The shocking truth about the Paedophile Information Exchange

The man who walked up the stairs was the embodiment of the cartoon image of a paedophile. Grey, thinning hair, a couple of days’ stubble and a gabardine raincoat. He had come to persuade us that the age of consent for sexual activity should be reduced to four years old ‘because that’s when children have the ability to express themselves’.

The ‘us’ was the small collective who worked for Release, a charity that helped young people who had got in trouble with the law, usually over drug use. This was 1976, a time when liberation was in the air and social mores had changed more rapidly in the past two decades than in the previous two centuries.

The man in the mac represented PIE, the somewhat friendly-sounding acronym which stood for Paedophile Information Exchange. PIE had been using Release’s address at No. 1 Elgin Avenue in Maida Vale as its poste restante – ‘c/o Release’ gave PIE respectability.

Every couple of days an old bloke would pop in and pick up the letters. As a new worker, I questioned the longer-term members of the collective about this arrangement, which had existed for some time, and they agreed to invite a member of PIE to explain its aims. They certainly found it a bit of a shock to discover that the man from PIE even considered four as possibly a bit limiting, as surely babies were also entitled to sexual experience, though he recognised that this might just be his view.

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PIE was given its marching orders, which was rather fortunate since a few weeks later the Sunday People did a big exposé and that would certainly have put Release’s Home Office grant at risk.