The aggressors vs. children do not lend themselves to subdivision as readily as the offenders vs. children, and some of the varieties recognized among the offenders seem absent or rare among the aggressors. No clear-cut cases of underdeveloped sociosexuality or of senile deterioration were found, which is not surprising since such persons are apt to be timorous or ineffectual rather than aggressive. Similarly one can scarcely find a situational case in which a concatenation of events caused the individual to yield to impulse before he could mobilize his psychological defenses against his behavior.
By and large, the picture of the aggressors vs. children is one of alcoholism or heavy sporadic drinking, mental pathology or defect, and very low socioeconomic status. These items usually are combined. The typical aggressor is an unskilled or semiskilled worker who did not graduate from grammar school, and whose employment and marital record is irregular. He is not very bright and his mental condition is worsened by heavy drinking; yet he cannot be dismissed as a simple-minded drunk, for even beyond the psychoneurotic element involved in the use of force on an extremely inappropriately young object, still other psychotic (or at least highly neurotic) responses not infrequently appear. This heavy overlay of deleterious factors obscures other items and makes classification into varieties of offenders extremely difficult. About all that one can do is differentiate three varieties :
1. Persons with mental defects and/or pathology (but rarely with psychoses) who are also alcoholics or at least sporadic heavy drinkers. The majority of aggressors vs. children fall into this category.
Pedophiles, such as discussed under offenders vs. children, except that the latter did not use force. There are few of these, but probably more could be recognized were it not for the fact that they are obscured by alcoholic and psychotic features.
A residual category chiefly of unclassified cases plus a few individuals who might be termed offenders vs. children who got a bit too rough.
Examples of each of these varieties follow.
An instance of a case where psychoneurosis and alcohol contributed to the offense is that of a male aged about twenty at the time of offense. His history was replete with indications of disorganization and emotional trouble: although a semiskilled worker, he had never held a job for an entire year; he had a bad-conduct discharge from the military after less than two years of service; at seventeen he had married a woman five years his senior, and the marriage broke up after a month; he had a number of arrests, but his only convictions were for disorderly conduct and drunkenness; he had once attempted suicide when rejected by a girl; lastly, he had, prior to marriage, almost as much coitus with animals as with humans, and his human coitus was largely with prostitutes. Immediately after discharge from jail for a drunkenness sentence he purchased a bottle of whiskey and became intoxicated. After approaching a strange woman in a bus station with no success, he picked up a five-year-old girl and took her into a swamp where he beat her about the head and raped her, with resultant serious injuries to the girl’s vagina. He then fled but was caught some days later. He could give no explanation for the offense and the whole affair seemed very hazy and unreal to him in retrospect. Aside from the unusual amount of physical damage to the girl, this example could be essentially duplicated many times by our case histories of aggressors vs. children: the disorganized, psychoneurotic background combined with alcohol culminating in the unforeseen and at first glance inexplicable offense.
The pedophiles who resorted to force are dramatically exemplified by the case of a man who had forced sexual activity on over a score of girls, the majority aged seven to fifteen, when he himself was between eighteen and twenty-one years old. He was interested in young girls for two reasons: (1) they were easily frightened and consequently offered little or no resistance, and (2) the realization that his acts were strongly tabooed by society and that he was in danger of apprehension made the behavior particularly exciting. This man never employed much physical force, and whenever a victim resisted strongly or began loud and lengthy protests he fled. A childhood marred by the absence of a father, poverty, a sexually promiscuous mother, and several years in an orphans’ home resulted in petty theft and emotional disturbance. The pedophilia began at age eighteen; soon he was arrested, and from that point on most of his life had been one of imprisonment with brief interludes in which his pedophilic impulses compulsively recurred.
An example of a man who could not have been differentiated from offenders vs. children had he not used a trifle too much physical force is seen in the case of a rather poorly educated, semiskilled laborer of average intelligence. His sexual history prior to the offense was not unusual. He had had one marriage which broke up after four years. In fact, the only unusual thing about him was his long-standing alcoholism which, however, was not so severe as to have prevented his being adequately self-supporting. Unfortunately, he obtained a job as a bartender and this, naturally, resulted in a four-day drunken period during which he induced a little girl whom he met in a movie theater to come to his room in a lodging house. There he had interfemoral coitus with her. While he reported that she did not cry or resist, she did seem frightened, did not cooperate, and the sexual activity was against her desire. The case seems almost purely an alcoholic affair—the man had an adequate sexual adjustment with adult females and had no prior sex offenses or indications of pedophilia or aggression. If the girl had been less frightened, or if she had been persuaded to cooperate, this man would have been classed as a typical offender vs. children of the drunk variety.
Because of the mental status and alcoholic predilection of the aggressors vs. children, coupled with the vulnerability of their objects, they impress us as being one of the most unpredictable and dangerous of the sex-offender groups.
*86\161\2*
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