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 is highly likely to create and develop your sexual preferences and sexual thoughts and fantasies. The more time you spend online viewing pornography is likely to increase the amount of time you also spend thinking about sex and engaging in sexual fantasies.
Fantasies do not automatically lead to behaviours, but they can increase your likeliness of wanting to ‘act out’ particular fantasies.
Fantasy and 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, due to the pleasure involved.
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?
Many people who view illegal images do so for reasons other than having a sexual interest in children. Many people tell us that though they view illegal images of children they would never act out the behaviours they are viewing in real life.
However, if you are masturbating to a fantasy or an image of a child, this may impact on your sexual preferences and normalise this behaviour in your mind.
The concern is that if your resolve to not hurt a child was hampered by ill health, a significant dip in your mental health, or some other loss (through relationship breakdown, bereavement, or unemployment) an opportunity to offend may be more likely to end in an inappropriate or illegal sexual behaviour towards a child.
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 may 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 or excitement.
Now, using Exercise 3 (on the next page), let’s take a look at one of your inappropriate fantasies.