Motivations for engaging in sexual communication with children
Some people tell us that their interaction with children was not only motivated by sex. Instead some people talk about wanting to feel understood, or enjoying the connection with the child they are speaking to.
Our experience is that people’s motivations are often about more things than simply sexual pleasure. As such, it is important to consider your motives, so that you are able to manage your behaviour more responsibly in the future.
Many of the motivations noted in the Understanding Why module will also be relevant for people who have communicated sexually with children online. Take a look and see which might have been significant for you. You might find it helpful to complete the timeline exercise, if you haven’t done so already.
Different groups
- People who want to feel close to a child – ‘intimacy seeking’
- People who adapt and change their online behaviour and profiles depending on the response of the child they are chatting to – ‘adaptable’
- People who act in a very sexual way from the outset – ‘hypersexual’
Exercise 1: Different approaches to children
- Did you think about your contact with a child or children as being consenting and intimate?
- Were your conversations prolonged and frequent with sexual content introduced slowly?
- Did your online conversations often lead to planning or arranging offline meetings to develop the relationship?
- Did your online conversations lead to the sending and/or receiving of sexual images?
- Did you see the children you spoke to as mature and sexually knowledgeable?
- Did you change your style of communication depending on the child you spoke to, and how they responded?
- Did you introduce sexual content very quickly i.e. within seconds or the first few minutes?
- Did you use a false identity?
- Did you try to develop a relationship with a particular child or children?
- Did you use sexual chat for your immediate sexual pleasure?
What do your answers to the above questions, tell you about your motivations?
What do they say about how you viewed the child or children you chatted to?
And what was the likelihood of you meeting up with a child you had chatted to online? What stopped you?
