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July
27th, 2002; Vol.162 #4
Men of Prey Scientists peer into the dark world of sex offenders
Men of Prey Scientists peer into the dark world of sex offenders
Bruce Bower
From inner-city mean streets to serene suburban cul-de-sacs, from bar stools
to pulpits, and from state houses to the state prisons, sex offenders
uniformly inspire fear and loathing. On occasion, rapists, child molesters,
and their ilk also stir up unexpected irony. Consider this turn of events. On
June 9, scientists and clinicians from throughout North America ended a 3-day
meeting in Washington, D.C., where they discussed the state of knowledge about
sexually coercive acts. Although intriguing lines of research were described,
conference participants readily admitted their ignorance about crucial issues.
There was no consensus on what causes individuals to become sexual criminals,
how best to predict which of them will offend again after release from prison,
or even whether current treatment programs for sex offenders are effective.
Fair enough. On June 10, however, the Supreme Court begged to differ.
Prison-based rehabilitation programs for sex offenders work so well, the high
court ruled, that states can impose penalties on convicts who refuse such
treatment.
The 5-to-4 decision addressed the case of Robert G. Lile, a convicted rapist
who wouldn't enter treatment in a Kansas prison because the program, which has
served as a model for prisons in more than a dozen other states, requires men
to admit in writing to past offenses. Lile sued prison officials, citing his
constitutional right against self-incrimination.
The Supreme Court's majority opinion stated that once a man is in prison, he
can't claim protection from self-incrimination. Thus, prison rehabilitation
programs can require him to accept responsibility for past crimes in the name
of changing his behavior.
Legal pronouncements of this sort can't wipe away scientific uncertainty about
sex offenders and potential treatments, though. It doesn't help that little is
known about the mental and biological development of sexual desire in
law-abiding citizens, notes psychologist Robert A. Prentky of the Justice
Resource Institute in Bridgewater, Mass. Prentky organized the June
conference, which was sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences.
The small number of researchers trying to understand sexual offenders responds
far more to sensational crimes and events, such as the scandal over sex abuse
by members of the Catholic clergy or the particulars of a horrific case in the
news, than to a systematic agenda for studying sexual development, Prentky
says.
"This is a young, difficult, sensitive, controversial area of
science," remarks psychologist Jim Breiling of the National Institute of
Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.
Deviant paths
Researchers agree that no one becomes a rapist or a child molester without
earlier influences. One challenge is to delineate the psychological
developments that usher men toward such acts. Researchers generally don't
study the much smaller number of female sex offenders.
The work of psychologist Neil M. Malamuth of the University of California, Los
Angeles has focused attention on two personality characteristics that may set
men up to become sexually aggressive and, ultimately, to rape.
Malamuth and his coworkers discovered this pair of attributes in groups of
college men who found rape acceptable. These men say that they would carry out
acts of forced sex and rape if no one would ever find out about it and they
wouldn't be punished. This attitude about rape also appears in many convicted
rapists, Malamuth found in earlier work.
He refers to the first characteristic he identified in the college group as
hostile masculinity. It includes self-centered arrogance, manipulation and
force in dealing with women, unusually high sensitivity to rejection by women,
use of sex to achieve dominance, and lack of empathy.
The second characteristic is a penchant for having impersonal sex with one
partner after another. The students who approach sex in this assembly-line
fashion often report being nonconformists, having been exposed to family
violence as a child, and having had early sexual experiences.
In contrast, psychologist Raymond Knight of Brandeis University in Waltham,
Mass., identifies three different psychological factors in his studies of
rape-inclined college men and convicted rapists. He finds that these men
typically describe themselves as highly impulsive, emotionally callous toward
others, and consumed by sexual thoughts and promiscuity, says Knight.
The research by Malamuth and Knight shows promise, comments psychologist Mary
P. Koss of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "By fostering hostility
toward women and a need for impersonal sex, a boy's family environment might
flip the switch toward a pursuit of sexually coercive behaviors," says
Koss.
Many questions remain about what makes someone become a sex offender. Hostile
masculinity and a sex life devoid of intimacy may stem from a single trait
known as psychopathy, says psychologist Marnie E. Rice of Canada's Mental
Health Center in Penetanguishene, Ontario. People who score high on
psychopathy scales ruthlessly pursue self-gratification by manipulating and
deceiving others without a shred of remorse. Psychopaths break the law in many
ways, from theft and stalking to rape and murder.
However the psychological models shake out, attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder (ADHD) appears to play a largely unappreciated role in the lives of
sex offenders, according to psychiatrist Martin P. Kafka of McLean Hospital in
Belmont, Mass. "I've treated about 700 sex offenders, and the guys with
ADHD invariably have the highest sex drives," Kafka says.
Many of these men weren't diagnosed with ADHD until adulthood. Kafka suspects
that they received much punishment during childhood for their impulsiveness,
inattention, and inability to sit still.
Knight also sees evidence for a link between ADHD and sex offending. More than
half of the men in his studies had previously received ADHD diagnoses.
Risky business
Although convicted sex offenders raise justifiable concerns about public
safety, studies indicate that many of them don't return to their criminal
ways. Researchers are attempting to come up with statistical tools that courts
can use to decide who should stay behind bars and who should go free.
Data from several long-term studies of 4,724 sex offenders released from
prisons in the United States and Canada after 1980 show that after 10 years,
one in five had been arrested for a new sexual offense, says psychologist R.
Karl Hanson of the Department of the Solicitor General of Canada in Ottawa.
After 20 years, that figure rose to slightly more than one in four. Among men
who had victimized children in their own families, an even lower
fraction-about 1 in 10-committed a new sexual offense during the first 20
years after release from prison.
Hanson, however, estimates that close to half the released sex offenders
eventually commit another sex crime. "Most of their offenses are never
reported to the authorities," he says.
In the legal world, however, overall reconviction rates count for little.
Courts ask mental-health clinicians for opinions on whether a particular sex
offender remains dangerous enough to keep in prison or to commit to a
psychiatric hospital. Since 1990, 16 states have passed laws permitting courts
to send men deemed to be "sexually violent predators" to psychiatric
facilities against their will after discharge from prison. The Supreme Court
has upheld such laws.
A growing number of scales that measure a sex offender's risk for committing
further crimes appear to be superior to clinicians' judgments, Hanson remarks.
Studies of the predictive accuracy of 10 such scales have been conducted so
far. These scales assign varying mathematic weights to concrete aspects of an
offender's past crimes, such as the number of offenses, age of victims, and
whether victims were family members.
All the scales do significantly better than clinicians do at identifying sex
offenders who later reoffend, Hanson says. A small number of mental-health
workers, however, tag future offenders more accurately than others do, so some
people wield a special expertise in this area that has yet to be plumbed by
researchers.
Additional data may boost the power of predictive scales, Hanson adds. Such
information might include a man's marital status, whether he becomes sexually
aroused when looking at pictures or hearing recordings depicting rape, and the
presence of psychiatric conditions, such as antisocial personality disorder.
Dousing desire
There's tremendous pressure for clinicians to devise treatments that turn sex
offenders into law-abiding citizens. However, research has yet to show more
than a modest advantage for current treatments over simply leaving sex
offenders alone, Prentky says.
"It's devilishly hard to identify treatment-related changes in a person's
risk for committing sexual offenses," Hanson asserts.
Consider a combined analysis, directed by Hanson, of 15 earlier studies that
had tracked a total of 3,016 sex offenders released from prison. After an
average of 4 to 5 years, 10 percent of those who had completed any
rehabilitation program had been arrested for another sex offense, compared
with 17 percent of those who had received no treatment.
That's a much smaller advantage for the treated group than either researchers
or clinicians would like.
Psychologist Grant Harris of Canada's Mental Health Center is unconvinced of
even that minor difference. The investigations considered by Hanson
overestimate treatment effects, in Harris' view. In studies he examined, the
prisoners who had received treatment had acknowledged their crimes, an
admission that already lowered their likelihood of reoffending, he says.
Members of comparison groups had explicitly refused treatment and usually
denied having committed any crimes, making them poorer prospects for behavior
change.
There's another side to that coin, Harris adds. Psychopathic sex offenders
often deceive clinicians into thinking that they've benefited from treatment
so that they can be released from prison, and then they commit more sex
crimes. "It's possible in our business to do harm," Harris says.
There's no standard form of treatment for sex offenders. Psychologically
oriented programs use individual and group therapy to teach men to think about
sex and intimacy in new ways. Another approach employs structured group
encounters, without therapists, among sex offenders and former offenders.
These groups try to break through denials and rationalizations about past
crimes.
The few psychiatrists involved in sex-offender treatment also prescribe
medications that dim sexual desire or motivation. One class of drugs blocks
activity of the male sex hormone, testosterone. Others boost the brain's
transmission of the chemical messenger serotonin. For the latter group of
drugs, the decreased sexual desire is regarded as an unwanted side effect in
their most common use-for depression.
While the scientists have little information about the factors underlying
sexual offenses or treatments for sexual offenders, the legal world seems
intent on taking action. In its next term, the Supreme Court will rule on the
constitutionality in two states of so-called Megan's laws, which require
community notification of the backgrounds and addresses of released sex
offenders.
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