Thanks for visiting my website! I’m a university teacher and researcher working in the fields of justice studies and public health. I research ways that we as a society can prevent harm–both by individuals and, especially, by larger systems. Scroll down for more about me, or follow the links at the top for info about my book, A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and their Pursuit of Dignity; my other academic publications; and answers to common questions.
About Allyn
After learning through professional experience as a social worker, working both in prisons and in victim advocacy, Allyn Walker is now a teacher-scholar researching innovative ways to prevent individual and systemic violence. They earned their Ph.D. in Criminal Justice at John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York in 2017 and their Master’s in Social Work at Columbia University in 2010. Their academic career includes work at Johns Hopkins University, Penn State, and the University of Utah, where they have studied connections between stigma, mental health, and institutional harm within criminal-legal, immigration, and mental health care systems.
Dr. Walker is especially interested in methods of preventing and responding to violence outside of incarceration, such as through public health and transformative justice approaches. Their ongoing research focuses on non-criminalizing strategies to address the root causes of harm while supporting people who have lived through violence and marginalization.
From the Preface of A Long, Dark Shadow:
“When I began my first job as a social worker, if you told me that in five short years I was going to be researching minor-attracted people’s experiences with facing stigma, I would’ve called you absurd. At the start of my career in social work, I was working as a counselor for victims of sexual assault. Some of my clients were children; some others were adults who had been victimized when they were young. I would leave work at night enraged by what I had heard during the day, wishing I could do something more for my clients, wishing more than anything that I could have prevented their victimization.
“Back then, if you had talked to me about minor-attracted people, I would’ve automatically assumed you were talking about someone who had committed a crime. This is partly because I working with crime victims, keeping the topic of crime almost constantly in my mind. But this was—and still is—also a typical assumption. We generally don’t place a distinction between people who are attracted to minors and people who have committed a sexual offense against a child. Stigma against people who were attracted to minors, then, was not something I ever expected to be something I would advocate against. If anything, I would probably have advocated for greater stigma.
…
“It wasn’t until years after my social work career started that I first learned about the existence of people who are attracted to minors who have never committed an offense against a child. Suddenly the pattern of ‘truths’ I believed I understood about these people—their supposed lack of morality, the inevitability of them becoming offenders—unraveled around me. I stopped assuming that their attractions meant something about their behavior, and I began asking questions. These questions developed into the research that has informed [my] book.”