Drag events targeting children can be a hunting ground for sexual predators, according to a therapist with a long career in treating sexual predators.

A relatively recent phenomenon “Drag Queen Story Hour,” which first appeared in San Francisco, now is happening around the nation—at public libraries, in eateries, at performance venues, in parades, and even at schools.

These events often include men in women’s clothing performing erotic dances, wearing skimpy or suggestive costumes, and telling sexually charged jokes.

These shows sometimes mask sexual predators and facilitate the sexual grooming of children, experts told The Epoch Times.

Jon Uhler, a therapist who treats sex offenders, says that in his experience if a man feels comfortable performing sexual dance in a skimpy women’s outfit for children, he’s likely extremely sexually deviant and “poses a significant risk to women and children.”

Uhler told The Epoch Times that men who want to perform for kids in sexy women’s outfits have likely watched hundreds of hours of deviant pornography that reshapes the brain to become a sexual predator.

Men don’t become sexual predators all at once, Uhler said.

Sexual deviancy requires a slow descent over time into deeper and deeper levels of evil, he said.

“The issue is deviance,” Uhler said. “It always has been throughout human history.”

Uhler draws his experience from 15 years spent treating hundreds of sex offenders, working with more than 4,000 sex offenders in several contexts, and spending more than 13,000 clinical contact hours with sex offenders.

He said he has treated sex offenders both inside and outside of prison.

All the men he has worked with eventually admitted they did porn, he added.

Viewing increasing amounts of “deviant” pornography supercharges the journey into perversion, Uhler said.

People aren’t born sexual predators, Uhler said. Instead, they become remorseless abusers through a process that starts with pornography, he asserted.

People on the way to deviance move from simple lust, to objectification, to power and control, to defiling, to increasingly warped behavior.

Every stage of deviance pulls abusers into increasingly warped behavior, he said.

Uhler said that men who enjoy wearing drag tend to get that way because they watch huge amounts of porn, he said.

Anyone can sink down this scale, and sexual deviancy destroys the brain’s capacity for empathy, Uhler said.

That leads to psychopathy, and psychopaths tend to be callous, detached, manipulative, remorseless, parasitic, sexually promiscuous, and without the capacity for guilt.

“A psychopath’s brain is very different than a normal person’s brain,” Uhler said. “And there’s no going back.”

The Epoch Times found no comprehensive list of drag performers in the United States.

Ru Paul’s New York DragCon event drew a record 50,000 visitors this year. But not all of these people were drag queens, and some came from outside America, the group’s Facebook page shows.

Not all drag queens perform at “child-friendly” events but verifying the criminal history of a large number of performers would be nearly impossible without a nationwide drag group’s cooperation.

Drag performers usually use stage names, wear flamboyant costumes that disguise their identity, and put on heavy makeup that further camouflages their normal appearance. Their real names rarely appear in promotional materials.

The Epoch Times emailed all 28 American chapters of Drag Queen Story Hour and the national hub to ask how many members they have, and whether performers have their backgrounds checked before being scheduled to read with children.

None of them responded to requests for information.

In the past four years, at least eight American drag performers accused of sexual crimes have worked with children, The Epoch Times has found. Seven of these men have been convicted of child sexual abuse, child pornography, and prostitution.

Three of these men participated in Drag Queen Story Hour events for children. Two took part in a reality TV competition. One taught children as a dance instructor. Another mentored young boys wanting to learn how to perform in drag. Yet another performed in “all-ages” drag shows.

One drag performer was arrested in 2012 for running a child sex-trafficking operation. He became a transgender activist in prison.

A man charged with sexual crimes was president of an activist group that facilitated Drag Queen Story Hours.

It’s important to remember that these men are only the ones who got caught, Uhler said.

Sex crimes often require extensive investigation and police lack the resources to complete them successfully, a study by the University of Massachusetts Lowell discovered.

And there’s another problem—the investigations inflict hardship on victims. Revisiting traumatic events in testimony often crushes the spirit of abuse survivors, the study noted.

“There are a number of cases where active guys that are on the sex offender registry have been part of Drag Queen Story Hour” organizations, Uhler said. “What has Drag Queen Story Hour done about that?”

Statistically, more children face sexual abuse in churches or in children’s clubs, such as scouting organizations, Uhler said.

But parents should beware of trusting their children to any group characterized by the public display of deviant behavior, he said.

A drag show also creates a perfect environment for sexual grooming, said Amy Sousa, a psychologist specializing in studying the way our senses inform our thinking.

But using that term in relation to children’s exposure to drag or LGBT lifestyle details angers some.

Even the Associated Press (AP), which informs most mainstream media organizations on how to use words consistently across the news industry, has strictly advised journalists not to use the word “grooming” in reference to interactions between LGBT people and children.

“Generally avoid the often false terms groom or groomer, which some people use to stoke fears about LGBT people’s interactions with children, or education about LGBT people, comparing their actions to those of child molesters,” the AP guide advises.

But drag “absolutely constitutes the normalization of adult sexuality placed in front of kids,” Sousa told The Epoch Times.

“Grooming” is defined as “the slow erosion of boundary violations over time,” she said. And “child-friendly” drag events certainly violate sexual boundaries, Sousa said.

“In any other case, we wouldn’t have pole dancers for kids, or ‘Stripper Story Hour,’ or even ‘Burlesque Story Hour,'” she said.

By watching drag shows, children get comfortable with the idea of receiving money for erotic performances, Sousa said. Then, she added, they may imitate this behavior.

“This is teaching them the total objectification of their own bodies—that their bodies, just like these men’s bodies, are commodifiable objects to be bought and sold for money,” Sousa said.

Children who see these things start feeling comfortable with doing sexual dance at the request of strangers, Sousa said.

“Even if they’re not stripping down to their underwear, even stripping off a coat to reveal an undergarment, that’s them practicing stripping behavior,” she said.

It’s not likely that a child will become a victim of sexual assault at a drag show, Sousa said. But visiting the show can lay the groundwork for child abuse, she said.

“Why do adult men who are self-sexualizing as women want to perform for kids?” Sousa asked. “We have to just look at the most obvious answer, which is that they want access to children.”

Furthermore, dramatic public sexual displays often shape children as they grow into adulthood and sexual maturity, Sousa added.

Under normal circumstances, children figure out feelings of sexual desire as they grow up without dramatic adult influence, said Sousa.

“The Beatles sang songs like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,'” said Sousa. “This is a very wholesome, natural progression if you’re starting to have romantic feelings for someone else.”

But introductions to sexuality by scantily-dressed drag performers will leave lasting imprints on children.

“As adults, we can see something [sexual] and reject it,” said Sousa. “But a child doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to reject the things that are in front of [him or her], so these images are just living in them.”

Yet, despite these dangers, many parents take children to “child-friendly” drag shows anyway because they see it as a way to put the virtue of their own open-mindedness on display, Sousa said.

Those parents value “virtual signaling” over common sense, she said.

“We have forgotten as a culture that children’s innocence deserves to be protected,” Sousa said.

Parents should keep children away from drag shows, Uhler advises. And people should boycott companies that support “child-friendly” drag events, he said.

They also should seek to exert control of local government institutions like libraries.

And parents need not be afraid to speak up if they see behavior that could harm a child or be a gateway to abuse by a possible pedophile, he said.

“The toying with the public, seeing how stupid adults are—that’s half the fun for a psychopath,” Uhler said.

Normal people tend to back off rather than call out pedophiles’ behavior because making accusations feels offensive, said Uhler. But to fight psychopaths, people need to go on the offensive, he said.

Parents shouldn’t allow their desire to embrace inclusivity to cloud their judgment in protecting their children, Sousa said. Parents should be completely willing to exclude dangerous men from access to their youngsters.­­­­­

“Inclusivity is a great value set for a third-grade birthday party,” she said. But “inclusivity is not an appropriate value set when you are trying to create boundaries because boundaries are necessarily exclusive.”