Adult pornography
The internet has a vast range of adult pornographic material on offer and it gives you the chance to explore what you like, what you don’t like and the type of person you want to see engaging in sexual activity.
Over time, what you view will start to create and develop your sexual preferences and sexual fantasies.
Fantasies do not automatically lead to behaviours, but they do increase your likeliness of wanting to ‘play out’ particular fantasies.
Illegal online sexual behaviour
Accessing indecent images of children, or sexually communicating about or with children, can also shape your sexual fantasies.
And if you masturbate to these fantasies to the point of ejaculation, this positively reinforces the attraction. Masturbation to the point of ejaculation is extremely pleasurable.
Over time, the things that we think about during masturbation are likely to be associated with feelings of arousal.
This means that masturbating to pictures of children or whilst engaged in sexual communication with or about a child increases the possibility of becoming aroused at the sight or thought of a child.
Will this make me commit a contact offence?
We are not saying that everyone who has accessed indecent images of children, or who has sexually communicated with or about a child, or has masturbated to the thought of a child will go on to commit a contact offence.
But, if you are masturbating to a fantasy or an image of a child, then this is going to develop your sexual preferences, just as adult pornography would, but in a very unhealthy and illegal way.
Although you may not believe this to be an option, under new and unknown circumstances, you don’t know how you might act on that arousal.
People also rehearse things they want to do and build confidence through their fantasies. You might not be thinking about enacting your fantasies now, but over time, your confidence and urge to act on them will increase, especially if you find that you are not getting the same level of pleasure from the fantasy; you may find you want to do something to increase the buzz.
Exercise 3: Inappropriate fantasy
Have you recently had a fantasy about a child? If you have, then without thinking about it in too much detail, work through these questions one at a time and see if these help you think about your fantasies differently.
- Where is this fantasy situated?
- What are you doing there?
- Who else is there? What are they doing there?
What this fantasy says about you
- What role does this fantasy place you in?
- How does this fantasy compare to the type of person you are generally?
- How does this fantasy compare to the type of person you want to be?
- How does the fantasy of the content compare to real life?
What this fantasy says about how you view others
- How do you treat the people in the fantasy?
- How do they treat you?
- What if the roles were switched?
What this fantasy says about your view of the world
- What sort of world would it be if you or other people were able to act on this fantasy?
- Is this really the type of world you’d like to live in?
- What is the likelihood of your fantasy ‘expectations’ being met and would you want them to be met?
- hat would your close friends and family feel about this fantasy? What would they think?
- How would you feel if your son or your daughter acted out this fantasy with another adult?
