Scratch the surface of a sex addict and you will find a love addict. Scratch the surface of a love addict and you will find a love avoidant. This is a perplexing situation for most of the individuals who are facing these complex behavioral addictions.
Love addiction or love avoidance is often an underlying addiction in many relationships. But it is hard to discern the dance of a love addict and a love avoidant when you are on the dance floor with one. It helps to look at the definitions of each behavior.
What is love addiction?
“Love addiction is defined as a coping mechanism whereby an individual is obsessed with a fantasy he/she has created about another person, believing he/she is ‘loving’ the other but in fact objectifying the other person through the use of the fantasy.”
-Pia Mellody
Love addiction is usually created in childhood when a parent or major caregiver is incapable of displaying love or forming an attachment with their child, such as a parent who stands behind an emotional brick wall, perhaps is abusing drugs or alcohol, or is an overachiever in the workplace or in society. As it’s psychologically impossible for the child to believe that it’s the parent’s issue, the child has no choice but to take on the blame themselves and begins feeling “less than.”
In adulthood, the love-addicted person believes that if nobody takes care of them, they will be abandoned, and unable to survive. As a result, the love addict has very few personal boundaries, becoming needy and creating drama (intensity) in a relationship, in order to draw attention to themselves, to be noticed and therefore “kept alive.”
Love addicts live in a world of desperate need and emotional despair. Fearful of being alone or rejected, love addicts endlessly search for that special someone – a White Knight or Princess Leia, the person who will make them feel safe. Ironically, love addicts have overlooked numerous opportunities to experience the true intimacy they think they want. Passing by many a good man or woman, because the love addict thinks they are boring. Mainly because a love addict is more strongly attracted to the intense experience of “falling in love” than they are to the peaceful intimacy of a healthy relationship. As such, they spend much of their time hunting for “the one.” They base nearly all of their life choices on the desire and search for this perfect relationship – the person with an Ivy League degree, or the interesting job, the guy with the perfect wardrobe or the woman with a perfect body. The love addict will play the chameleon, engaging in hobbies that may not interest them or portraying themselves falsely in conversations and social interactions, in order to attract their mate. But what is a love avoidant? In next week’s post, I will explore the love avoidant characteristics.
Will an offender that views child porn become a ‘hands on’ offender?
Melissa Killeen
The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers is an international, multi-disciplinary organization dedicated to preventing sexual abuse. In a report adopted by the ATSA Executive Board of Directors on September 7, 2010 it was found that there is increasing attention paid to Internet-facilitated sexual offending. Internet-related sexual offending includes different crimes, including: viewing, trading, or producing child pornography to be traded or posted on-line. Others use the Internet to make contact with a child, or adolescent, these offenders are often called ‘hands on’ or ‘contact’ offenders. These offenders seek to contact vulnerable persons for sexual chats (electronic correspondence), exploitation such as convincing a child to view or produce pornographic images (e.g., having the child take and email a nude picture of him/herself), or to arrange face-to-face meetings to commit sexual offenses (sometimes referred to as “luring” or “traveler” offending)1 .
The vast majority of these ‘contact’ abuses against minors are from either a family member, or someone the child knows such as a family friend, coach, teacher or church leader, according to Dr. Fred Berlin, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in Baltimore. Whereas the viewer of child pornography remains anonymous.
That is not to say there is not a significant amount of psychological damage is perpetrated on children during the production and subsequent constant viewing of child pornography. Incredible and devastating harm is done to these young children that requires years of counseling and treatment in order for these young victims to heal, if they can ever heal. It is the point of this blog, to clarify that viewers of child pornography often do not move on to being ‘contact’ offenders.
It is a primary concern for professionals who evaluate and treat Internet-facilitated sexual offenders to assess the risk these viewers may pose to perpetrate direct contact offenses with victim(s) or to commit future Internet-facilitated sexual offenses such as producing and/or distributing child pornography. Accurate risk assessment is critical to decisions by law enforcement in order to make appropriate recommendations for sentencing, treatment, and level of supervision. Across studies of Internet-facilitated child pornography offenders, approximately one in ten has an officially known history of contacting a child for the purpose of sexual offending2 . However, the majority of Internet-facilitated sexual offenders have no known history of contact sexual offenses. Some, through self-reporting, suggests these offenders may have committed contact offenses, but never got caught. However unfortunately, there is very little research to assess the risk of viewers of child pornography who have no official history of contact sexual offenses to relapse into contact offenders.
A follow-up study of offenders that view child pornography suggest these individuals present less risk for any future hands-on offenses, on average, than undifferentiated samples of contact sex offenders3 . Viewers of child pornography also presented a relatively low risk to commit another child pornography viewing offense. The preliminary results of follow-up research suggest criminal history, self-reported sexual interest in children, and unstable lifestyle (e.g., substance use problems) are factors that identify the likelihood that contact offenders will re-offend. As a result of these risks and unstable lifestyles, 8.5% of the offender population are more likely commit a contact sexual offense in the future4 .
1 Motivans, M., & Kyckelhahn, T. (2007). Federal prosecution of child sex exploitation offenders, 2006 (Report No. NCJ 219412). Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs.
2 Seto, M.C., Hanson, R.K., and Babchishin, K.M. (in press). Contact Sexual Offending By Men with Online Sexual Offenses. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment.
3 Seto, M. C., & Eke, A. W. (2005). The future offending of child pornography offenders. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 17, 201-210
4 Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K. J., & Ybarra, M. L. (2008). Online “predators” and their victims: Myths, realities, and implications for prevention and treatment. American Psychologist, 63, 111-128.
The Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health (SASH) is a nonprofit multidisciplinary organization dedicated to scholarship, training, and resources for promoting sexual health and overcoming problematic sexual behaviors. SASH is the only organization dedicated specifically to helping those who suffer from out of control sexual behavior. http://sash.net/?q=about-us
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline: 1 (800) 843-5678 . The CyberTipline is operated in partnership with the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, U.S. Secret Service, military criminal investigative organizations, U.S. Department of Justice, Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force program, as well as other state and local law enforcement agencies.
Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers is an international, multi-disciplinary organization dedicated to preventing sexual abuse. Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers offers symposia, workshop presentations, discussion groups, and advanced clinics relating to issues in both victim and perpetrator research and treatment at an annual conference in November 2016.
The pornography industry nets approximately $13 billion dollars of revenue in the United States, alone. Illegal child pornography revenue is around $3 billion annually and is one of the fastest growing businesses online (Top Ten Reviews, 2005)[1]. In 2014, the Internet Watch Foundation found 31,266 individual child abuse domains or URLs, a 137% increase from 2013. Today, there are estimated to be more than one million pornographic images of children on the Internet, with 200 new images posted daily. The U.S. Customs Service estimates that there are more than 100,000 websites offering child pornography — which is illegal worldwide. The fastest growing demand is for images depicting the worst imaginable type of abuse and images of the youngest children. Of P2P users arrested in 2009, 33 percent had photos of children age three or younger and 42 percent had images of children that showed sexual violence. More than half of all illegal sites reported by the Internet Watch Foundation are hosted in the United States. Illegal sites in Russia have more than doubled from 286 to 706 in 2002 (National Criminal Intelligence Service, 8/21/03). One can only imagine how much free child pornography transfers hands on an annual basis. Who is possessing all of this child pornography?
What does an Internet viewer of underage pornography look like?
Federal child pornography charges are leveled against judges, politicians, doctors, teachers and other well-regarded members of society more frequently than you would ever imagine. If you remember in 2015 alone, Glee co-star Mark Salling, TV producer on Law and Order Jace Alexander, and the Subway spokesman, Jared Fogle were all arrested for possession of child pornography. National Juvenile Online Victimization Study found that men who view child pornography include those who are:
Sexually interested in prepubescent children (pedophiles) or young adolescents (hebephiles), who use child pornography images for sexual fantasy and gratification
Sexually compulsive, meaning they are constantly searching for new and different sexual stimuli
Sexually curious, downloading a few images to satisfy that curiosity
Interested in profiting financially by selling images or setting up websites requiring payment for access
These offenders weren’t concentrated in any specific geographic location, and their levels of income and education varied widely. Two-thirds were single, about one-quarter lived with children under the age of 18 and about one-quarter had problems with drugs and alcohol. In 2009, similar to 2006, about 20 percent of the offenders were between the ages of 18 to 25; while the majority of men who viewed child pornography were 26 or older. The National Crimes against Children Research Center reported the great majority of those arrested were non-Hispanic white men and less than 1 percent were women.
Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, POP Center, The Problem with Child Pornography on the Internet, Guide No.41 (2006), by Richard Wortley and Stephen Smallbone
What are the characteristics of a love addict? 
