The most common thing we’ve gotten mentions and questions about recently is the terminology “minor-attracted person” or “MAP”. Here’s a thread about the origins of that term.

The first usage we’re aware of is by Heather Elizabeth Peterson, a free-lance journalist who first used the term “minor-attracted adults” (later abbreviated as "MAAs") in a 1998 article in Greenbelt Interfaith News. That article is linked here. http://www.greenbelt.com/news/98/12/02.htm…

That term caught on, and when B4U-ACT was founded in 2003, we also used it. We transitioned to “minor-attracted adults” in 2007, in recognition of the fact that “MAAs” often realized they were attracted to children or adolescents younger than themselves before they were adults.

In 2007, when we submitted our report to Baltimore Mental Health Systems on our TogetherChat initiative, meant to connect mental health professionals and minor-attracted people, it was, to our knowledge, the first instance of the term’s public use. https://www.b4uact.org/togetherchat-submits-report-to-bmhs/…

Now, 13 years later, it’s a standard term in both colloquial use and published research. So why did we start using it in the first place?

First of all, one of our foremost goals is to promote communication. Other labels ascribed to this population carry connotations that can be misleading, prejudicial, and even derogatory. Those are barriers to understanding.

Beyond that, minor-attraction is broader than “pedophilia,” which in addition to being commonly misused to describe illegal acts themselves, definitionally applies only to a subset of people who are attracted primarily to children or adolescents under the age of consent.

The lesson here? When we talk about MAPs, the people we are talking about: 1. Are people, just like anyone else 2. Are not only adults, but adolescents as well 3. Are still poorly understood as a population, and commonly have unmet mental health needs as a result