Authorities in Scotland can’t seem to stop getting themselves into trouble when it comes to wrestling with issues involving gender and sex offenders. First, they passed the Gender Recognition Reform Act only days before Christmas, making it easier for people to legally “change their gender” for official purposes. Now, in an end-of-the-year report issued by the head of Police Scotland, they have referred to pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons.” (MAPs) The news was immediately met with protests from child welfare groups as well as gay rights groups. But Chief Constable Iain Livingstone is defending the language, saying that he was only following a template set by the European Union and that the people who are offended aren’t taking the language in context.

A controversial move to label paedophiles as “Minor-Attracted People” in a top-level report has been defended by Police Scotland, with the force suggesting the EU was to blame.

Chief Constable Iain Livingstone’s annual year end report refers to child abusers as Minor-Attracted People (MAPs). The move comes amid wider concerns by campaigners over what they see as attempts to rebrand paedophilia as a harmless sexual preference.

A spokesman for the force stressed that MAPs is not a term they routinely use to describe child abusers and said that its use in the report had to be understood in context.

While anyone using this new “MAPs” language in an official capacity should be forced to answer some serious questions, reading through the explanation from Police Scotland, you can kind of sympathize with their position. The portion of the report where the term shows up makes a specific reference to the European Union’s Horizon Europe Project – Prevention of Child Sexual Exploitation. That’s the language that the EU used, so Police Scotland simply copied it from there. Also, the program in question does not endorse any sort of pedophilia. It’s actually intended to protect children from pedophiles.

Also, the police insisted that the MAPs language is not in use elsewhere inside the department. They still refer to pedophiles as pedophiles (even if they spell it “paedophiles”) and they do not support the efforts of pedo activists to lower the age of consent. As the linked report correctly points out, there are child abusers, more commonly on the European mainland, who are “trying to escape the stigma” attached to pedophilia and who would like to be seen as “a niche group alongside the LGBT community.”

One Scottish MP summed up the situation nicely.

“I very much welcome the common sense approach from Police Scotland, though even in commissioning documents these euphemisms should be avoided as they mask the reality and hide the horror. The term in whatever context is baloney.”

Another MP chimed in, describing the danger of “normalizing and therefore perhaps decriminalizing a serious offense”. And that’s exactly what these sick individuals are attempting to do. Gay and lesbian people should be rightly offended at having pedophiles lumped in with them, and many gay rights activists have begun speaking out about it. (See Gays Against Groomers for more information.)

Judging by the reactions coming from so many people in the country this week, it appears that the majority of people in Scotland aren’t nearly as woke as their counterparts in many western European nations. We could use a lot more people like that in the United States, where the push is on to engage in precisely the same sort of “normalization” that the Scots are worried about.