Bill Aims to Treat More Young Sex Offenders

When children rape, molest or act lewdly with other children, the experts say, they do it mostly in secret, in the privacy of homes, among playmates and family members who seldom tell.

When detected, juvenile sex offenders are likewise dealt with quietly, in juvenile or dependency courts closed to the public, at state detention centers or private clinics that keep a low profile in residential neighborhoods.

But the details of this hidden world are about to get a thorough airing in California.

A bill to be introduced in the Assembly in coming days will provide an open forum on young sex offenders who prey on other children--teenagers raping 3-year-olds, for instance, or young abuse victims switching seamlessly to abusers before they turn 10.

Co-authors of the proposed legislation, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) and Assemblyman Robert Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), say the exercise is necessary for the sake of a safer society. Today’s young offender, they argue with supporting data, too often grows up to become every parent’s nightmare: the adult child molester.

“What we’re trying to do is deal with sexual abuse at the source,” Hertzberg said. We need to “try to stop the problem for future generations if it’s possible.”

The bill, still in draft form, would create for the first time state policy on how to deal comprehensively with juvenile sex offenders.

For example, it would require the psychological evaluation of every juvenile sex offender appearing before a criminal or dependency court so judges can better decide what to do.

Currently, juvenile courts often operate in the dark, hearing cases without an expert evaluation of the danger posed by a young sex offender. As a result, lawyers and others familiar with court procedures say sexual abusers often get mixed in with other children and continue to prey on victims.

To make the judge’s job easier, the measure would add $10 million in resources, principally for treating the most extreme offenders in a program run by the California Youth Authority. To date, the program has shown effective results in preventing future sex crimes. At the state level and nationally, therapists report success rates in the range of 90 percent and higher for youths who have been treated.

Part of the money also would be used at the local level, where most youths are incarcerated or supervised for lesser sex crimes.

Under the bill, county probation officers who deal with young sex offenders before and after they go to court would receive special training to recognize the often hidden tip-offs that point to dangerous sexual disorders in juveniles.

For all the emphasis on therapy, however, the bill offers no let-up in punishment.

“This doesn’t mean they’ll get treatment in lieu of incarceration,” Schiff said.

Other parts of the Schiff-Hertzberg bill include treatment for victims and regular reports to juvenile courts on an offender’s progress.

The measure also would require those who treat juvenile sex offenders to be certified with 1,000 hours of training in the special branch of psychotherapy used to rehabilitate them.

Money to Expand State Program

Schiff, a former federal prosecutor elected to the Senate in 1996, pursued juvenile crime legislation last year, some of it shot down by opponents as “draconian” or, on the other extreme, as not hitting hard enough.

But Schiff believes that his current bill is down the middle and on target. “I think its prospects [for passage] are good,” he said. Schiff chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice. Hertzberg chairs the Assembly Public Safety Committee. Both committees will eventually hear the bill.

Administration officials are “willing to work with the authors,” said a spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson, indicating at least preliminary support for the aims of the bill.

Most of the proposed $10-million appropriation would be spent on expanding a California Youth Authority treatment program that seems to hold promise for changing the behavior of the worst young sex offenders.

The program now has resources to treat only 260 inmates at a time out of the 1,000 who need it, youth authority therapists report. Under the bill, 700 more youths would be treated at a cost of $8,000 each.

By law, detention in the California Youth Authority ends at age 25 for all inmates except those who are transferred to adult prisons by order of adult courts. That means most young sex offenders don’t receive treatment and must be released to their cities, towns and homes when their time is up.

Jack Wallace, program administrator of the Humboldt Sex Offender Program at the authority’s facility in Stockton, said, “There are so many sex offenders in the department and so few [treatment] beds” that no mental ward in the agency’s institutions can handle the load.

At the Humboldt facility, psychologist William F. Schouweiler recently invited a reporter to attend a session in which five of “the worst of the worst” were undergoing group therapy that, say its practitioners, has the best chance of rehabilitation.

Only after the point where denial, excuses and feigned ignorance of wrongdoing have been stripped away--layer by arduous layer--and their “cognitive disorders” acknowledged, do the young inmates face the truth.

It is then that they speak in graphic detail of their offenses and urges that therapists seek to dispel.

Jimmy, not his real name, a blond, small-featured 19-year-old with red-rimmed eyes, blurted out his offenses in rapid-fire, staccato bursts.

“I had five victims,” he said, reeling off a few: the 6-year-old brother he sexually abused when Jimmy was 13; a neighbor girl, 3, he fondled; the rape of his 9-year-old sister.

Jimmy himself was molested, he recalled, at age 3 or 4, a common practice in his family, “going back five generations, my mother told me.”

Jimmy got off to a bad start in the Humboldt sex offender barracks when he arrived four years ago, he said. “I got raped. . . . It was partly my fault.”

Now, Jimmy said, “I’m doing well in here”--better than at the time of his arrest when he was planning to kill his sister’s husband, he said.

“Carlos,” 22, described a home life of Nintendo, porno movies and doing his molesting around the family swimming pool before his arrest six years ago.

His “victim selection”--one of the descriptions that inmates use to dissect aspects of their crimes--Carlos said, tended toward children who “were young, weak and didn’t understand.”

Constantly rejected by kids his own age and never having had “a relationship with a woman,” Carlos sought out young children--just as a molester had done to him when he was 5 or 6.

Said another of the youths in the therapy session: As a teenager he chose victims 3 to 6 years of age because “I felt this was someone who wouldn’t tell me to go away.”

All in the session exhibited an intense emotional closeness to their families, describing idyllic home lives that, Schouweiler said later, probably never existed.

Two of the youths, for example, showed family diagrams listing relatives by name, age and--part of the therapy--their sex offenses, drug habits and other crimes, if any.

Some of the youths welcome the chance at a turnaround. “I want to make my family proud of me,” said one boy.

The four-hour session was just one small part of a years-long process.

Using tactics that work best with the young, therapists say, offenders are taught to understand what led to their crimes, develop empathy for their victims, know why they chose their victims and realize the harm they caused.

“Turning around the cold and callous indifference of the perpetrator is the backbone of the treatment,” said one expert in the field, psychology professor Wallace A. Kennedy, in a recent Florida State University study.

Aiming to Nip Problem in the Bud

Despite the twisted lives on view in Schouweiler’s group discussions, experience and studies show they are among the fortunate ones.

Left untreated, numerous studies show, at least one out of three juvenile sex offenders will grow up to become adult rapists and molesters.

Most adult pedophiles, concluded the Florida State University study last year, “started as juvenile sex offenders” and during their lifetimes have “molested hundreds of victims” each.

California has been harsh on adult sex criminals. State penalties range from life imprisonment to chemical castration. Also on the books are Megan’s Law requirements for police to notify the neighborhood when a registered sex offender moves in, and civil commitment procedures that can prolong incarceration for a convicted molester after a prison sentence has been completed.

Adult molesters, said Hertzberg, are the criminals “every politician wants to beat up on.”

Now, he said, it is time to catch and treat as many offenders as possible when they are young, and “nip the problem in the bud.”

So far, no youth who has been through the Stockton program since it was started in 1994 has come back for committing a sex crime, Schouweiler said, “although we know many go on to commit [non-sex] crimes.”

Similarly Wallace, the administrator of the Stockton sex crime treatment program, said that in the eight years he spent running the state’s other unit for intense therapy in Whittier, only two of the 120 hard-core offenders treated there returned for repeat sex offenses.

By comparison, of all 8,500 California Youth Authority inmates now in custody, 70% to 75% have been there before, agency officials said.

Most juvenile sex crime, however, is handled at the county level, where similar treatment is lacking in counties throughout the state. Each county deals with juvenile crime, including sex crimes, in its own way.

Abusers Can End Up With the Abused

Some areas such as Orange County operate effective, well-run programs, said Dawn Kusumoto, the lawyer on Schiff’s staff who wrote the original draft of the Schiff-Hertzberg bill and has visited youth delinquency programs in all 58 counties.

Some rural counties offer no special therapy for young sex offenders, often opting to send them to the California Youth Authority, where they become a state responsibility, Kusumoto said.

In the larger counties, children who are sexually abused wind up in the care of children’s services departments. If removed from the family, such children are placed in licensed group homes or foster care.

Juveniles who do the abusing, when caught, are arrested and turned over to probation departments and juvenile courts. If not sent to the youth authority, young sex offenders--ideally--are placed in separate custody, at county camps or special group homes for sex offenders.

But, said Kusumoto, who practiced child care law in Los Angeles, the ideal does not always happen. Dangerous young offenders can easily wind up in group homes designed for abused kids, or in a home where people are unqualified to treat them, she said.

An abuser, for example, under age 10--usually too young for criminal charges--would more likely be placed in a group home by children’s services where officials are less familiar with the danger signs.

In the juvenile criminal arena, said Craig Levy, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Probation Department, probation officers do the best they can in placing young sex offenders.

But in the county Children and Family Services Department, said Carol Walker, who runs one of its sex abuse prevention programs, there were 26,666 cases of sexual abuse reported in 1996.

Statistics show that as many as half of those crimes may have been committed by juveniles. Yet, Walker said, the children’s services department has no program specifically set up to treat juvenile sex offenders.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Juveniles and Sex Crimes

* 30% to 50% of all sex crimes nationally are committed by juveniles. In California in 1996, youths under 18 committed 39,210 known acts of sexual abuse.

* Nationally, one in five children is in danger of being sexually abused before age 18. In California, the rate is almost one in four.

* A specialized sex offender treatment program operated by the California Youth Authority has had only two repeat sex offense cases in 12 years. The program is limited and treats only 260 youths at a time.

* Of 114 juvenile sex offenders treated and released so far in a Florida State University program, only five have committed another sex crime.

* Of the 8,450 inmates in California Youth Authority custody, 1,000 were sentenced for sex crimes.

* Of the 100,000 to 300,000 child prostitutes in the U.S., 80% report having been physically or sexually abused at home.

* In a national study of 535 teenagers who were pregnant or already parents, 62% reported having been molested or raped earlier, and a quarter of those said the abuse occurred at age 5 or younger.

* 90% of sex crimes against children are committed by someone the child knows.

* A quarter of all rape victims are attacked by a father, stepfather or other relative.

Sources: California Youth Authority, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Florida State University specialized treatment program; “Sexual Abuse in America,” by Robert E. Longo-Freeman and Geral T. Blanchard; “Sexually Aggressive Children,” by Sharon K. Araji; Giarretto Institute, San Jose