In a relationship with pornography that spanned three decades, Michael Leahy said it was in the final five years that his use of the material went beyond recreational — it became an obsession.
At the height of his addiction, Leahy worked out of a cubicle for a computer company in Atlanta, and accessed porn online for an hour or two a day. As a company salesman who was often on the road, Leahy said that tally could reach as many as eight hours in a day.
“Of all the places where I acted out sexually in inappropriate ways, I did it more often at work than any place else,” said Leahy, 52, a recovering sex addict, founder and executive director of BraveHearts and author of “Porn Nation” and “Porn@Work.”
“Work was a safe place for me in essence because my wife at the time, she was at home with our children, and home wasn't a safe place, and what other choices do you have at that time?”
The Center for Internet Addiction Recovery says estimates suggest one in five Internet addicts are engaged in some form of online sexual activity, primarily viewing porn and/or engaging in cybersex. Statistics have also shown 70 per cent of all Internet porn traffic takes place during the 9-to-5 workday.
A 52-year-old employee with Ontario's Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services was arrested and charged last week after child pornography images were found on his work computer.
If you're serious about keeping your job, you've got your breaks, your lunch, you've got your own BlackBerry. Get an iPhone and do what you want to do on your time. Fiorella Callocchia, a certified management consultant
And south of the border, an investigation of employees with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission found senior agency staffers were spending hours surfing pornographic websites.
In one case, a senior attorney spent up to eight hours daily looking at and downloading porn, burning files to CDs or DVDs when he ran out of hard drive space. In another, an accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as “sex” or “pornography.”
In an era where many employers are cracking down on personal use of office computers for non-work related activity, why would employees run the risk of trying to access explicit material using company resources — and on-the-job time?
“I think that people perhaps think they can get away with it,” said Penny Lawson, manager of the Sexual Addiction Treatment Program at Bellwood Health Services in Toronto, which specializes in treatment of addiction and mental health problems.
“Not everybody who accesses porn at work has a sexual addiction. But certainly someone with a sexual addiction, the risk of getting caught increases the excitement around it.”
While there are many types of behaviour a sex addict will engage in, a very large proportion of them use Internet porn and masturbation as a form of excitement, Lawson said.
“It's a big part of it for the people we see,” she said. “Availability is one of the criteria that makes a fertile ground for addiction to develop.”
Lawson said she has also heard from addicts that even if there are filters and blocks to sexually explicit material, those who are very tech-savvy can get around them to access porn.
Marco Bonanni of Optrics Engineering, a diamond partner of Barracuda Networks, which specializes in e-mail and web security, said workers should be aware everything they're doing is marked and logged — even things they might think are innocent.
“The equipment that most organizations install nowadays have months and months of logged data and information about every single message that goes in and out of the company, or every single URL or website that's been visited,” he said from Edmonton.
What's more, some filters are set or configured to display a message notifying users that a particular website they're trying to visit has been blocked.
