Society Vs. the Child Molesters : Let’s Face It: No Single Approach to Offenders Is the Answer

Every so often a sexually assaulted child is murdered. We understand murder. We believe murder. So we clamor for action and appeasement.

We are appalled when we learn, as is so often the case, that the suspected killer is a known sexual offender--previously apprehended, convicted, treated and released. We are aghast to learn that the man driving the ice-cream truck, reading the meter or leading the choir could be a registered child molester. When a child is murdered, we worry about these things. In between killings, we tend to forget.

For each tortured body there are thousands of tortured minds: children who are befriended, molested and betrayed, usually by someone whom they and their parents know and trust. The murdered child speaks louder than these silent prey; less than 5% of the surviving victims complain to the authorities, very few of these complaints are prosecuted, and still fewer lead to any meaningful control of the offender.

The sadistic killer draws our righteous indignation from child predators as a whole. The vast majority of child molesters will never maim or kill a child. Most are convinced that they are doing a service, bringing love and joy to sexually neglected children. Pedophiles gain our trust and entrap our children with impunity. Children may protect their secret rather than risk rejection and punishment by telling. We believe that a stranger could kill a child for lust. We can’t imagine that our neighbor could captivate our child for love. We believe a lifeless victim; it’s hard to trust a living one.

While it is true that most child molesters are not homicidal, it also is true that those who eventually turn to murder started out with less violent patterns of sexual assault. Another truth crying for prevention is that career pedophiles begin early, even in childhood, molesting younger children as they themselves have been molested.

The challenge for protecting children is not to single out the end-stage homicidal monsters, nor even to keep all known child molesters in jail. There is no jail large enough, no juries sure enough, no children strong enough to withstand the courtroom trauma and no sentences long enough to keep most offenders behind bars. Our burden is to recognize the offenders in our midst, to challenge their access to children and to block their escalating addiction, even as we hold them responsible to lawful, productive citizenship.

For the past 40 years Californians have waffled between two simplistic poles in dealing with such offenders. With each homicide there is renewed debate between those who call for stronger penalties and those who promise definitive cures. The last legislative showdown followed the appalling murder of 2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz in 1978. An aroused citizenry, speaking through SLAM (Stronger Laws Against Molesters), achieved an end to what was seen as preferential treatment for sex criminals. The 1981 bills by then-state Sen. Omer L. Raines (D-Ventura) abolished the concept of mentally disordered sexual offender treatment in favor of straight criminal responsibility and punishment.

In the public hearings concerning the Raines legislation there was a clear and portentous paradox. The doctors insisted that counseling was no alternative to social control and criminal sanctions. They could neither guarantee a cure nor predict which treated inmates would remain dangerous. Lawyers were dumbfounded by those truths. Their cherished achievement of determinant sentencing guaranteed a return to freedom for anyone who has done the stipulated time for a given crime. They said that the doctors would have to find a way to fix the offenders, but only after the offenders were punished.

The apparent triumph of SLAM seemed to appease the public clamor against molesters. If anything, stronger laws against molesters provoked the now-popular claims of a new horror: Victims of Child Abuse Laws (VOCAL). Outraged citizens and lawyers have organized to offer strategies for discrediting child witnesses and humiliating anyone who elicits or endorses disclosures of sexual assault.

Instead of opting for treatment, suspected molesters now have the tools both to demand exoneration and to collect civil reparations from their accusers. California offender treatment and research programs have languished while criminal-defense budgets have soared. While it is not obvious that more offenders are going to jail, it is clear that more children are going to court. A child in a dumpster is called a victim. A child on the witness stand is called a liar.

Is there no end to this flapjack cycling of public concern? Can we offer nothing better than the illusion of cure against the fantasy of lifetime imprisonment? Other states have developed spectacular improvements in treatment combined with realistic sanctions. We need both treatment and punishment, as well as the willingness of traditional extremists to endorse the merits of unsatisfying mergers.

Some offenders who are beyond any hope of control need lifetime isolation. Some, especially the very young and almost innocent, deserve a maximum of services with minimal sanctions. Most established molesters need both strong sanctions and strenuous therapy, as well as extended and even endless review and reinforcement. We should not confuse the promise of treatment with the hope of cure.

A few weeks ago South Bay Coalition/Alive, an organization that works to prevent domestic violence, and Richstone Family Center, a child-abuse treatment facility, sponsored a day-long symposium. The symposium explored a community-based model for sexual-offender treatment in Seattle that is based on a tough network of prosecution and control.

Beyond the promising treatment strategies, the system works because no single facet is held out as sufficient. Hope, trust and confidentiality are supplanted by demand, demonstration and accountability.

Offenders who qualify for treatment get not so much a diversion from punishment as a commitment to scrutiny. They must relive and re-enact their crimes in the company of their counselors and peers. Self-justifications and alibis are exposed by electronic monitoring of their hidden feelings. They must inform every current and potential associate, including employers, of their history, arousal pattern and potential for re-abuse. There are abundant precautions to ensure that an offender will not be alone with a child, any child, ever again. The offenders pay for their treatment, as well as offer reparations and apologies to their victims.

Offenders in that system do not entirely overcome their longing for children, or even all of their potential for violence, but they learn to respect the hazards of their condition and to welcome supervision and support in avoiding temptation. If they fail, the system is capable of early detection and prevention of covert re-offenses and escalation. That capability is deliberately, constitutionally forbidden in either of the traditional dichotomies of psychotherapy or determinant sentencing.

The symposium was sobering but inspiring. A system like that, especially in conjunction with the incest-family treatment models already in place, could encourage child disclosure, parental responsibility, societal involvement, compassionate sentencing and genuine prevention of much of the escalating chaos that we have historically chosen to ignore.

The provision of intermediate options of treatment shifts the balance toward less contest and more control of the real offenders. Therapeutic networking also protects innocent adults against inappropriate suspicions and false allegations. We can learn to recognize false accusations only by acknowledging those that are true.

We can’t change a thing if we get excited only after a child is killed. We will prevent murders by devoting our best resources to dealing with the day-to-day realities of molested children in our midst and the people among us who molest them.