I know plenty of people who do have similar fantasies – both as the kidnapper and the kidnapped – but the difference between them and Priklopil is that they know the difference between fantasy and reality. Moreover, they subscribe to one of the strongest rules that comes with being a Sensible Perv – consensuality. It’s no different to the non-kinky world, essentially: I will only do X to you if you want X done to you. You’re free to have fantasies about kidnapping strangers, but they have to stay fantasies. To a Sensible Perv – and they make up 99.999%**** of the kinky people out there – the thought of carrying one of those fantasies out is anathema.

No doubt if a case like this occurred in the UK, there would be further calls for “violent” pornography to be banned, whether it was linked to the case or not.*** There is, after all, an awful lot of pornography and erotica on the internet that relates to this sort of fantasy, largely because it has to remain fiction. Hell, there’s probably quite a lot of it in the catalogue of Black Lace and similar imprints. Banning all that isn’t the answer. The answer is education. If the Sensible Pervs are out in the open, and easy to find, the dangerous ones are more likely to realise they’re not the only kinky people out there. All us Sensible Pervs can make sure that people like Priklopil realise that their fantasies aren’t unique, that it’s possible to fulfil them in almost-legal ways,***** and effectively train them to be a Sensible Perv too. It can be done, and it’s the only way to stop cases like this happening in the future.

* A particular BDSM** subgroup, where one person agrees to be the property of another, with no right of veto. Well, more or less. Any one-liner definition like that is bound to upset someone.

** NSFW links.

*** After all, the internet was still fairly rare 8 years ago.

**** OK, I made this number up. But it’s probably roughly correct, apart from the exact number of 9s after the decimal point.

***** I say “almost-legal” because an awful lot of what anybody, perv or not, does in bed, is technically illegal. Anything – a love-bite, for example – that leaves a mark that is more than “transient and trifling”, is Grievous Bodily Harm. What “transient and trifling” means, of course, is entirely up to the judge. For more information, ask the Spanner Trust.