When we’re bored and browsing the internet, we can sometimes find ourselves reading about a situation that takes us down a baffling rabbit hole.
In a lot of cases, what we’re looking at only seems mildly strange on the surface, but soon reveals a disturbing underbelly of creepy interactions with others, hidden outbursts, lewd acts, and sometimes even crimes. We may come out the other side of it wishing to forget what we just saw, but no matter how revolted we were, we also felt such fascination that we had to see it through.
Unfortunately, one Canadian court doesn’t have the option to dig their way out of today’s disturbing rabbit hole because it’s everyone’s job to explore it.
54-year-old Kenneth Harrisson of Newfoundland, Canada has faced criminal charges over the last six years for one incredibly ill-advised purchase.
As CTV News reported , he ordered a child sex doll named “Carol” from a Japanese website back in 2013, but it was seized by the Canada Border Services Agency before it could reach him. He paid the equivalent of $742, but said he was willing to pay three times as much.
Harrisson was then charged with possession of child pornography, mailing obscene matter, and two violations of the federal Customs Act of smuggling and possession of prohibited goods.
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However, part of the reason the case has gone on so long is because it raises many complex legal questions.
Aside from issues of whether charging him is an appropriate limit to free expression, there’s also the question of whether the doll constitutes child pornography when no actual child is involved in the situation.
And Harrisson’s explanation for why he bought it doesn’t make the case any easier to understand.
He claimed that he hadn’t intended to have sex with the doll, but rather to treat it as a companion.
Specifically, he said he was seeking the kind of companionship he had been robbed of when his son died at six months old.
This explanation begged a series of questions from Crown attorney Dana Sullivan, the Canadian equivalent to a prosecutor.
When they asked why Harrisson did get a dog if he was lonely and wanted a companion, he chuckled and said, “A dog is not representative of a human. It’s not human in appearance.”
The Crown also asked why Harrisson didn’t buy an infant-sized doll or mannequin if he was seeking a replacement for his infant son.
To this, he replied that a mannequin wasn’t lifelike enough for his purposes and he didn’t go with an infant because he wanted it to look like his son would’ve in 2013, had he survived.
However, there were a couple of reasons why this explanation didn’t make sense to the Crown.
For one thing, Harrisson’s son had died well over 20 years ago and would have been 25 years old in 2013.
For another thing, the doll was modeled after a girl. Regardless of how Harrisson’s son would have developed, it’s highly unlikely that he would have resembled a prepubescent girl at 25.
Harrisson said that Carol’s face is what appealed to him, as it seemed both “male-like” and best resembled his son out of what he saw.
Although the doll was pictured kneeling in a sexual position when Harrisson first saw it, he said this did not factor into his decision.
As he put it , “I did not order a sex doll of a childlike nature. The purpose I intended it for was to replace my deceased son, period.”
However, this doesn’t do much to explain why Harrisson found “Carol” by googling the term “sex doll.”
He said that it hadn’t occurred to him to search for “male sex dolls,” but other than an apparent facial resemblance, there wasn’t much explanation as to what led him towards the dolls that forensic psychologist Peter Collins described as, “the size of a prepubescent child without sexually mature characteristics.”
h/t: CTV News
