Borders Conference - Rethinking the Line: The Canada-U.S. Border / Child Pornography on the Internet Session
Appendix III: Presentation Materials – Max Taylor (continued)
Slide 57
Life on-line
- Increasing amounts of time spent on-line
- Mood change when not able to access material
- Sub-culture of danger and excitement – highly mutually reinforcing
- Relationships act as catalyst and facilitate emergence of deviant sexual interest
Slide 58
Move to Child Pornography
part of a continuum of engagement:
“and… slowly but surely then… got… to the point where… I… had really accessed every sort of pornography you can think about… so… it eventually got to like teenage and then child pornography… and… erm… it was I was being turned on… because… erm… there was this idea I suppose of like breaking taboos… erm… but there was also a sense of like… I… can go where a lot of other people can't… it was kind of like… the idea of keeping the images was like trophies…”
Slide 59
Images as Currency
- Denies primary interest in child pornography (at odds with his collection)
- H talks of child pornography as
“much to facilitate the on-line relationship as an end in itself”
. He says:“ …these images were currency… because it allowed me to maintain my relationship with the people… I didn't want the material MORE that I wanted to talk to them. I wanted to sort of wallow in their experiences.”
Slide 60
Control
Emerging sense that H was losing control:
“I'd sort of opened Pandora's box and couldn't get the lid shut. I'd sort of uncovered… some… aspect of my personality that I couldn't control… If I questioned what I was doing with the people I spoke to on-line… they would shut me out… because they'd think Oh… he's not part of out group… so… all the kinds of messages… all the dialogue was reinforcing”.
Slide 61
Changing Persona
H describes his engagement with the Internet as rapidly growing, allowing him to change as a person:
“…through the relationships I was establishing on the Internet… there was part of me that was kind of growing… was developing… whereas my normal sort of… off-line life… was king of boring and going nowhere… there was king of this excitement that…erm… on-line I was a different person…”
Slide 62
Child pornography and sexual arousal
Emphasises the role of images in maintaining relationships
“Well… eventually… it probably got down to… I mean some of them were babies… there was a woman from L… and she said she was into babysex… and erm… I was sort of again claiming that that was of interest… Because I wanted to… maintain contact with her…”
Slide 63
Legitimising the material
- Lack of objective measure
- Lack of experience of personal abuse
- Smiling faces
- Exhausting the potential
- Fantasies of being abused
Slide 64
Using child pornography
Masturbation
- “I was with the masturbation… almost avoiding coming… because if I was on-line for an hour or so I would actually be masturbating on and off for an hour… and wanting to maintain the state of arousal”
- “Actually, once I'd come I'd then almost be… I'd I'd I'd be… I'd find it distasteful. That what had been… that what had been acceptable during a state of sexual arousal… afterwards wasn't acceptable”.
Slide 65
Collecting
- Completing a series
- Changing names to fit with classification
- Obsessionality
Slide 66
Significance of collecting
- important
- constant in the way that he systematically sought out images to add to it
- highly organised in the way that it was stored
- permanent (he rarely deleted images)
- concealed it from others
- shared with others who expressed an interest in similar material
Slide 67
Points of Concern
Reasons for not crossing boundaries:
“…I'd wondered what it would be like… but then I knew that… if I were to cross that barrier… That everything would have been lost. That I would have transgressed and entered an area where I would have been totally out of control… that up until that point I was still somewhat in control… but once I'd sort of crossed that boundary and lets say had sex with an underage girl… then it would have been a no-going back situation…”
Slide 68
Justification
Normalisation
Slide 69
General vs. specific statements about fantasies
Reluctance to talk about specificity of fantasies
“I suppose I fantasised about having sex with underage girls… but there wasn't any sort of… erm… any one story line as it were… although I clearly recognise that… if it were to be enacted in real life… there would only be… certain opportunities or situations that would arise… so clearly it had to fulfil a theme that was within the bounds of possibility…”
Slide 70
Resolution through new persona
Art student (including photography)
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