The Chief Constable of Police Scotland is under fire for referring to paedophiles by their preferred term “minor-attracted people” (MAPs) in a European Union-linked report.
In his Year End Report for 2021/22, Chief Constable Iain Livingstone said his Specialist Crime Division for Public Protection had “engaged in the Horizon Europe Project” and that the project’s “main agenda is to develop understanding and approach to avoid the victimisation of children by engaging Minor-Attracted People (MAPs) and providing them with the necessary support, treatment and guidance to help prevent criminal activities.”
While it was some time before the incendiary language in the report registered with the public, its use of the extremely controversial ‘MAP’ term has provoked a predictable backlash after coming to wider attention.
“Most Scots will find any attempt to soften the language around paedophilia in official guidance to be deeply disturbing and wrong,” said a spokesman for the Scottish Conservatives in comments quoted by The Telegraph.
Independent social work consultant Maggie Mellon further warned that adopting the ‘MAPs’ language ran the risk of “normalising and therefore perhaps decriminalising” paedophilia.
Condemnation has not just been local to Scotland, where the devolved government — roughly equivalent to the U.S. state government — is run by the left-separatist Scottish National Party (SNP), however.
“How about we don’t do this: ‘minor-attracted people’ equal predators plain and simple,” urged Canadian celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Australian commentator Rita Panahi, meanwhile, warned the adoption of paedophiles’ preferred terminology was an example of “[w]hat can happen when sane people don’t fight the ‘culture wars’.”
“Police Scotland does not use the term Minor-Attracted Person,” insisted a spokesman for Police Scotland in a response to the controversy quoted by the Scottish Daily Express, despite the fact that their chief constable’s official report clearly did use it.
“The reference in the Chief Constable’s Assessment of Policing Performance 2021/22 was in the context of Police Scotland’s engagement with the Horizon Project EU consortium to tackle Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation,” they added, apparently contradicting themselves by confirming that they did indeed use the term, but trying to explain this away by suggesting that they were just going along with the EU when they did so.
Sam Faulds, Head of Public Protection for Police Scotland, further insisted in comments to The Scottish Sun that “Police Scotland officers successfully lobbied for the MAP term to be removed from recognised terminology used by more than 20 European partners” at a meeting in Warsaw, Poland in September — although if true this only makes Chief Constable Livingstone’s use of the term in his Year End Report for 2021/22 more bizarre.
Scotland’s police and judiciary have a chequered history with respect to being soft on child abusers, with one notable case in 2019 seeing a judge grant paedophile Christopher Daniel a so-called absolute discharge after he was convicted of abusing a girl from the ages of six to eight.
This meant that the predator not only avoided prison entirely, but he was not registered as a sex offender and his conviction was not even recorded. The judge, Gerard Sinclair, claimed that Daniel’s child molestation was merely “the result of [the] entirely inappropriate curiosity of an emotionally naive teenager” and argued that “[a]ny recorded conviction for this offence would have serious consequences in terms of [Daniel’s] future career” as a dentist, a job he was training for at university at the time — one which and one which could have given him intimate access to both children and sedatives.
“[The judge] also [said] that my daughter appears not to have suffered any ‘long-lasting effects’,” complained the victim’s mother.
“[H]ow can he possibly know this? No one has asked me at any point how my daughter is.”