North American Man-Boy Love Association Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is a US-based organization which calls for the elimination of aged-based restrictions on sexual behavior, most notably age-of-consent laws. NAMBLA was founded in 1978 by members of Boston's gay liberation movement as a response to a sustained campaign of police intimidation and harassment of local gay teenagers. The address of its national headquarters is now a private mail box service located in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. Its New York City chapter is named for Horatio Alger.
Although both the F.B.I and the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations have cleared the organization of legal wrongdoing, some have speculated over its possible links with convicted sex offenders, including Paul Shanley, a Roman Catholic priest from Boston, Massachusetts, accused of criminal sexual activity with very young boys. Two men with alleged ties to NAMBLA were responsible for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley in October, 1997. The leadership of NAMBLA condemned this crime, citing its long-standing record of opposing all violence and oppression, and has insisted that the most effective method of curtailing crimes against children is to empower youth to make their own decisions regarding sexuality.
Members of the Religious Right in the United States have exploited NAMBLA's infamous reputation to attack more conventional gay rights groups, suggesting a moral equivalence between homosexuality and pedophilia. These critics attempt to conflate pedophilia (as medically defined in DSM IV) with homosexuality by asserting that gay men perpeterate the majority of child sexual assaults, despite statistics which indicate that most sexual molestations are crimes of opportunity committed by otherwise normal heterosexual men, not gay men or even pedophiles, who use children as a substitute for same-age partners. In the early 1990s, the International Lesbian and Gay Association had its United Nations Economic and Social Council non-governmental organization status withdrawn after it was revealed it had links to NAMBLA. ILGA then expelled NAMBLA from the organization, but still has not been able to get back consultative status. Some members of the gay movement opposed ILGA's action as a witchhunt.
A similar organization in the Netherlands is the association MARTIJN (for acceptance of pedophilia), which was founded in 1982. Until 2004 Denmark had the Danish Pedophile Association (DPA), also called the Pedophile Group, because it used to be a group within the Danish homosexual association.
One episode of the popular adult cartoon show South Park parodied NAMBLA; it featured a fictional organisation with the same acronym, "The National Association of Marlon Brando Look Alikes".
The organisation labels itself a "support group for intergenerational relationships," and has adopted "Sexual Freedom For All" as its semi-official slogan.
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2 See also 3 Other paedophile groups |
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See also
Other paedophile groups