Online porn problems spike during pandemic

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This article was published 11/07/2020 (2112 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT is dismaying, although unsurprising, that police report a spike in pornography offences during the pandemic.

Alberta’s internet child exploitation unit announced last week it has arrested 18 people for online sex offences. In one month alone, it received a record 243 complaints of online child exploitation — more than double the two-year average.

A police spokesman told the Edmonton Journal the level of online pornography activity has been unparalleled in the existence of the ICE unit, and could be linked to digital dependency during COVID-19 isolation measures.

The arrests reminded me of a young man I know who struggles with porn addiction. I won’t publish his identity, but his story is instructive in highlighting the pervasive grip of online pornography for some people.

He approached me in 2019. I didn’t know him well at that time, but I know his family. He said he had a pornography problem and he asked if I would consider being his accountability partner. I said I was unfamiliar with the term, but we should get together and talk about it.

Over a coffee, he told me that, as an accountability partner, I would install on my iPhone an app called Accountable2You, which would monitor all his devices. The app would give me a daily report of all his online activity. I invited him to tell me why he needed an accountability partner, and he told me his story:

He was about 11 years old when he Googled “sexy girls” and got an eyeful. In the following years, he visited porn sites once or twice a week, careful to clean his browser history in case his parent checked. He kept it a secret, saying his porn viewing felt “dirty but exciting.”

In his late teen years, his consumption of porn escalated to more explicit sex acts. He said it became a daily habit behind the closed door of his bedroom, often when he should have been doing homework for school.

In the two years before we met, he had experienced cravings when he didn’t get his daily dose of porn. He would avoid everyday activities so he could spend more time with porn. He also it was affecting his relationships with real-life women. He recalled being on a date “with a girl I really liked,” and feigning illness so he could go home and escape to his porn fantasy world.

He decided to stop consuming porn when he heard a media report that named men who had been arrested for possession of child pornography. He realized with alarm that his quest for more extreme porn had led him to images of younger victims: “They’re weren’t kids, they were young teenagers, but they could be children legally.”

He felt his future would be ruined if he was arrested and publicly shamed for viewing child porn.

He tried several times to quit, his abstinence typically lasting a week or two before the cravings overcame his willpower. That’s when he decided to ask two people to be his accountability partners for his latest attempt to kick his addiction. I agreed to be one such partner, and asked if there were other ways I could help, such as checking in with him periodically or helping him financially to get professional counselling.

He declined further help, saying, “I think it will be enough to know you’re watching where I go online.”

It was enough, for a while. I checked the app daily and there were no obvious signs of improper activity. Then, after about five weeks, he emailed and said he was dropping me as an accountability partner. I offered to meet again to discuss his decision, but he declined: “I think I’ll be OK now.”

Fast forward about a year — I heard from him again several weeks ago. He asked if he could reactivate me as an accountability partner. While isolating during the pandemic and spending much more time online, he fell again into behaviour he knows is damaging and dangerous.

He’s not alone. Canada’s Centre for Child Protection has warned police forces to prepare for new cases of porn-related abuse as pandemic restrictions on normal social activities push children and adults to connect virtually with other people and escape from the glum reality currently besetting the real world.

“I couldn’t think of a better way to create conditions to cause this to increase,” Det. Andrew Ullock, head of Peel Police internet child exploitation unit, told The Pointer, an online news source in Ontario.

“There’s more kids online more often and more predators online more often; it’s inevitable that they’re going to intersect with one another and when they do, there’s going to be offences.”

His thoughts can be a timely warning to parents. Where are the children going online?

carl.degurse@freepress.mb.ca

Carl DeGurse is a member of the Free Press editorial board.