Understanding Sexually Deviant Online Behavior from an Addiction Perspective

IntroductionStatistics show a sharp rise in the number of sexual predators who prowl the Internet looking for vulnerable children, then make arrangements to meet the child for sex (Andrews 2000a). The FBI calls these criminals "travelers. " The numbers are hard to document but travelers are clearly part of the Internet-era crime wave. According to a CBS News report, the FBI alone opens up six new traveler investigations every week (Andrews, 2000b). This same report indicated that the Center for Missing and Exploited Children receives about fifteen new leads about online enticements each week, and a traveler is arrested somewhere in the United States almost every day. A disturbing number of recent traveler cases involve men who are first-time offenders with no criminal history of sexual activity towards minors. Some high profile cases include Patrick Naughton, a top executive at Infoseek/Go.com, Terry Spontarelli, a Los Alamos research chemist, and George DeBier, a former Belgian diplomat (Andrews, 2000b). Their profiles were similar, that of men who held upper-income jobs, and otherwise law-abiding citizens, arrested for traveling to meet undercover agent posing as a minor on the Internet.Chat rooms exist in cyberspace with names such as "Daddy4daughter," "Men for Barely Legal Girls," and "Family Fun. " While these are branded as "fantasy only" chat rooms and require participants to be over the age of eighteen, it is difficult to decipher what is fact and what is fantasy, based upon the chat dialogues in such pedophilic virtual communities (Trebilcock 1997). It is unclear from the discussion that whether users are describing fictional stories, sexual fantasies, and stories about past activities, or plans for the future (Lanning 1998a). Given the lack of restrictions in cyberspace and its sexual subculture, predators have a new medium to not only pursue potential contacts with children, but also unite and unionize with fellow users in a way that allows them to validate and normalize their sexual proclivities (Lanning 1998b). Psychologists have begun to question how the anonymous availability of child-oriented sexual material not only creates an ideal breeding ground for pedophiles but also how this opens up a Pandora's Box for unsuspecting users (Farella 2002). Unlike in the physical world, conventional messages about sexual behavior are ignored in cyberspace. Users are free to explore pedophilic themes within the sexually uninhibited environment of the Internet. In this way, cyberspace becomes an enabler allowing users to create personalized content without any limitations that provides them with an outlet to explore sexually deviant online behavior.Internet SexualityEarly studies of Internet sexuality, or "cybersex" emphasized the fantasy nature of online sexuality and focused on use of the Internet for criminal and deviant behavior (Durkin & Bryant, 1995). They distinguished various motivations for erotic computer communication, from mild flirtations to seeking and sharing information about sexual services to frank discussions of specific deviant sexual behavior. They posited that cybersex allows a person to operationalize sexual fantasies that would otherwise have self-extinguished if it were not for the reinforcement of immediate feedback provided by online interactions. As the Internet gained in popularity, researchers began to identify similar patterns in the addictive aspects of online communication.Internet addiction, as if is often called, is a pathological preoccupation with Internet use (Young 1998). Studies estimate that nearly six percent of online users suffer from Internet addiction (Greenfield 1999) and can lead to significant occupational, social, familial, and psychological problems (Morahan-Martin 1997; Scherer 1997; Young 1998). In one of the largest studies of online sexuality, Cooper et al. (1999) posted an online survey on the MSNBC Web site, netting a sample of 9,177 respondents, 86 % of them men. …