Tom O'Carroll

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O'Carroll during a 60 Minutes appearence

“	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.	„
	~ Tom O'Carroll, Paedophilia: The Radical Case

Thomas Victor O'Carroll is an Irish-British writer and pro-pedophilia advocate who chaired the Paedophile Information Exchange during the late 1970s, and has multiple convictions for crimes against children. Although PIE campaigned for the age of consent to be lowered to four, O'Carroll claims that it should be the age of twelve.

Prior to his involvement with PIE, O'Carroll was involved with the Open University and the National Council for Civil Liberties, as well as several gay rights organisations. He was removed from all of these groups for his association with the group. The NCCL was particularly shocked by an incident in which he allegedly argued against the punishment of sex offenders.

O'Carroll is the author of Paedophilia: The Radical Case, a book which has been described as "justifying the behaviour of those who prey on children." In the book, O'Carroll describes his own experiences, including an incident where he was sacked from a teaching job for having a relationship with an underage boy. The book also advocates for sexual freedom for children and provides examples of groups that allow sexual contact with children, claiming that in certain parts of Africa "all men and boys engage in anal intercourse".

In 1981, one year after his book was published, O'Carroll was convicted of "conspiracy to corrupt public morals" for his involvement with PIE. The charges stemmed from adverts for PIE he had placed in Magpie magazine that promoted sex acts between children and adults. He served two years in prison before being released.

In 2001, O'Carroll was arrested at Heathrow Airport when Immigration & Customs found almost 100 indecent images of young boys in his luggage. He was charged with importing child pornography from a foreign country and stood trial at Southwark Crown Court. O'Carroll's defence was that the images were an art exhibition. Despite the large number of images found in his cases, he was only convicted on three counts and sentenced to nine months imprisonment in 2002. His conviction was later overturned by the Court of Appeal because, although the Court agreed that the pictures were indecent, it did not consider that they constituted child pornography.

However, this was not the end of O'Carroll's legal troubles. A police raid at the home of his friend Michael Studdert, a former vicar, uncovered a cache of over 50,000 child pornography images that had taken fifty years to amass. The raid was triggered by O'Carroll supplying an undercover officer with child porn he took from the vault. Studdert and O'Carroll were both charged with distributing child pornography across the country between 1994 and 2005. O'Carroll pleaded guilty to two sample charges, the Irish Times reported, and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.