diving into some pretty heavy and deep topics, but we also push people and say hey, you need to go seek your own therapy and help us guide you to where that would be, so that fits in perfectly with us.

S: Yeah. And I have learned so much from your podcast. That’s why I was telling Tracey, we have got to bring these folks on to help educate us more, and also to share your insights with our listeners. Again, I know you guys are super busy, super in demand, and really, really appreciate you and honored to have you joining us.

Dr Scott: Thank you so much. We feel like we kind of inhabit a pretty special place within the true crime community. We’re not everybody’s cup of tea, and that’s ok. It’s great that there’s a lot of quality stuff out there for everyone. One of the things that we really wanted to do in creating our podcast was just really provide real psycho-education about all the aspects of criminality and mental health diagnoses that have a nexus to crime. It was Shiloh that pointed it out years ago to me that there was really not a lot being explained about the drives. There was just a lot of focus on the gore and the things that really – I don’t want to sound pejorative when I say salacious, but there is a lot of salacious material out there that’s really good, I really enjoy it myself, but some people will give us reviews of like, wait, this is too clinical. I feel like I’m in class. Yeah, that’s kind of what we intended, right.

S: I love it. It’s funny, my husband – we’ve been in the car a few times listening, and he’ll go, you really love this because they’re really detailed and they’re really researched based. You love it, don’t you, and I’m like, oh yeah baby, oh yeah.

T: Sharon’s background is animal behavior so this is right up her alley as far as part of why she’s binged so intently. A little bit of our background – of course, our audience will be hearing this from our previous podcasts,  but in this sphere we’re not educated well about mental health issues, in the exvangelical area. Many of us are coming from that, and it was all about you just need to pray harder, you need to believe harder, and mental illnesses, mental issues are really not focused in on. I think this is why you guys are such important guests into this sphere, because you bring that snark with the clinical benefits. So we’re very excited. This is exciting for us.

S: Absolutely. Alright. Well, what has actually brought us together today is something not fun at all, especially for me and Tracey. That is the recently revealed crime of Steve Greisen. We will have already talked about who he is ahead of time, people can refer back to that as far as our relationship with him. So this was in Colorado Springs, Colorado, September 7^th of 2022, Steve was arrested. He had been messaging with, unbeknownst to him, an undercover detective from the Internet Crimes Against Children taskforce. He was involved in solicitation of a child for prostitution. So after texting with this detective who twice confirmed that the age of the girl was 14, Steve agreed to pay $170 for sex with her. He showed up with $180 in his pocket – I don’t know, maybe he was going to be generous with a tip.

T: Yeah, generous. Generous.

Dr Scott: Or he stopped by the ATM and didn’t break it into 10s, right.

S: There you go.

T: There it is. So smart.

S: Maybe he would have asked for change. Who knows.

T: Oh god.

S: Anyway. God, this is horrible to laugh at, but you got to. Sixty-eight years old at the time, so just the creep factor there is huge. In March of 2023, so six months later, he pled guilty to the class 4 felony and in – I don’t know if this is based on Colorado State law or Federal law, he can still vote. He cannot own a gun, but his spouse can own guns,.

T: Hmmph. Yeah. When we first heard about this, we thought it was a scam link because there was no way we believed this at first without some corroboration, and so to read that he actually pled guilty was something for us. In May 2023 he was sentenced, and this is where we’d love to get your input. In reading this our jaw dropped – he received no jail or prison time. He did have to register as a sex offender, and then he was sentenced to five years in the Colorado Sex Offender Intensive Supervision Probation Program, which that acronym which you guys are probably familiar with, new to us, is SOISP. So I don’t know if you say soips.

Dr Shiloh: Who knows.

S: And then as far as payment, hitting his pocketbook, he had court fees of $1,728.50, a fine of $1,500 which was broken down to $1,000 for sex offence, $500 for crimes against children. He has to pay the probation of supervision fee of $3,000 – I’m assuming that’s for the five-year program. I don’t know if there’s going to be any additional fees as time goes on. So his grand total was $6,228.50, and you know – I will tell you guys, Shiloh and Scott. That just like, rocked my world. You’re kidding. This guy was going to fuck/rape a 14-year-old, and this is what he is paying? I also wondered how that might compare to the sentence or the fines for other types of attempted felonies. Any ideas on that?

Dr Shiloh: Yeah, of course it varies state to state. We have two ways in which a lot of sex offences are prosecuted; either at the state level or at the federal level. It just depends, and especially when there’s an element of the internet being used, that can fall into a federal jurisdiction, and that’s a majority of who is investigating this at first. Nobody really had jurisdiction over the internet and websites other than the FBI. It kind of just defaulted to them. We’re talking late 90s early 2000s, mid-2000s when I started to come into this work. The bulk of it really fell onto the FBI to investigate this and prosecute this. That has since changed of course. Local law enforcement has been able to get educated and trained on how to perform these investigations, but not only that, develop these task forces that then can do some of the preventative type work, if you will. To catch a predator work in which they are setting up stings. So having said that, this case being prosecuted at a state level – I’m most familiar with California, of course, but this is pretty par for the course especially if he did not have prior violent offenses, or prior sexual offenses. It all comes down to how we end up doing risk assessment for future recidivism, which of course we can get into later, but just to answer your question – doesn’t surprize me at all that he did not get any prison time. If he had been prosecuted federally, I think that would have been very, very different.

Dr Scott: Right, if it had gone across state lines, that’s a whole different game.

T: Oh, ok.

Dr Scott: If he had travelled across state lines, right Shiloh.

Dr Shiloh: Right, but he didn’t even have to if he was using the internet to contact this person. It could have been a federal case, and he certainly would have gone to prison.

S: Ok.

Dr Scott: And yeah, it’s – again, the legal world is a labyrinth. I mean, it really is. There’s so much detail and variance between different laws from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and I would think – I’m not super familiar with this case, but I would conjecture that intent had a big part of it. He intended to do this, but there were two things – it was not a legitimate child, it was an operation. It was a sting, but it’s not entrapment, but it’s like they’re judging on the intent, and it would have been a completely different crime if there would have been contact with an actual underage individual. We can all have a lot of feelings about this, and they’re all legitimate, and I have to divorce myself from my emotional reaction as well, to go ok, well, this is what the system supports right now. Maybe it should be different, and then there becomes the issue of legislature from state to state, and how much states lean in which political direction and have higher populations versus more rurally scattered populations, because you know – this is something that has very much to do with your backgrounds, is the wider the population is spread out, the more people can have these individualized belief systems and religious systems and cult systems that don’t have to – they’re operating outside the eyesight of large urban populations where law enforcement is. Does that make sense?

T: Yes. That makes sense. I guess to follow up with that, when they perform what we would call a sting operation, is that usually tipped off? Because there’s either a known ring? With no priors I guess, what would usually tip off some type of sting operation such as this?

Dr Shiloh: I don’t think it’s necessarily something like that where there’s a tip, where there’s predators essentially, looking for prey. From the law enforcement side, I was a police officer before I was a psychologist. It could be as simple as maybe a certain police department gets a grant that goes towards sex trafficking, or money that goes towards reducing sexual offenses. Could they win or be awarded that grant because there’s been an increase or a problem? Perhaps? But sometimes money just needs to be doled out, so they could have folks that were recently trained up and have the infrastructure in place to be able to set up the sting, and unfortunately can be like shooting fish in a basket.

T: One of the reasons I like what you said, Dr Scott, of being able to kind of step back and divorce yourself from the emotions – that’s been really hard for us to do on this one specifically.

Dr Scott: Of course.

T: Why this case matters so much to us, because it comes from those circles and this particular man comes from those circles, where helping trafficked individuals is usually a main ministry in these circles, right? They actually have donations and set up huge organizations to save children from trafficking, of which we know he’s been connected to, so this really causes us to gasp emotionally on so many levels. Of course then, it’s Sharon’s own personal connection – we all have somewhat of a personal connection from our former time at the ministry that we lived next door to them, but Sharon even more so through the years.

S: Yeah. I don’t need to go into that now – we talked about that, or will talk about that later, but I think – the hypocrisy is stunning, someone who’s very high profile in Christian film and in music, and of course, just on the personal level too. It’s not just a crime, but you’ve got the betrayal of his wife Nelly and their sons. It’s a very widespread problem. Tracey, you’ve had a bit of a theory here too, right?

T: Yes, so one of the main reasons I wanted to talk about this, and I was going to forward a link to several articles to you all (which I didn’t do, but I can) – it’s called the Julie Roys report, and she basically keeps track of all the investigations of the pastors, the ministers, that have been accused not just of adultery, it’s bad enough in that sphere, but of the amount of having either sex crimes or exploitation of minors. It is what we would call almost at epidemic levels now. I don’t know if it’s just because of our ability to communicate now, it’s one right after the other. So of course, I’m not a psychologist and I don’t know what research has been there, but we come from what we call purity culture, which has a very strong sense of repression of your sexuality from the time you are a child born into these circles, to then if you are an adult and you convert into these circles, it really in my theory is an arrested development that happens at a crucial part of their lives that kind of seems to be this branch that comes out of there. So I’m very interested in what you guys know about that, and what you think about that and why there seems to be this massive epidemic of trusted professionals, trusted pastors and priests and ministers having so many incidents of this.

Dr Scott: One of the things I would say is, taking a couple of steps back to the phenomenon to which you’re speaking, has so much to do with electronic communication and media and access. I come from what was a small town in northern Alabama. That’s where I grew up, I was part of the United Methodist church, I’m no longer part of the United Methodist church, however it was a great church to grow up in with very much a focus on community works and what is your role, what is your purpose, how do you take care of the community. So there was a very loving, supportive message at that time, but I was exposed to people who were much more strongly attached to dogma within their particular denomination. What I’ve noticed over the years is that those ministers would be sort of landlocked within their own church, and it’s like you would be drawn because someone would say hey, I go to a great church, come with me. That whole landscape has changed in the last 40 years. Certainly there was televangelism that started in the 70s, I remember in college we used to just get completely bunkered out of our mind and watch late night televangelism because it was so over the top.

S: Tammy Faye!

Dr Scott: It was more than Tammy Faye, it was Ernest Angely. Do you guys remember Ernest Angely?

T&S: Yes!

Dr Scott: that would heal you through the television in his powder blue tuxedo and his toupee. Also brought up on sex charges, by the way.

S: Wow.

Dr Scott: Yeah, so the proliferation – I think it’s on an exponential level due to social media and everybody with a camera and an internet commercial, even if their church is 300 square feet in a mini-mall, they can get on and spout all sorts of craziness. There is sort of this human algorithm that’s involved. How do you get more listeners? You get more listeners by being more extreme, and then you buy into this literalism interpretation of your dogma which puts a focus on exactly where you started out Tracey, on this purity culture. This weird interpretation of virginity that is wildly different – if you talk to any bible lit scholar, you’ll understand that that’s completely wrong. Then of course what it morphs into is what I find – I can’t think of enough horrible adjectives to describe how gross purity balls are. This whole movement of the father entering into a spiritual marriage with their child or giving over their child to a spiritual connection to Christ or God, it’s just the ultimate in creep factor, because it continues to marginalize and objectify women as separate from individual identity, as separate from healthy expression of sexuality. That’s the seed. That’s the evil seed that is planted to control people. Of course, as Dr Shiloh can really explain, is that predators find positions of power where there are opportunities to take advantage of children.

Dr Shiloh: Yeah, certainly I think if you have someone that is already a predator – I don’t know how else to say that, because there is some that have already gotten into that behavior and those offenses and then they find professions, usually, that give them a lot of access and a lot of power over potential victims. We see that in not just religious communities but other types of organizations, of course. I think the other thing that you touched on already Tracey, as far as looking at this as all these other layers that are playing into this factor – you said it seems like an epidemic, but is it really an epidemic or are we now feeling that it’s ok to report. I think that has been something that has been a thread of sex crimes through the decade, because if you ask anyone now, they’re usually like oh my god, yes, sex crimes – it’s an epidemic, it’s all over the place, human trafficking, sex trafficking, a lot of this stuff has been happening for a very, very long time, it’s just now we have a culture that more so than in the past, it’s ok to report it. We’re having more education around it. It’s ok for male victims to come forward now when they were perpetrated on by men or women. So there’s certainly been an evolution in how victims come forward. The frustrating thing is with all the things we’re going to talk about today, and all of the research surrounding sexual offending and victims of sexual crimes is we don’t know what we don’t know, and there still is so much that is left unreported. So the numbers the best that we have – are they truly accurate? It’s really hard to say, and probably not. We’re probably missing a lot of stuff because when we can go back and again, from the offender’s side, start exploring what behavior these people have been involved in, we don’t even have a point of contact with them until they come in contact with the criminal justice system. So until they have been caught. There have been some helpful things. We started implementing, a couple of decades ago probably now, the polygraph to sex offender treatment here in California. It’s one prong of what we call the containment model, so you have therapy and the clinician – it’s like a triangle at one end of the prong you have probation or parole, whoever is monitoring them is another one, and then the last prong is using polygraphs, and then the offender is in the middle. They’re kind of contained.

S: I see.

Dr Shiloh: Yes, so I think that’s really tricky, and if your listeners want a little bit more we did a two parter at the beginning of this year, 2024 Scott, on child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church. I think there’s a lot of overlap, as you’re alluding to, sexual repression, and some folks get into that profession because that’s what they’re looking for, they’re looking for the victims, but there’s others that aren’t but they do get there one day.

T: Yeah. I think that’s so good, to talk about how we are in a landscape where it is easier to report. Of course we would all consider that a good thing, so I think what’s really hard is the amount and the volume of cases that there are to report.

S: Yeah. It’s heartbreaking. It really is. Alright guys, well I took a lot of notes listening to many of your episodes and I’ve put together a list of terms and concepts that your information really helped me start to get my head around it all, and we would love for you to discuss with us. I broke it out into chunks. First thing we would like to touch on is some terminology and just general overview of some of these concepts.

T: Sharon is a great note taker, I’ve looked over that, but in our circles – and I say circles, but it’s really what our listening audience is the exvangelical community, this very fundamentalist community, lot of rules and regulations around sexual behavior, and so now what gets thrown around a lot is pedophile – everyone’s a pedophile. They’re a pedophile, and just this concept that all of these people are getting in as predators to serve their pedophilia. And I think seeing that, it’s way more complex than that and that’s why we’re interested in some of this terminology.

S: Right.

Dr Shiloh: Certainly. It drives me crazy in the media because they use it interchangeably with child molestation, or other types of child abuse that is not appropriate, so I think that’s a great place to start. I also think a good disclaimer is sometimes we can come off a little clinical when we’re talking about this. We’re not research psychologists necessarily, but we are or have been sitting in conferences, sitting in trainings, reading tons of research papers – I just read a new one this morning to prep for this. We can come across as just kind of talking about this stuff, it’s our daily reading, and I want your listeners to know that certainly just because a majority of our work in sex crimes has been with offenders, that’s the lens we’re looking through. Both Scott and I in our private practices, and there’s some overlap here right, but we have certainly worked with survivors of sexual abuse as well, and are incredibly mindful of that and those experiences. So just wanted to put that off the top.

T: No that’s great. That’s awesome.

Dr Scott: I just wanted to throw one thing out there that is not too – I don’t think it’s too clinical but it offers a good framework, is that there’s so many levels of frustration with throwing the term pedophile around. On one of the most base levels is when you use a term that is just this kind of broad range umbrella epithet, you actually water it down and dilute it, and you make it less potent for the places where it actually should be really strong so we can do our work, so we can stop these practices. What has happened is – Sharon, I have the same issue, I have a really raw mouth because I work with cops all day, and I started out with a raw mouth. But here’s the thing, that pedo or pedophile is now the new version of faggot. Faggot or diminutive, diminishing epithet terms are a way to push people down. It’s a way to oppress people that you don’t agree with, so now what we have is this nationwide movement, like there’s book bannings and if you support a book that helps a teenager maybe understand their sexuality and not commit suicide, you’re suddenly a pedophile.

T: Right.

Dr Scott: So that’s what’s frustrating too, we’re dealing with so much ignorance when it comes to this, and I mean wilful ignorance many times. The wilful ignorance is when you say let me educate you on this so that you as an individual are able to be aware of trafficking in your community, or aware of the abuse in your community, and people can just get so concrete that you can’t achieve the goal of that education. Sorry, that was my little soapbox about how it’s a power drive.

T: No, that’s great.

S: I love that Scott. One of the things that just fucking frustrates me so much is that…

Dr Scott: Oh Sharon, I love you so much, you’re just like let’s eff on together. I want to move to an island with you and we can f bomb to our heart’s delight.

[laughter]

S: Excellent. Well, this idea if what you really care about is people, and you really want to help prevent abuse, you really want to help abusers to not actually be self-destructive themselves, because if you care and want to prevent things, you have to fucking understand what’s going on. You’ve got to let go of your preconceived ideas and your quick little labels.

Dr Scott: And reactivity.

S: Yeah!

T: And reactivity. What’s interesting in that is – because obviously this is someone that we know and love, we love the community that is impacted by this, the fallout, and the flip side of the religious community because of this belief in a real devil, that the devil sits out there with a big sexual temptation, that’s his pitchfork of sexual temptation and he’s just gonna hit all these faithful believers equally, so then they cover it up with we just all need to be forgiving and compassionate, he just got touched by this satanic pitchfork of sexual crime.

Dr Scott: The devil made me do it.

T: The devil made me do it! So then they’re trying to formulate a compassionate community, still based on not real science, not real stuff, not real understanding…

Dr Scott: That also absolves the perpetrator. It absolves the perpetrator of the responsibility for that crime, because it was an outside influence of dark spirituality that made it happen. It’s the most unbelievable fucking mental gymnastics ever.

T: Yes!

Dr Shiloh: We certainly have heard that as an excuse in sex offender treatment.

Dr Scott: Oh my gosh, we could tell you stories about our clinical – Shiloh and I started out in a clinic doing pre and post incarceration treatment with sex offenders. I really learned my poker face in that job because you would hear things that were so nuts, that they completely believed. You just could not react to it.

S: Oh god.

T: So this is why it’s so exciting for us to have you all here, because Sharon and I – although we have been accused of being – what’s the latest Sharon?

S: Our steaming vat of rebellious witchery.

T: Rebellious witchery.

Dr Shiloh: Ooh! I love that.

Dr Scott: Oh I love that, you cauldron sisters!

Dr Shiloh: Let’s join.

[laughter]

Dr Shiloh: Put that on a t-shirt.

S: Amen!

T: But the reality is we have learned in our own lives the landscape of these mental health issues, and so many real mental health issues go undiagnosed, untreated, lied about, so we have compassion but not in the same thing of like, well, my sin’s equal to their sin and the devil made them do it. So we’re so excited you have this background and that you’re able to come bring this terminology to understand it for what Sharon said – we really want to solve this in our culture.

Dr Shiloh: And that’s – Scott and I would always get the question, how can you do that work, how can you work with those people, right? We’re one little cog in hopefully preventing future victims.

T: That’s awesome.

Dr Shiloh: For us, we had to have some meaning and purpose behind why we were doing it as well, and why I went on to do it for so long, and we both truly believe there are clinicians out there that are cut from different cloths that are just made to work with different populations. There are some that Scott and I would never even touch, because for us that would be too hard, or that would be too triggering, what have you. For some reason, we’re able to do this and we’re happy to be a part of hopefully identifying risk factors to prevent a future victim. So with that, I’m going to take one step a little backwards from pedophilia to talk about paraphilia, real quick. Paraphilia is a clinical term, if you think about it as the big umbrella term, and then pedophilia and hebephilia are going to fit under there, along with a gajillion other ones. But a paraphilia is essentially the experience of intense sexual arousal to atypical objects. Or it might be certain atypical situations, fantasies, behaviors, or even individuals. The lay term for this, or the non-clinical term we often throw around is like, a fetish. People are interested in things that are a little different, but in terms of paraphilic disorder it also has been defined as a sexual interest in anything other than a consenting human partner. That starts to give us a little flavor of oh, some of these could actually be illegal or criminal, but the last little piece of criteria on there is that the attraction, and for clinical purposes for us to diagnose someone with a paraphilic disorder, that attraction has to rise to the level of being distressing to that person that has that attraction. So distress is kind of a vague term, and we have it like that on purpose so we can individually look at this person’s life and say how is this bothersome for you, why are you seeking therapy for it? What sort of clinical interventions can be done for it, and that can come to light in a lot of different ways. So you have paraphilias, and then pedophilia is a paraphilia. When we’re looking at the unusual or atypical attraction in this case, for pedophilic disorder it is specifically to be sexually attracted to prepubescent children. Hence, what we see in the media or what we tend to throw around is sometimes there can be an offence against a teenager and someone says pedophile. So that would be incorrect, because most teenagers are post-pubescent.

S: Right. Dr Shiloh, could you clarify prepubescent, pubescent and post-pubescent for us?

Dr Shiloh: Sure. Clinically we really just look at pre and post. Of course it takes a while for a child to fully transition into post-pubescence if you will, but really we’re looking pre and post, so pre would just be there really aren’t any secondary sex characteristics that have developed yet in that child. There is – I think it’s the FBI in conjunction with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children who actually have a bit of a sterilized rubric for when they have to examine photographs that come across their desk to say about how old is this child. They will very much say are their hips developed, are there breast buds yet, is there any semblance of maybe some distribution of fat or weight gain in the way in which children develop – they have it down to something that can be tallied, essentially.

S: A science.

Dr Scott: Scored.

Dr Shiloh: Yeah, a science to where they have this tool for some of their investigations to be able to pinpoint the age as well as possible, without ever meeting this child, but for sake of clinically if we were to diagnose someone and start talking with them about their sexual attraction, the hard line there is looking at if they are attracted to body types where there is secondary sex characteristics or not. An interesting note about that is when you interview, and study and speak with pedophiles that oftentimes we have this myth that they have a preference of gender, that they prefer boys or they prefer girls – we don’t see that so much with pedophiles because if you think about it, their body types are actually pretty similar, prepubescent.

T: Yeah, that makes sense.

S: Androgenous, really.

Dr Shiloh: Yeah, yeah. So they don’t have as much of a preference, per se. I won’t get graphic here, but it’s more about just the very petite, smooth, non-curvy body type in a body that doesn’t give off smells – it’s very – I hate to use this word, but this is one that they use – it’s very pure.

T: Hmmm. Pure.

S: That’s exactly what I was thinking.

Dr Shiloh: And clean.

Dr Scott: Uncomplicated.

T & Dr Shiloh: Mmhmm.

S: Yeah. So you mentioned a moment ago that the term pedophile is not interchangeable with child abuse, molestation. Could you speak to that a little bit more.

Dr Shiloh: Sure, yeah of course. So there are people who offend against children and when they get caught and they get assessed and/or interact with the legal system and then eventually the mental health system, we have to determine what is the motivation here, because it’s important for us to understand them, to understand intent, also to understand risk, and then ultimately to understand how to target their treatment. There has been information that has shown that there are basically two categories; those that are pedophiles, that would meet the criteria for pedophilic disorder, and those that don’t, yet they still molested a child. This could be a contact offense where they did offend against a child. So not every child molester is going to meet the criteria for pedophilic disorder. They could, certainly, and then we would put them into that category. Not every person who is a pedophile, ever offends. We have many who have taken their own lives; we have many who have sought treatment. We have had many who have – there’s actually been organizations started, mostly online, where they certainly never want to offend and they are trying to figure out by talking to each other, how do you keep from offending, how do you deal with this struggle. So I think that helps parse it out for people, that there are two different types of offenders. Those with pedophilic disorder it’s almost easier to wrap your mind around. Ok, there’s this disorder, maybe they offend, maybe they don’t. The child molester who is not truly attracted to children – that one’s harder to wrap your head around, right, because I think there would be some people out there who would say oh no, once you’ve gone hands on with a child, all bets are off, you’re a pedophile, But we actually find that’s not true. There are a majority of cases, above and beyond when we look at the research, are opportunistic and situational types of offenders. That can vary, it doesn’t mean that someone is a serialized offender in that way, that would definitely lean more towards the paraphilia of being a pedophile, but there are some people are just so criminally oriented and minded that they don’t care who they’re offending against. It can be a person, place, thing – they are just tearing through committing offences. But there can also be people, when there is a number of different factors present in their life, perhaps their coping mechanisms for those are so faulty that it has ended up in a situation where they sexually act out against a person who is underage.

Dr Scott: There are so many aspects that she is referring to regarding power and control and availability and positioning. We talk about this overlap of potential diagnoses, but there aren’t any stats that distinctly show that every sex offender in this particular class of offense is diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. There isn’t anything – there’s some tendencies, and some trends, but what I can offer you is that there’s a huge part of this population that are sexual offenders that, while maybe not having a full diagnosis, have many qualities or flavors of antisocial acts, of antisocial behaviors, of narcissistic acts, of narcissistic behaviors, but they’re not – they’re subclinical. They’re not reaching the point where it’s an actual diagnosis.

S: Mmhmm.

Dr Shiloh: And usually we see more of that with those that offend against other adults, so rapists and sexual assaults.

Dr Scott: SVP – Sexually Violent Predators.

S: So, I just want to tell you how much I really, really appreciate that distinction. When I was listening to one of your episodes and you drew that line between someone with a paraphilic disorder of sexual attraction and arousal at the images of prepubescent children versus someone who makes the choice to act on violating a child – those are two very different things. In one of your episodes you recommended – well, a lot of resources, and we’re going to try to put a bunch of them up on our show notes, but one was the documentary I Pedophile, and I believe that was Dr James – can’t remember – Cantor?

Dr Shiloh: Cantor. Yes.

S: And I’m going to really recommend that to our listeners as well, because one of the men interviewed said, why would I choose this? If I had a magic wand or if I could undo what’s in my brain, I would. It gave me a lot of sense of compassion for the difficulty; that if some of these paraphilias truly have a genetic basis to them, they are not a result of someone just going into moral degradation, but the fact that their brain is actually stimulated by a certain thing that is atypical, that is not a choice. And yet, it’s something that we as a society really need to have a better understanding of if we are going to truly be able to help make a difference and save a lot of children from being victims – and also help individuals with the struggles that they face.

Dr Shiloh: Certainly – you have folks that feel that way and think that way, as you were speaking of the individual from the documentary. You also though, have folks with a lot of cognitive distortions going on, and Scott and I worked with them, where they absolutely believe that because they naturally feel this way, it must be natural and it should be allowed.

Dr Scott: Also they’re in a delusory process as well. I mean, there are hardcore pedophiles and hebephiles – the misinterpretation of their environmental data is absolutely staggering. There are individuals who say well, she was flirting with me. No sir, that child was six years old. Oh no, children are very sensual and very sexual. No. That’s not true, you are misinterpreting signals from this individual.

T: Oh wow.

Dr Scott: Or, they are choosing to misinterpret and that’s sort of their excuse. Again, it’s something that I think speaks to your original question, that this requires understanding and challenging your own perspective and nuance so we don’t muddy the waters, because the more muddy the waters are, the more perpetrators have the ability to offend.

T: Oh, that’s so good. What our podcast is really based on is coming out of our own fundamentalism we realized our own cognitive dissonance, and there is an environment – we’ve done a couple of episodes where we referenced it’s easier for mental health issues to hide in plain sight because it’s almost part of the teaching, it’s almost part of the training, so it’s like an incubator where these things get to fester. And because there’s no teaching, there’s no training, there’s no understanding, it all gets that label of it’s just the devil trying to mess me up. This is – you said so many great things as far as that mental state and being in an environment of coercive control. That’s the other thing we talk about that is so prevalent and then you had mentioned at the beginning – we did an episode called Sexvangelicals, as we were coming out and discovering our own sexuality, because we were so repressed. We had no grounding on what was natural development, normal development, and really believed that some of these paraphilias – and I don’t know if you guys have much research on that as far as what you might be born with and what you are made by that very much conditioning that happens. The gist of that Sexvangelical episode was many people coming out notice that they would have what we would call kinks.

Dr Shiloh: Sure.

T: I love that you differentiated what would be legal and not legal, consenting and not consenting. I’ll just add this – in this world of really coercive control, consent is not understood. It’s not taught, it’s not respected, so when you have women particularly, coming of age, it’s not a factor. We have to take that into consideration. So anything you guys want to say about that – I know that’s a lot of the topic, but it’s so important.

Dr Shiloh: It is, it’s very important, and the research community is – not split, I would say, but the recognize that it seems as if certain interests and certain – let’s say atypical objects, or things, or situations – might be biologically based. You might just be wired that way, for sure, and then it takes something to kind of wake that up one day.

S: Epigenetics.

Dr Shiloh: Yeah, and if nothing woke it up, then ok, maybe we all have the potential for a lot of different kinks. Can it be conditioned? Yes. I mean, we certainly know it can be conditioned – when you talk about pornography use and different genres and getting into more and more taboo areas – certainly once you start some classic conditioning of pairing a bodily function like sexual arousal to a stimulus, then yes we can certainly condition that as well. I think what the research community in this area has made a bit of a distinction about is that your non-paraphilic kinks – yes they can just sort of be woken up, or you can be conditioned to it. They almost put – and I always hate saying this out loud, because of what it can invoke in people, but (and I think James Cantor speaks to this) they put pedophilia because we have studied it so much and we know the wiring systems in the brain. They almost put that into terms of a sexual orientation, not that it should be an allowed or appropriate or widely acceptable sexual orientation in terms of how you act out on it, but they’ve made that distinction; we have enough biological markers at this point to realize that those folks essentially are born that way. I hope that makes sense, and I hope that isn’t too triggering to some of your listeners.

S: It does make sense, and it’s not – I get why we’ve got to be really, really careful when you say orientation.

Dr Shiloh: Right.

S: But I like what you say about wired that way, because if someone is born absolutely hating cilantro, or absolutely loving cilantro, that isn’t a choice. Now, if I want to eat cilantro I think that’s ok and there’s nothing illegal about it, other than – I don’t know, maybe we’re abusing the plant, but there’s not a consent issue like when you have another human being.

Dr Shiloh: There you go.

Dr Scott: That is the key word: consent.

T: That is the key word.

S: That is the big issue, that a child cannot give consent. For the most part, a lot of teens, even some that can legally – depending on the country or the state you live in, but if you look at their social development, and their psychological and emotional maturity, they’re really not in a position to give consent. So it’s really a question of whether you are victimizing someone, using someone, or whether it truly is an equally balanced power dynamic that would allow the person to make an independent choice. And I think that’s where some of the fuzzy line comes down to.

Dr Shiloh: Indeed.

Dr Scott: Yeah, it gets complex too, given world culture. Across the board there are many different cultures – I wouldn’t say we are a melting pot, we’re like a really interestingly textured salad here in the US, with a lot of different cultural influences, and just from state to state. But the world is a big place when it comes to how these kind of things are viewed. Even historically our view of children and minors has changed. Shiloh and I have done a couple of episodes about that as well. The view of what is an adult, when are you actually making adult decisions. The reason I give that framework is I definitely in this conversation today, don’t want to minimize or not hit on the fact that there are sexual predators who are experts and grooming, and they have intentionally created atmospheres where they engage the trust of the child. The most heinous examples are when predators will use phrases to minors, regardless of their age, of you’re so special, you’re so mature, we have something special. That allows the predator to create a false sense of consent within that minor, and to reinforce that within themselves, right. She gave me consent. He gave me consent, when what you’re saying Sharon, which is absolutely right, is legally a child cannot give consent for that, right. But there are ages – even within the US, it’s mind-blowing about the age of consent from state to state. Come on, it is 2024 folks, we need to all get on the same page about this.

Dr Shiloh: I think in the majority of states it’s 16. 17 and 18 are actually less common. That makes for interesting legal cases…

Dr Scott: But if the age for marriage in some states is even lower than the age of consent, that is fucked up.

T: It is so fucked up. Of course, like, Utah right, it’s always in the news.

Dr Scott: Right.

Dr Shiloh: Yeah! And then you have this sort of federal age of consent which again speaks to a lot of internet crimes, or crossing state lines, which is 18, so they’re more conservative in that way. I think I gave this example in one of our episodes, where you can have a couple that’s in a relationship physically and it’s legal, but if she were to send him a nude picture via the internet or across state lines, it’s a federal offense.

S: Wow.

Dr Shiloh: So you have all of these discrepancies that – you’re right, Scott, let’s just get on the fucking same page, please.

Dr Scott: Or, we can force an individual to have a child in some states, even though they are not of an age when they have any rights as a parent, which is like…

T: Also fucked up. Yes.

Dr Scott: That’s one of the things that’s so complex about the way our country is set up. I did want to also add something, using a particularly bold example of mental health and sexual repression. We have really gone backwards in the US in ways that are so subtle that we’ve forgotten. You can go back and look at school – elementary, middle and high school, or what used to be called junior high – hygiene films. Do you remember the term hygiene films?

T: Yes I do!

Dr Scott: They were beautifully constructed and very cut and dried, talking in terms that can be understood by elementary and junior high school kids, about the process of reproduction. That was sex education, and that was when pregnancy rates were lower among high schoolers. Now from state to state we have these draconian laws – even I’ve had the experience too, of individuals who – very, very well meaning, but saying well, I’m going to teach my kids that. I want it to be my responsibility, and I’ve gotten into arguments because I push back with ok, your son is 14, when did you have that discussion? And there’s just a blank stare because they have not engaged in that discussion at all. And then I start getting really pissed and I go ok, he’s 14, so most of the information he’s gotten is probably really wrong.

T: Yep.

S: From his peers!

Dr Shiloh: And from TikTok.

S: Oh my gosh.

Dr Scott: And you’re about seven years behind starting this conversation. So again, the idea of repressing too – the mental health issues Tracey was talking about is exemplified so horribly in the tale of the Duggars and everything they’ve been through. I think it was Ginger, because Ginger is the one, if anybody watches it, you watch Ginger and you go, she’s the one that’s gonna break out. This is the one that doesn’t take shit, and she’s an insightful thinker, but she went to her mom to say I need to talk to somebody, I need counselling, I’m struggling with this, and her mom’s response was well, therapy – no, that’s just paying somebody to be your friend. And her mom is a victim – I want to say also, her mom is a victim of narcissistic abuse by the elder Duggar, but there’s a lot of repression when a child is given that message that their feelings aren’t valid. Their emotional experience is not valid. Even the kids were taught to do it to each other, to shame women’s bodies so that they gave each other clues, if they saw somebody walking down the street, they’re supposed to give a code word to their brothers – Nike, look down at your shoes. When you repress, when you say that those kind of urges are evil or sinful, you’re laying a groundwork for someone to act out in ways that are predatory later in life.

T: So good.

S: Absolutely.

T: Yes.

S: Scott, there was something you said in one of your episodes, I paused and wrote it down because it was so fantastic. It was something about here in the US, we seem to have “quivering Puritanical shame about all things related to sex”. That is so true, and it is what absolutely shuts down education on basic biology.

Dr Scott: Basics!

S: The basics.

Dr Shiloh: Which is key here, for sure. It’s key to preventing offenses.

S: I would like to circle back to this particular situation that we’re dealing with, with my friend, Steve Greisen. Scott, you mentioned a moment ago, you used the term hebephilia. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that, and again in the situation with Steve, we’re dealing with he was ready to go pay money to basically – in my opinion, I don’t know how else to say it – rape a 14-year-old. Not technically pedophilia, because we’re going to assume that that 14-year-old was in early pubescence at the least, but that’s just sick and fucked up. So can you guys talk about that a little bit, and what could be behind all of that.

Dr Scott: Well, just quickly, to build on what Dr Shiloh laid down earlier. We talked about pedophilia being generally aged ten and under, but it’s specifically about pre-secondary or it’s the primary sexual characteristics which are very androgenous. No fat distribution, that sort of body. Hebephilia is more looked at generally because trends happen in the world about early onset of menses, secondary sexual characteristics, but generally we’re speaking about age 11-14. Hebe means drawn from (because I’m a big Greek mythology nerd), Hebe was one of the minor goddesses of the hearth, and she was like a teenager, sort of like a maidservant in the Greek pantheon, but she was a deity. So Hebephile particularly describes this age range.

T: Oh, that’s interesting.

Dr Scott: When we’re talking about a 14-year-old – you’re right, there was intent, there was understanding that he was going to do something that was against the law, right. But there’s also this term that’s used in the ultra-far end of the men’s rights movements, and the marginalization of women, and I apologize because this is such a gross statement, is if it bleeds then it breeds. So the excuse is if a woman is at the point where she is exhibiting menses which means she’s of reproductive capability, then it should be open season. If she’s able to reproduce I should have access to her for my needs. There is a real, like you were saying, cognitive dissonance or cognitive distortion, would probably be more accurate in this vein, of justifying that.

T: That’s good, yeah.

Dr Scott: So, just want to be very clear though that it’s not interchangeable with crimes of molesting or abuse or exploiting, like Dr Shiloh was saying. It’s about insight, willingness to have insight into our own shortcomings in order to develop an emotional IQ and adult sensibility. Is it normal, or like a clinical term, is it within normal limits – you’ll see this on reports sometimes, talking about behaviors or presentations, as a WNL, within normal limits. Is it within normal limits for an adult to be attracted to a younger person under 18 with secondary sexual characteristics. It is not out of the realms of normal. It’s just highly inappropriate, and we accept that as a society, and that’s what really worries me about a lot of the political and ideological division in this country, is that there’s a large movement that wants to lower that and make it ok through the marginalization of women and young girls, of saying that it’s ok to have these kind of feelings and marry off younger and younger women, which comes from these proto-Evangelical movements.

T: Yes.

S: Yeah, you’re talking our language, how fucked up that is.

T: Yes, you are.

Dr Shiloh: And I would add, because I know people are probably thinking of it when they hear that, is that the research shows that it is normal for heterosexual men to be attracted to post-pubescent teenage girls, we don’t find that so much in the reverse with straight women being attracted to teen boys. That comes up with a whole ten other podcasts we could do about female sex offenders and teachers who offend with their students, things like that, but the research just doesn’t super support that, so it does come down more to a mentality with women, and the emotional “connectedness” and stunted sort of maturity. But with solicitation offenders, they’re a tricky population because a lot of times it starts out online and then it crosses over to in person contact offenses. We have a ton of data on each of those alone, but when you have the one person that does cross over it gets a little tricky and I think we’re still developing typologies of those types of folks. It’s like, how do you develop typologies. I found a paper this morning that I hadn’t seen before, although it’s from 2017, but it’s from one of the leading researchers in the areas of child molestation and specifically internet crimes against children, but he even breaks down that there are sort of four typologies. One they just called cyber sex only offenders. These individuals, the fantasy is really just about talking to these children, or teens, online and the majority of them never actually intend to go meet up with them, even though they might be talking about those things, like, they’re setting it up but typically we’re finding it’s more about the fantasy of just talking about it with the perceived child, because sometimes it is law enforcement on the other end.

S: Can you pause that just one second, Dr Shiloh. That’s one question I had. I have done a request for the case evidence file from Colorado, from El Paso County. Don’t know if I’ll get it, but I was unclear as to whether Steve thought he was communicating with the actual 14-year-old girl, or someone who was going to provide this girl for his sexual indulgence.

Dr Scott: Hmmm. That’s different.

S: So that I don’t know.

Dr Shiloh: Interesting. When you find that out because that’s going to kind of play into these typologies I’m going through right now, because the way that they did this study is essentially going through all of the chats, and a lot of the back and forth that was done online to even take the person out of it from interviewing them and getting their story, is looking at what their behavior was online.

S: Got it.

Dr Shiloh: So with these cyber sex only offenders, they tended to be white men, overwhelmingly. They tended to expose themself to the victim, meaning like via webcam or sending explicit photos of themself to the victim and then nearly half of them asked for sexually explicit photos back from the victim. In their language and their conversations with the victim, about a third of them expressed some sort of interest in very child specific or even incest themes, and they tended to have more protracted interactions with the victims, like, for months. These guys put a lot of effort into their behavior online. But again, the talk of meeting up was very hypothetical, it was like, someday and sort of things of that nature, which again – we hypothesise plays into the fantasy.

T: Before you go on, that’s also illegal though. I know the exchanging of photos is absolutely illegal. But is that communication back and forth also illegal?

Dr Shiloh: It depends on the jurisdiction. It is more difficult to prosecute, because – gosh, this is so hard. We’ve done quite a few episodes where we’ve touched on this idea of thought crimes. How much of this is just fantasy and how much of this is there some intent behind it? But the idea is, is this a willing participant on the other end. Generally, I know in California it would probably fall under something like Child Annoying, which if you’re kind of speaking sexually to a child, that’s kind of a catchall for a lot of creepy behavior with a kid, is a simple way to put it. So it would depend on what penal code sections are out there that would capture this. I might be wrong, but I don’t think a lot of states have developed particularly a crime for having sexually explicit conversations with children, because they’re just so hard to prosecute in terms of again, what was the intent there. Then if you’re even trying to prove intent of meeting up, that would be even harder with this group. So then they go into another category which they call cybersex/schedulers. These individuals often have the interactions for months as well, but they have a lot of discussion of meeting up. It doesn’t mean they always do, and actually this group tends to be the group that cancels more often. They might make actual plans, with a time and a date and a place, but they tend to cancel. We don’t know if that’s because it’s part of the fantasy to take it that far, or because they tend to have second thoughts of is this a trap or not, once push comes to shove, and they’ve really made this date. But we find the same things as far as these tend to be overwhelmingly white men. They do, about half of them, expose themselves to the victim and seek the sexually explicit victim photos. They were actually the group that was more likely or most likely to express very child specific or incest specific interest in themes when they were going back and forth with the child. So then you have your schedulers, which is the third group. Still predominantly white, but this included more non-white offenders than the previous two categories, if you will. They actually rarely expose themselves, and very few of them sought photos of victims. It’s almost as if once you get to schedulers, they’re just kind of like, very focused on this goal of meeting up for sex. There’s very little of the online grooming and talking. They’re seeking more of, as the researchers put it, a quick hookup. They’re not putting in a ton of effort. They’re probably going to start talking sexually to this child a little quicker and what I’ve hypothesized there is that they need to see who’s going to be the one they’re going to hook up with. They need to get through quickly, and if they find the one that’s receptive, cool, them I’m going to follow that. I’m not going to put in a bunch of time and effort if this is not going to pan out. It’s interesting they also find with this that the chats, the offender kind of lowers themselves to the emotional immaturity of the victim, in the chats that they have and the conversation they have with the child. I think that is part of the grooming process, but it’s sort of this quick and dirty, let’s just see if there’s someone that’s going to bite here. And then you have the last category which they call buyers. So there is more of a seeking out – this almost crosses over into sex trafficking. This is more seeking ads of people that can provide sex with underage children. I don’t know if the case study that you guys started off with would fall into this, but generally they are responding to a classified ad for casual encounters, some of which feature minors, or implied sexual deviant activity, and this is really more ethnically diverse group of men. Again, it’s very quick. It’s not like they’re going back and forth or sending pictures of themselves. They are enquiring about when and where, and this tends to happen in areas like we hear about sex trafficking and sex work and child sexual abuse going up around like, the Superbowl, when there’s a lot of vacations, or businessmen, or people coming to a location at a specific time and very quickly wanting to seek out sex while they’re there. So it’s interesting – there’s a ton of other typologies that break down offenders in this solicitation realm, all the way down to how far they’re willing to drive to get to this victim. So there is a lot of research out there, I think it’s just making the leap from is this just an online offense to will this cross over into a contact offense, which is kind of the million dollar question for researchers.

T: That’s so good.

S: That terminology too – noncontact offense, being cyber, all that other stuff, versus contact in person, victimization.

Dr Shiloh: Yes.

S: Yeah. And one thing that I remember thinking in this is I don’t think somebody goes from zero to a zillion in one step. So there’s not any information in this particular, in the court document and the reporting that we’ve seen thus far about any evidence of Steve having engaged in viewing child sexual abuse images. A terminology I heard you guys give a distinction of, that I really appreciated as well, is the difference between pornography and sexual abuse images. Could you speak to that as well, and also – I know you can’t diagnose, you haven’t see him or whatever, but the likelihood of there having been something to do with minors in viewing visual images prior to just – yeah, I’m going to pay $180 so I can fuck this little girl. Sorry for my language, but that’s what he was doing.

Dr Shiloh: I can take those stats, but Scott, do you want to talk about sexual child abuse images?

Dr Scott: Yeah, so there was a really famous politician years ago, this is during the Larry Flynt Hustler federal trial, and they asked him well, Senator, what is pornography? And he said well, I know when I see it. The idea that there is a legal distinction here, and this is one of the reasons we don’t use the term child pornography, because pornography is – again, using that word consent. I mean, 99% of the time, if it’s media driven, Playboy, Playgirl or any of those plethora of magazines – that is consent. Those models consented to that and they, regardless of how young they look, some magazines tend to go for younger models, they have very strict rules about what is legal. They have to have signed, they have to check the birth certificates, there’s a real procedure there. So what we did was – well not, we, the law enforcement population around taking these actions and protecting our youth, was to really define this term child sex endangerment images. It’s what these photos are, and you can see each one of those is a qualifier. They are sex, it is graphic, it may mean nudity or it may only be partial nudity, or there may be no nudity, but it can still be a child sex endangerment image. That can differentiate from pornography because again, there was this ignorant drive to lump everything together.

T: So good.

Dr Shiloh: And you’ll still find when you’re looking at court records and you’re looking at how the crimes are categorized, it will say possession of child pornography, distribution of child pornography. That’s just what they’re calling it there in the treatment realm and hopefully in the media, to shift that into child sexual abuse images or child sexual endangerment images. It’s really just to start getting us out of this idea that it’s a product that’s being pedalled; that it’s an actual victim there.

T: That is so important. Thank you for pointing that out. It’s really, really important, especially in our circles, with consent.

Dr Shiloh: The more that we can do to change language is part of our mission just with having our podcast. But there is actually information as far as when we look at solicitation offenders – what is their background, and if you just look at documented criminal history for them, with the samples that have been studied, only about five percent showed that they had had previous contact offenses in their background. Now, that’s their criminal record but once they got into treatment and they were able to be interviewed and/or self-report in anonymous surveys, there was a big survey that was done at one of the prisons many, many years ago, where we got kind of astounding information, more specifically with child pornography offenders. But if we’re just talking solicitation offenders, once they self-reported it was almost 30% of them, they admitted to a contact offense that was never known about before. So almost a third had done something previously, and depending on the study you look at, there’s quite a gap, but between 20-40% had child sexual abuse images on their computer when they were caught for solicitation.

T: Wow.

Dr Shiloh: But predominantly they were tending to focus on victims between the ages of 13 and 15, so that post-pubescent teenage age range which – I don’t think we said this sort of qualifier when we talked about pedophilia and hebephilia, pedophilia you can be exclusive or non-exclusive. Those are the subcategories. Exclusive means you are literally only attracted to prepubescent children. Nonexclusive can be also attracted to adults, and those individuals are obviously easier to work with in treatment because they have another way in which their sexual needs can be met. When we talk about hebephilia and those focusing on that age range; they can also be attracted to adults; it just means that that age range is their preferred sexual attraction, if that makes sense. And we see more of that, where there’s that attraction to both, where it’s non-exclusive, if you will, for those who meet the criteria for hebephilia, it’s just their primary interest is that age range, even though they might be married or they might date adult women. But yeah, there’s some concerning information about the backgrounds and the previous offending behavior of solicitation offenders.

T: That is concerning.

S: I know it would vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but is it standard procedure if someone has been arrested for solicitation involving a minor to also then go and seize all of their electronic devices and search for child sexual abuse images?

Dr Shiloh: Oh yeah, I think that would be very common procedure, to get every device out of that home. It would be very easy to write a search warrant for that once you have the initial offense, so yeah, they’re certainly looking for everything that will stick because solicitation is a little bit difficult sometimes. It’s tricky, where computer offenses, the evidence is right there. You have it.

T: I know we’re really coming up on time. I was looking at that acronym I said, SOISP, the offender intensive supervision probation program. Do you have any stats on how successful those programs are?

Dr Shiloh: Ooh, that’s a great question. I don’t. So that would be similar to – in California we have CASOM, that’s the California Sex Offender Management Board. It’s the overseeing Board who determines really how – it includes mental health professionals, think of it as a little bit of a thinktank in who’s gonna set the policy and procedure for people who are getting out of prison and how they will be monitored in the community, and what kind of treatment they will get, making sure the best and most evidence-based risk assessment tools are being done. So I guess in a way to answer your question, recidivism for sexual offenses is much lower than I think people would think. When I usually pose that question I get anything from 50 to 100% will reoffend. If we look at all sexual offenses which I know it’s different, if we had time to break it down it would be great, but we’re looking at 15. 15% reoffend. … Sex offender treatment – I pause, because it pains me to say this. Sex offender treatment actually isn’t hugely statistically significant in reducing recidivism. Now, I don’t think that means we should do away with it, and Scott and I will tell you, those anecdotal experiences of working with someone, knowing they’re getting their risk factors and understanding them, and making changes to make sure they never reoffend, and to me those moments are worth every single year I ever put into working with this population. But the overall research shows that it doesn’t make a huge, significant impact on lowering recidivism rates overall.

S: What does?

Dr Scott: We need more research. We need continual research.

S: Ok. This has gone so fast.

Dr Shiloh: It has!

S: And been so fascinating.

T: So fascinating!

S: And so wonderful, and I know that we have just kind of scratched the surface. Of course I’m going to put a plug in again for our listeners, and we’ll put in the show notes so much great information and education that you guys offer in your podcast, plus a lot of fun and snark, so they’ll have fun listening as well. As we wrap up here, is there anything else, Shiloh or Scott, that you would like to say to our listening audience?

Dr Scott: Well, I would just like to say I have so much admiration for you two as hosts. I wish – I hope that our country will get to a place where we talk about this more, about the impact of coercive and oppressive religious doctrine and dogma, and isolation. It’s no different from the fingers that we point at other countries and other cultures that do this to women and minors. I think you’re doing really important work. There is a way, and you guys are part of the way for people that are survivors and moving out of that world. So keep up the good work. And listeners out there, know that you’re not alone. I’m glad that you’re all listening and finding your path out.

S: Thank you.

Dr Shiloh: Yes, thank you so much for the opportunity. It’s always a pleasure for us to get out in front of different audiences, and this has certainly been that opportunity. We can’t thank you enough for that, after seven years of podcasting it’s very exciting to feel like we’re not just sort of swimming in the same circle, so it’s very exciting to have made this connection. And I knew with four of us, an hour and a half would go by like – nothing.

T: It would go by so fast. You guys have been amazing and excellent, and I am very excited to introduce our audience to your podcast because it’s the same thing. We all tend to swim in the same circles, so this has been so important for us to expand with your research and your definitions.

Dr Scott: Awesome.

Dr Shiloh: Thank you guys.

S: And we may have to talk again later about the whole cult thing.

Dr Scott: Happy to, yeah.

S: Because you guys got some great insights on that so maybe another day.

Dr Shiloh: Let’s do it.

T: Yes.

…

S: Wow. Shiloh and Scott are just incredible to me. Their range of experience, and their depth of evidence-based knowledge – I really, really value that, and I am just so grateful they were willing to take the time with us to share those insights and help us start to put some framework around this shit pile.

T: Yes, and they’re very busy people as well so we are particularly honored that they gave up their weekend morning. They’re out on the West Coast, which is a different time zone than we are, to be able to meet with us. There’s so much I’m still pondering, so many nuggets to think through, and again, from our perspective of you can’t solve something if you can’t even agree on what the problem is and what are the causes, so I really am grateful for the work they’re doing, and very glad that we could share it on this space with people who probably haven’t heard them before.

S: Right. Right. So, folks, as we said at the outset, there are these other things that we want to follow up with on this whole topic. Of course, it’s the experience of learning that someone that we thought we knew could be guilty of something so horrific, and we’re going to look more closely at what exactly happened there with him, and this crime, and we’re going to delve into the leadup of it all, which is going to bring us back to the tie in with the 1970s Jesus movement.

T: The motherfucking Jesus movement.

S: Wait a second, I’ve been looking at it more and more Tracey, and you know the Jesus that we thought we were following in the beginning? That dude’s cool, but he got corrupted. So anyway, that’s the next episode.

T: Well, there’s so much to go into which I’m excited to do, but as far as – I’ll just add this little nugget, all of those people who came from so much trauma and had some very deep-seated issues, it all got glossed over in the Jesus movement, right. So yes we all wanted what he stood for at that time, but Jesus really wasn’t the answer to some really deep seated mental and emotional issues, as we all are living out today.

S: That’s right. Amen sister. Amen.

T So with that, we are wanting to dive into that and of course Steve Greisen, I don’t know if we said it here, but he actually produced a whole film on the Jesus Movement and that first love and how exciting that was. So it’s going to be very appropriate, it’s all going to connect here, so we are hoping to be back on our regularly scheduled time, which is dropping every two weeks.

S: [laughing] Can I just do an aside and go hahahahaha.

T: Yeah, but the hahaha is totally me, Tracey-centered because there’s been a lot of life happening in the midst of all of this, right.

S: I’m about to have a lot of life too, I’m on standby to go to Tennessee because our tenth granddaughter – well tenth grandchild who happens to be a girl, is about to be born so I’m going to have grandma duty soon. So it’s not just you; it’s other stuff in my life that might have us delaying, but we’re going to try not to, folks. We’re to try to be on time.

T: We’re going to try not to because it has – even though life has happened, and life has been happening for me, there’s so much to ponder through this, because of course those children that we talked about were raised in all of this. And the more healing that we get, and the more insight that we get, and the more that we’re able to go oh god that was really fucked up, the better it is in our own relationships.

S: Yes.

T: So it’s all interconnected, Sharon. It’s all interconnected, so for those listeners who worry about us, let me tell you that this has actually been a gift for us because we’ve been able to see things and acknowledge things that I don’t think on this level we would have been able to if we hadn’t been doing this and diving in. Would you agree?

S: I totally agree. I totally agree.

T: So thank you, thank you to our listeners, thank you for your feedback, thank you for your messages. We are going to try to get back on our regularly scheduled programming, but you guys have been great and you’re patient with us, and we will keep you posted.

S: And in the meantime, you can be part of the conversation with others by asking to join our Facebook group, Feet of Clay Confessions of the Cult Sisters Community.

T: Yes! And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram. I have been really good for a long period of time about being daily, and I did also take a little small break on that, but it’s going to be back up this week and we’re going to post some really cool things – especially, if you guys heard it in our interview: Dr Scott, Dr Scott! So for those of you who know that reference, be ready for some fun Instagram pictures!

S: Yay. Alright everybody, there is a bunch of links in the show notes for this episode as well, and until next time, be good to yourselves. Love each other. Talk soon.

T: Bye bye.