Mermaids promotes an ideology that sexualises children. Erik McGregor/LightRocket/ Getty Images

Mermaids, the troublesome charity that advocates for the transing of children, is in the news again. Currently under investigation by the Charities Commission regarding concerns that it fails to safeguard young people, Mermaids’s reign as the charity that can do no wrong appears to be coming to an end. A report in The Times yesterday revealed that a trustee has resigned after it was revealed that he is a child abuse apologist.
Dr Jacob Breslow was a graduate student at the London School of Economics when he gave a presentation at an event for the US-based non-profit B4U-ACT in 2011. According to its website, B4U-ACT promotes services and resources for people “who are sexually attracted to children and desire assistance”. In his 2011 paper, Breslow compares a child to a shoe — which, in case you weren’t sure, is an inanimate object. He stated:
“Just as the desire to and the act of cumming on a shoe requires a rethinking of the shoe and how it comes into being, I want to now argue that the desire to and the act of cumming on, or possibly even with, a child requires a rethinking both of the child, which we just begun, and of the person for whom the child is a sexual fantasy or partner.”
Breslow wrote in the same paper that “allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand minor-attracted persons [MAPs].”
Beneath the usual academic gobbledygook, this statement is clear: the intention is to ally those who identify as “MAPs” — who others would rightly label as adults that desire sex with children — with the rest of the rainbow community, including lesbians, even those who campaign to expose the atrocity of child sexual abuse.
This scandal might date back 11 years, but there is ample evidence that Breslow has only strengthened his views rather than backtracking from them. He is, for example, writing a book on “the queer lives of children’s desires”. Five years after his presentation for B4U-ACT, having argued in his PhD thesis that some kids were “queer”, Breslow defined this as “the queering that ‘queer’ does to the child, is one of resisting the child’s alleged asexuality and heterosexuality; allowing for the child’s pleasures, desires, and perversities…”
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