Tom O'Carroll
| Tom O'Carroll | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Thomas Victor O'Carroll 8 August 1945 |
| Occupation | paedophilia advocate |
| Criminal charge | conspiring to distribute indecent photographs of children, indecent assault against one boy and gross indecency against one other |
Thomas Victor O'Carroll (born 8 August 1945) is a British writer (with dual Irish/British nationality),pro-paedophile advocate, imprisoned for conspiracy to corrupt public morals and the distribution of child pornography, and with multiple convictions for offences against children. O'Carroll is a former chairman of the now disbanded Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and was at one time a prominent member of the International Paedophile and Child Emancipation (now known as Ipce).
O'Carroll was working as a press officer for the Open University in the 1970s when he was told of the existence of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) after coming out as a paedophile to lesbian members of the OU Women's Group. At that time, he was editor of the OU staff newspaper Open House and had been covering a Women's Group meeting on homosexuality. In his book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case, he writes: "The general public in the UK has long been aware of 'child-molesting' and 'perversion'. But only in the 1970s did it come to hear about 'paedophilia', a designation suddenly lifted from the obscurity of medical textbooks to become a crusading badge of identity for those whom the term had been designed to oppress".
His activism with PIE cost him his job at the OU, and he was dismissed in February 1978. O'Carroll appealed to an industrial tribunal which ruled in May 1979 rejecting his complaint as he had placed himself in a position which meant that he could not do his job effectively because of his connection to PIE.
At the time O'Carroll sat on the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) sub-committee for gay rights. However, NCCL's association with PIE was controversial internally. The Winter 1978 issue of Gay Left magazine reported that the NCCL executive had voted not to distribute a transcript of O'Carroll's speech to the organisation's 1977 conference in which he had objected to the punishment of sex offenders.
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