Venturis Jones
Psyc 5
Reaction Paper #2
April 22, 2009

There is no likely criminal behavior that rears as much condemnation and fear as criminal sex offends. This portion of the class was emotionally taxing for me. As a victim of child molestation, at anytime in anyway confronted with this issue, I am taken back to the very moment the abuse occurred in my life. According to the text, the actual incidence of child abuse in this country and abroad is staggering. To date, much of the debate about sex offenders has been driven by the most horrendous and appalling crimes. What about the victims in suburbs, small towns in the Midwest? Or more frequently in cultures accepting of this behavior from relatives, family or friends as if it’s something that just happens? No, it's absolutely not a new quandary. Some of the cases that are coming to light now are and were from before the '80s. Every year in this country, two million children are brutally beaten or sexually abused. 340,000 new cases were reported in 1989 (U.S. Advisory Board, April, 1991). What’s new is our concentration towards this crisis, recognizing the degree of distress that it can instigate. There is a sense that our criminal Justice system is going to cope with matters unsympathetically, recognizing that we cannot cure, however we can successfully try to deal with these sexual disorders. There are novel ways of understanding the facet of the behaviors, but the problems itself, very sadly, has been with us throughout history and probably continue. The text provided a great resource of the relationships between the child victim and the perpetrator of sexual abuse; I was surprised by the high numbers of female offenders. Most boys are less verbal about abuse than girls, especially when the victim is someone in the family or close to the family. I was astonished to find out that there are common features in terms of the personality or temperament or even the intelligence level of these individuals. Yet, we can’t seem to get a grip on this deviance behavior. What these individuals share in common is difficulty in coping with their sexual needs in a healthy and constructive fashion. The only common feature present in these individuals has to do with the isolation of their sexual lives and how they deal with that. Obviously if someone's had a prior record, we should be aware of that; or seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time with children and wants to do it without any chaperoning, this would be causes of concern. A person's demeanor or conduct is not necessarily going to give us a clue of being a risk. However, it does provide a light-bulb affect. Abuse can be perpetrated by people of any level of intelligence. They can have a spectrum of personalities from introverted to extroverted and anything in between. Their temperaments can be quite different in terms of whether or not they tend to have a short fuse or are very patient and docile. According to the text and videos, the only thing that they tend to share in common is that they are experiencing these attractions and acting on them. It has nothing to do with intelligence, personality, or social skills. Considering all the life long emotional damage that a pedophile leaves a victim with, it discourages me to discover that only the convicted most severe paraphillas are treated, while those with milder behavior will go untreated. Finally, I would have like to know more about paraphillas in relation to culture, which ethnic group is more prone to committing this type of crime. In my conclusion, mainly after speaking with several members of my family, I discovered that a great deal of them were molested by one particular relative, however their responses to why they didn’t tell anyone,“ I thought it was just something that happens since it happened to so many of us in the family.” This was a very sad discovery for me because many of my female relatives are victims with serious scars; due to the acceptance of things like this. These occurrences could also happen to their very own children. Above all, a habitual rapist of children; my mother’s brother will forever be a pedophile.

References

1. Incest Survivors' Resource Network, International. (1990). Manual. N.Y. Yearly Meeting, Hicksville, NY.

2. Calam, R.M., (1989) Sexual experience and eating problems in female undergraduates. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 8, 391-399.

3. Blume, E. Sue, (1989). Secret Survivors: Uncovering incest and its aftereffects. John Wiley & Sons, NJ.