Assignment #2: Worcester Man Ordered to Prison for Child Porn. Wrote of Plans to Eat his Victims (Theresa Chan)

Geoffrey Portway was sentenced to 27 years in a federal prison for the distribution and possession of child pornography and solicitation to commit a crime. Portway, a 40-year-old computer programmer, had discussed his plans in internet chat rooms to kidnap, rape, kill, cook, and eat young children in a sound-proof dungeon he had built in the basement of his Worcester home. When authorities raided his home, they discovered 20,000 files of child pornography, the dungeon and tools he would use to perpetrate the crimes (including a child-sized coffin and metal cage, butchering kits, castration tools, freezers, and scalpels), and Internet conversations between Portway and another man who had been asked to kidnap a child for Portway. Portway’s defense argued that he was a man with “issues” who only engaged in fantasy role-playing on the Internet.

Link: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/09/17/worcester-man-who-wanted-cannibalize-children-sentenced-years-federal-prison/aAPi2vRJ9E5tbwU1Ku7maN/story.html

It’s very clear that Portway had some “mental issues” and used the Internet as a way to act out more intensely his criminal desires. Suler’s “online disinhibition effect” comes into play in this story as Portway’s lawyer argued that “disinhibition” was what motivated him to commit the crime (whether or not we actually buy his defense is irrelevant). Dissociative anonymity is clearly one of the reasons why Portway became disinhibited while online, but I believe that the most likely cause for disinhibition in this case is dissociative imagination. Portway created this fantasy world that existed in another space. His lawyer told the judge that Portway had no intentions of actually killing and cannibalizing children; the dungeon was all a prop, and all his fantasies were imagined in the privacy of his own home. He had dissociated his online self and fantasies from offline reality.  Portway would argue that while online, he would play out his fantasies of eating children and sometimes that extended to role-playing at home, but he never actually acted on it in reality. Of course, when you’re using the Internet to solicit the kidnapping of a child and detailing your plans to torture and eat that child, that makes a poor defense.