[15] The Winter 1978 issue of Gay Left magazine reported that the NCCL executive had voted not to distribute a transcript of O'Carroll's speech to the organisation's 1977 conference in which he had objected to the punishment of sex offenders.
[13] At the time of its release, the book received mainstream reviews which were either scathingly dismissive,[19][20] like Wilmers,[13] or supportive of the author, if not entirely of the "radical case" he had set out.
[21][22][verification needed] Sociologist Jeffrey Weeks described the book as "the most sustained advocacy" of "intergenerational sex", and stated that there were two powerful arguments against O'Carroll's views about the possibility of children consenting to sex: the feminist argument that "young people, especially young girls, do need protection from adult men in an exploitative and patriarchal society" and the argument that while adults are fully aware of the sexual connotations of their actions, young people are not, and that there is thus "an inherent and inevitable structural imbalance in awareness of the situation.
[26] After publication, J. Michael Bailey, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, reviewed the book for the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
"[27] In 2010, O'Carroll's writing was affected following complaints to Amazon.com about a book by another author, Phillip R. Greaves, which encouraged sexual contact between adults and children.
[28] In 1981, O'Carroll was convicted for conspiracy to corrupt public morals over the contact ads section of the PIE magazine and was imprisoned for two years.
[7] In August 2002, O'Carroll was convicted at Southwark Crown Court of importing indecent photographs of children from Qatar, which had been found by Customs in October 2001 hidden in his luggage after his arrival at Heathrow Airport.
In his packing cases, 94 full-frontal images of naked children aged between 2 and 10 were discovered, apparently taken without their consent or, the judge assumed, without that of their parents.
[31] In 2003, he made an extended appearance on the TV discussion programme After Dark in a BBC revival of the series, featuring, among others, Esther Rantzen and Helena Kennedy.
According to the police, O'Carroll considered the groups as an attempt at creating an "international secret society" of "academic" child abusers.
When this became public knowledge on 16 February 2016, via a report in The Times, John Mann, the Labour Member of Parliament for Bassetlaw, and other party figures advocated his immediate expulsion.