SEX OFFENDERS: SEQUENCE OF SEX OFFENSES
In our society there is a belief, so common as to constitute folklore, in the evolutionary sequence of behavior. The child who indulges in petty theft will, if unchecked, end up as a professional thief. The teenager who lights his first marijuana cigarette is on the road to becoming a heroin addict. The collector of “pinup” pictures will demand stronger and stronger stimuli until he avidly seeks pictures of sexual activity, and finally he will commit an overt sex offense. In our contacts with the general public and with the police we often encounter this same evolutionary hypothesis in their attitudes toward sex offenders. Sometimes specific cases were cited in substantiation, for example, cases of peepers who subsequently committed rape.
To test this hypothesis we studied the sequence of the sex offenses committed by the men in the present study.
First of all, we were forced to rule out men with only one sex offense, many of whom were still serving their sentences. Moreover, as we stated earlier in the section on recidivism, our sample suffers from the serious defect of not having enough sex offenders who were out of prison at the time of interview. Our sampling procedure made it unlikely that we would include a man who had committed one sex offense, served his time, and thereafter kept out of trouble. Our data do, however, permit us to speak with considerable authority about the sequence of sex offenses among those convicted of more than one, and this is really the crux of the matter.
At one time we thought of categorizing the offenses according to some scale of seriousness, but this proved unprofitable. There is considerable disagreement both among the public and in professional groups about what offense is more serious than another. For example, one man may hold that an offense involving force is ipso facto more serious than one involving a voluntary relationship, yet the next man may feel that the seduction of a child is more serious than the rape of an adult, and a third man may claim that incest is the most pathological of all. One measure of seriousness might be the effect upon the male or female partner or victim, but in most instances we do not know the effect. Furthermore, the same offense would not produce a uniform effect. For instance, what to one person is an inconsequential dim childhood memory may to another be a life-molding unforgettable trauma. Consequently, we gave up the idea of scaling the offenses according to their gravity and decided simply to describe the sequence and type of offense.
Our method is simple. We first took the sex offenders who had been convicted of two or more offenses and divided them into groups according to their first offense. We then figured how many of their second offenses belonged in the same category or another one, and then did the same for their third and subsequent offenses. Thus, for example, we can say that the men whose first sex-offense conviction was for exhibition had 72 per cent of their second convictions also for exhibition, 6 per cent for peeping, etc.. We are aware of the oversimplification of this approach and the overemphasis this gives to the first offense. Had we more cases and time we could at least partly eliminate the fortuitous element involved and, more importantly, deal with all behavior rather than only with that which resulted in conviction.
One other complication merits mention. In some instances the second (or even later) offense was committed before the man had been convicted of the first. For example, a man who had committed incest with his two daughters might be charged with two (or even more) offenses and convicted of each. In our statistical presentation it would appear that he had not “learned his lesson” from his first conviction, since it was followed by a second offense of the same sort. This sort of complication, while a minority phenomenon, should be kept in mind, since it falsely emphasizes recidivism.
The men whose first conviction was for a heterosexual offense against a child and who were convicted of a second sex offense repeated their first offense in about three fifths of the cases. This degree of specificity is neither large nor small compared to other groups. About a tenth of the second offenses were against minor girls, as one might expect. The third commonest form of recidivism is at first a bit surprising: 9 per cent of the second offenses were exhibition, but some of this appears to have been exhibition to female children and minors. The second offenses involving aggression are not numerous (7 per cent total) nor are the homosexual offenses. Other offenses are rarer yet.
The third and subsequent offenses reveal a certain inflexibility in these men: once more three fifths were against little girls, and almost the same percentage were exhibition. A hard core of pedophiles, defectives, and senile deteriorates resist learning through experience. The proportion of offenses involving force, however, declined; these men as a group are not physically dangerous. There was a marked increase in miscellaneous sex offenses (15 per cent, the second commonest type of offense for these men and a relatively very large figure compared to other groups). This seems to represent the almost random sort of nuisance behavior one can expect from men whose mental faculties, sometimes below-average to begin with, have been impaired by alcoholism and/or senility.
In summary, it appears that the offenders vs. children with multiple sex offenses generally repeat their original type of offense, relatively few begin using force, and a substantial minority commit what can be termed as nuisance offenses (including exhibition).
The sex-offender recidivists whose first offense was against acquiescent or cooperative minor girls seldom tended to repeat; only about one third of their second offenses and one sixth of their subsequent offenses were the same as the original one. Their second offenses were usually either “spillovers” into offenses against children or offenses against adults (both totaling 23 per cent of the second offenses), or aggressions against females (also totaling 23 per cent). This is the most use of force exhibited by any group except those whose first offense was one of aggression. Their third and later offenses again show the “spillover” phenomenon; the use of force is less but still substantial; and there is a marked increase in miscellaneous and nuisance offenses (totaling 25 per cent if one includes exhibition). In both second and later offenses these men display a pedophilic tendency: children strongly outnumber adults in heterosexual offenses without force and also in the homosexual offenses. Only when force or violence was involved do we find adult females outnumbering children and minors.
All in all, the men whose first offenses were against girls under sixteen inclined to a wide diversity of subsequent offenses. Their predilection toward young females coupled with a definite tendency toward the use of force makes them one of the more dangerous groups from a social viewpoint.
The men whose first offense was against a cooperative or at least passive adult female show the least specificity of any group in their later offenses. Their second offenses, for example, are scattered over virtually the whole gamut of sex offenses with no type of offense accounting for more than 17 per cent. This lack of specificity in part reflects social attitudes and law enforcement, since heterosexual activity with consenting adult females seldom results in arrest and conviction. While a moderate proportion of second offenses involved force none of the later offenses did, and these men cannot, as a group, be looked upon as physically dangerous. In the third and later offenses there is a strong trend toward miscellaneous and nuisance offenses. A full third are of this type, and if one adds in the 17 per cent of exhibition offenses, one finds that over half of these later offenses are not particularly serious.
*350\161\2*
