Peter Townshend says he plans to "formalize" his anti-child porn and child abuse work rather than keep it low-key, in the wake of his five-year listing as a sex offender for visiting a child porn site as part of research for a book he plans to bring out within a year.
North Carolina radio stationWRAL reported over the Memorial Day weekend that the guitarist/composer of the Who e-mail Rolling Stone plans to publicize his future work against child porn and child abuse, the better to make clear he's against and not for child porn.
"I've decided to greatly formalize the structure of my charity (Double-O) and the way I work with 'survivors' -- so that in future my work is more well-known to everyone," Townshend's e-mail said. "I've kept my profile low in this area out of modesty I suppose, and it has worked against me."
He also said he's speeding up work on the project that triggered the controversy in the first place: his autobiography, including an examination of childhood sexual abuse, which he hopes will dispel any suspicions that he had more in mind than research when he made the child porn site visit that blew up in his face with his January arrest.
Townshend faced no criminal charges in the end, but he was put on Britain's sex offender registry for a five-year term as a result. His arrest prompted child porn fighting groups, including Adult Sites Against Child Pornography, to warn supporters not to try going into suspect sites for fear of misunderstood interest turning into legal trouble as it did for Townshend.
"People need to read about my entire life to get a real picture of who I am," Townshend wrote in his Rolling Stone e-mail. "I hope to finish it by the end of the year. So it may come out next year sometime."
