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I needed to be caught. It was the jolt I needed in my life to sort it out. It's cost me almost everything, but my life is in such a good, positive direction now.
CANDICE:
Welcome to the prevention podcast, I'm your host Candice. It has been a wild ride this year, to say the very least, and because of the wild ride that we have experienced recently, I have my co-host on with me, Meg. Thanks for joining me.
MEG:
Hello everyone, happy to be here.
CANDICE:
And, I say wild ride because we've had some [misunderstood] articles that came about about us recently, a couple of authors of these articles failed to fact-check, and as a result, we received quite a bit of controversial messaging, I will say, on social media. To put it politely, we received hate mail and death threats.
So, we're here today for folks that are listening, and we are a prevention project. We are a global project that is here focusing on prevention of sexual abuse, and this podcast is all about interviewing people who are committed to never ever harming a child. Now, we do interview people who have never done that, we also interview people who have found themselves in the legal system, and we do that on purpose, we do that for a few reasons. One, to talk about how people can change, to talk about people get to these places where they make those decisions, and to talk about our programs where we do treat people who have sexually offended. So today we have an individual by the name of Jay.
I want to welcome you, Jay, to our podcast.
JAY:
Thank you.
CANDICE:
We're going to inverview Jay, who, you know, he's had some experiences. He considers himself a minor-attracted person, is that right Jay?
JAY:
That's correct.
CANDICE:
And, you also admit that you know at some point in your life that you went down a dark and scary road, and crossed over into non-contact sex offending, for folks that are listening, is more like, for instance, viewing child pornography, or distributing child pornography.
JAY:
Yeah, that's correct.
CANDICE:
So, I just wanna welcome you to our podcast, and we wanna get to know you a little bit better, how does that sound?
JAY:
That sounds good, it's good to be here.
MEG:
It's a pleasure to have you on Jay. Why don't we just have you start by sharing the beginning of your story. When did you realize you were minor-attracted.
JAY:
I first realized it, probably, seventeen/eighteen was when I first realized that my attractions were not developing as a normal person's would. I think, although I'm not sure, this is true or not, but might be down to the fact that very early sexual experiences with both male and female children, who - I was a child at the time as well, it wasn't em, you know. I wasn't an adult.
And it em, I don't know, it's the first sort of sexual image you have in your mind is of someone of a very young age, that becomes the dominating sexual image in your head, perhaps, which might contribute towards why I fell down that rabbit hole of child pornography.
So during the teens, I discovered child pornography on the internet, and realized it was there and it was very, very, easy to get a hold of under the false guise of anonymity, pursued it, which was extremely conflicting, because it was morally indefensible and also I felt compelled to do it, in a way. It was a very strange time. It became an addiction, and every so often I would see something that was so bad it would make me stop, and I would get rid of everything, and I would just quit it all, and everything would be great, and it was for sometimes up to several months, but, like most people in my position, as I've learned recently, it becomes a cycle of events in which you slowly slip back in and you start to see things and go down the same path again.
CANDICE:
One of the things that you said Jay, that I really think is really important for our listeners to hear, is that you noticed as a minor yourself, that you have an attraction to kids.
JAY:
Correct, yeah, that's correct.
CANDICE:
Yeah, and I think that's what so many people who do not understand minor attractions, which by the way we're not using that term to re-brand or soften pedophilia, it's literally an umbrella term which pedophile, hebephile, ephebephile fits under, so when we say MAP, that's what that entails, but I think people don't understand is that a lot of youth, say, end up like "Wow, I'm like seventeen, and I have an attraction to a six-year-old, this isn't normal", and then to add on to that, what I heard you to say that I want listeners to hear is how accessible, for minors, child pornography is. How scary that is. Meg did you want to add on to that?
MEG:
Only that Jay, as you've been talking, I must admit we've heard this, a similar story several times, you know, noticing that I'm attracted as a kid, not knowing what to do with it, even in some cases stumbling upon CP because as Candice is saying, it is more accessible than people think that it is. And then that develop into what feels like an addiction. And that's the component of your story that we treat in our program here; there's a lot of people who, they might feel okay with their minor attraction, but they're coming to us because they, they feel addicted to pornography in general, and in some cases CP, and so that, that is a component of your story that we hear often when it develops into something that is an addiction.
JAY:
It's very very common.
CANDICE:
Yeah, and part of what I wanted to point out that you said is that "I felt extremely conflicted". A lot of people think that someone who decides to view CP is just as bad as the people who are creating it, and while I'm not excusing CP viewers at all, there is a difference between a non-contact sexual offender and a contact sexual offender. There is this conflict, there is this moral issue, there is this understanding of your behaviour conflicting with your values, there is possible preoccupation or addiction, these are all things that need to be looked at clinically, and so, I mean when we get there, we're really interested in the treatment that you received, but again, those are aspects of your story that we see that are really common.
JAY:
It's extremely common, it's a moment out of - I was in prison for almost a year, and I met a lot of people with the exactly the same, almost word-for-word same story. It's a trap they fall down, it's very very hard to come back up. It's very similar to, I can imagine, drug addiction.
I've never been addicted to drugs, but it's what I imagine it to be like, it's a compulsion, its something you feel you have to have to do to satisfy yourself, and it's, there is so much that you could do that is equally as satisfying, which I've learned and its, it's yeah, its just a terrible terrible business, to be fair.
That whole, I mean uh, when I was using it, I was telling myself, these kids are smiling, they look happy, they look like they're enjoying it. It was nothing – I never really looked at anything where it is anyone was in pain or struggling, and that's what I told myself, that's how it is, that they're happy, they're not damaged in any way.
It was only when I went through the therapy, the prevention, that I started realizing the effects of everything. Even if the child is willing on camera, it's always the psychological effects later on in life, which made me feel monstrous, just hearing some of these kids go on and end up doing after this.
CANDICE:
And, well, I appreciate you saying what you just said about treatment and learning the reality, because as a sex abuse survivor myself, and having horrific childhood abuse as a child, I'll say that there's a lot of thinking errors for people when they are in an addiction, for one, and when it's moving or escalating into viewing, say child pornography, like you said, you know, "oh the kids, they look happy, they must be willing, etc.", and the reality is, and I want our listeners to hear this, from my mouth, as the founder of the prevention project: children are not willing.
They're not willing participants in child pornography. They are not willing participants in any form of sexual behaviour. A child cannot consent, I don't care what anybody says, and so, you know, they're likely being threatened if they don't smile, if they having to be in child pornography to be a victim for others to watch, so I'm really happy that you learned in therapy the reality of what was going on, that these are victims, that even though you did not have "contact", you were perpetuating the victimization of these children by watching, right?
JAY:
Yeah, correct. I mean, to be fair, it wasn't quite... well it was predation where it was taught to me properly, but whilst I was awaiting sentencing, and you know, going for all that, I looked up everything about the effects and everything, it was something I became obsessed with when I was waiting to be sentenced, it was something - I needed to be caught. You know, it was the jolt I needed in my life to sort it out. It's cost me almost everything, but my life is in such a good, positive direction now that it's um, its almost a blessing to have been caught by the police.
MEG:
And again, its something that we hear all the time is that we have clients who will thank their arresting officers because especially when there's an addiction involved, it feels like there is no other way to get out of it without the help of these systems, and what we're doing at the prevention project is we're wanting to be available to people who need help out of their cycles before we have to continue to victimize people to the point that the legal system gets involved, or the criminal justice system gets involved.
So you're bringing up really great points that cross over into some of the other programs that we have at the prevention project, because we don't only treat minor-attracted individuals, we treat anyone who's escalating into problematic, risky sexual behaviours, who need and want help before they get involved legally and some cases, especially with non-contact offenders, after they're involved legally. So I appreciate you bringing this up, and one of the things that I'm interested, and you maybe going into detail about, is the prevention work you did while you were pre-sentencing, or in your pre-sentence phase, as well as the treatment you received, through the systems where you are.
JAY:
Yeah, they um. Basically how it works is: Once you've been processed you've done your prison time, now sometimes it in England if someone's been sentenced to four-years plus, they can go on a course inside prison and they learn everything while they're there, but because my sentence was too short, I had to do everything outside.
I had a really good probation officer who helped me out. They came to the prison every week, we did course work, basically everything that someone who gets convicted of that sort of thing has to go through.
Normally they go through as a group session, which, um, there's costs, to government, quite a bit their money, all I had all my sessions through my probation meeting because my because the probation officer was a sexual offences expert. When she wasn't seeing me she was seeing other offenders and doing group therapy with them, and it was the exact same as group therapy, so it was coursework about victim awareness, what a victim goes through, what they're likely to do after they've been subjected to horrible photography taken of them, or videos of sexual abuse; things like committing suicide, or taking drugs, or not trusting men, having emotional problems against men or women, all these horrible things you don't even think about when you're looking at this smiling child on a screen.
So we had everything written down, we wrote down everything that I was feeling during the offending, what I wanted to get out of it, things like that, and as the weeks went by, we went back and looked at alternatives to looking at that kind of thing, and sort of going into adult pornography, seeing what do you like there, this is a - even to some of my kinky things that might escalate, up to the point where if there was a kink that you like, for example, feet, or whatever. You could use that, as long as it's done in a legal way by consenting people on the internet, or whatever. It's an alternative.
And we discovered all these, I don't know, these alternative things I could look at, or even things that involve me just staying away from the internet completely, which was a priority at that point during the first six months I wasn't allowed on the internet at all after being released except for one particular computer that was in the government office, that I could go and check emails things, which was moderated.
So slowly and surely, I was allowed to go here and I was allowed to go there on the internet and I was allowed to do this and do that, I mean because I've gone so long without viewing any porn whilst being in prison, normal things seemed to excite me more than they used to, which was what we sort of focused on, you know, trying to keep the excitement if I'm feeling sexually frustrated and want a release, and you use these normal things, we explored all these different normal things that would work for me, these things that are not part of the internet, like going for runs. I started running, doing exercise, which lowers any inclination to want to view any pornography at all, which worked really well.
We looked into the cycle of offending which a lot of people in my position always go through - there was a few people in prison who were there for the second or third time because they couldn't break out of the cycle.
It's avoiding the little hints that will make you slip down the rabbit hole.
As long as you're away from the hole completely and you're not taking little baby steps towards it, I think that's the way to sort of prevent you from going down it at all, even if you look at something slightly risque, media for instance of lolicon and shotacon, which is the animated version of child porn, which I tried to use as an alternative before I was arrested, because it was less morally corrupting; it was something I tried to do, obviously it's illegal in this country completely anyway, so I couldn't even do that, yeah?
But yeah, so we were looking at just any way at all, even unconventional ways to stop you thinking about going down that same path again. And if one alarm bells rang because you looked at something slightly risque, that's something you need to concentrate on, that's a bad thing which my probation officer always encouraged me to tell her everything that happened during the week, every little thought I had, times when I would release my sexual tension, what I thought about whilst I was doing it, preventative ways of thinking of legal stuff while I do it, things like elastic bands on the wrist and sort of flicking yourself so it hurts when you, if you... ever... listening to.... thinking about ever um... you know thinking about a child or someone similar, it's just little things like that which all help.
It must be tailored to each individual [unintelligible] as a group, because each person has their own problems, I think. Their own little things and their own strategies which work and don't work. To me it's important to identify what does work, and pursue them.
CANDICE:
And yeah, thank you for sharing, you just described a lot in terms of what you worked on and through, and I think different countries have different approaches, and systems, and things in place, especially when there's been a sex offence, to treat individuals, and I know in the United States, just thinking about the treatment that we do with non-contact offenders, non-contact offenders in the research have higher rates of depression, actually higher rates of victim empathy.
They're really anxious, they tend to be isolated, very socially awkward, a lot of times we see folks that have a ton of trauma that gets replicated in their behaviour, and so what we do a lot of work on, not just victim empathy and working through those thinking errors, and healthy boundaries, and helping individuals understand their offence cycle and interventions, but also looking at how to regulate emotional discomfort.
We know in the research by Marshall and Marshall that came out back in in 2015 that sexual preoccupation is the dynamic risk factor for sexual re-offence, and so looking at, you know, how does someone get sexually preoccupied, and if we we go back and we look at, well they're emotionally disregulated, they cannot manage their emotions well, so they get preoccupied with trying to soothe, and it becomes unhealthy. So even before individuals are on a screen, finding ways to intervene, teaching about healthy relationships, healthy communication, if needed, assertiveness training, but really doing a lot of work to, with a lot of our folks that have trauma, trauma is relative, everyone's had shame, shame can be traumatizing, to really understand how do I go from point A to point F, and what are all the steps in between, so that I can be a safe member of the community.
MEG:
One of the things that I love that you shared are just all of the alternatives that you shared, that you and your support system helped determine for you, because I think what people think is "how can we get somebody to stop this behaviour?", which is really important, but you also have to figure out what are the alternatives, what are the things that I can do, to like, as Candice was saying, regulate myself? Maybe I am going to take up running, because that helps me regulate my nervous system, regulate my emotions. You know, what are the things that are healthy sexuality for me, and really exploring that, so its not just about, you know, slapping you on the wrist and saying "Stop it!", its about how can we give you the tools necessary to have a healthy sense of sexuality for you and also a healthy way to regulate.
I appreciate you sharing all of that.
JAY:
And for me, I mean, the biggest reason for me not to ever go back to that thing again is who I have left.
Even though say 90% percent of my friends and family have said "no, we don't want anything to do with you", the 10% that remain have become closer to me, and have been rocks.
Without them, I wouldn't be here, it's as simple as that. It's the thought of letting them down again, which keeps me from not doing anything.
Its not like I walk through the streets now, look at children now and think "ooh yeah". It's different, looking at child porn and looking at kids in real life, its two different entities, yeah.
It's hard to explain, but when you look at them through the computer, its an image, it's—you can create whatever background for them that you want to justify yourself, but in real life, its a human being. It's a life destroyed, and it's a completely different thing, and for most people who've been convicted of the same kind of offences, you'd find that they are good people, even, you know, around children, at parties or whatever, they would never dream of actually doing anything to anyone, they just became addicted to this horrible internet subculture because it was there, and it was easy. It grabs you and it doesn't let go very easily.
MEG:
And it's dehumanizing, like you said, yeah.
JAY:
Exactly.
MEG:
Yeah, because like you said, when you see a child in person, there's a context, there's a humanization that occurs, that's somebody's son or daughter, you're seeing them in their element vs. The dehumanizing nature of pornography in general, I'll just say, and then especially CP.
JAY:
Yeah, very true. Recently my - I've had nieces and nephews all born and growing up, and they're all, um, I've been getting sort of – well I was - sort of getting close with them and building good relationships, and you know, being - thinking I was a good person, and then when you view images like this after building these good relationships with your family, who are their children, it suddenly hits home that the people in the images are people's nieces, nephews, daughters and stuff.
It really helped me get off it by having this family emerge. This is a younger generation coming through who I - that I love with all my heart, and I would never see any harm come to them. It's another good thing that keeps the demons away, I suppose, if that makes sense.
CANDICE:
Yeah, it does, and you know, in our program we definitely talk about as part of victim empathy that this is someone's child, this is a human being that you might be looking at them on a screen and be desensitized, but this is the real person, and they're not happy, and I hear you when you say, yeah, it made it real for you, now that you have children around you that are human that you can say "Oh, wow, I would never ever ever ever want to harm them, or look at them" if they were on child pornography or in child pornography, so its interesting how sometimes we have to go through some of the darkest experiences to get some of these lessons and to change our lives, right?
And that there are people out there that are well-intended good people who are doing the best they can, who that at some point in their life make bad decisions. Does that mean I'm condoning people to view child pornography for those listeners who want to troll us and hate us? No, I am not viewing child pornography or abusing a kid. Why would I do that, I am a survivor.
My plight is prevention of any harm, what I am saying is because of people's history, and trauma, and what we know now in the field of addiction, addiction, sometimes cross over into offending, and with the proper help and support, people can be prevented from going there ever again, such as you, Jay.
JAY:
Yeah, correct. Absolutely.
CANDICE:
So, we're going to wrap it up for today, Jay. I just want to say thank you for being on our podcast, we really appreciated you sharing your story.
JAY:
Thank you for having me, its great to finally meet people who are willing to help and who are actually empathize with the situation, I guess. There are so many people need help, and they don't need trolls telling them to hang themselves, they need proper help from good people like yourselves, so thank you very much for having me.
CANDICE:
You're so welcome, and thanks for saying that last part, because I think that's what people I definitely want people to hear that last part. It's logical to me to treat people before they actually commit a sex offence and harm a child. It makes no sense that we have systems in place that wait until someone is convicted before we offer treatment, and so I will continue my prevention project until I die, regardless of who wants to say whatever about me. Thank you for being on our podcast.
JAY:
Thank you very much.
CANDICE:
Alright everybody, until next time, thanks for listening and we will continue these dicey conversations, let's talk about it! Have a good one.
MEG:
Thank you for listening to this week's podcast. Please visit the prevention project dot org to learn more about our project and programs. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast at thepreventionpodcast.com or iTunes. See you next time!
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