Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (62 page)

Freud's peremptory dismissal of what his female patients told him and his dogmatic construct of the sexually fantasizing child influenced several generations of his devoted followers. Psycho analytic literature on child molestation points a wagging finger at the victim. In fact, the thrust of the psychoanalytic approach has been to pinpoint the child victim's "seductive" behavior. A fre quently quoted study from the nineteen thirties described the

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AGAINST OUR WILL

"unusually attractive and charming personalities" of victimized children and cheerf ully remarked that they showed less evidence of fear, anxiety, guilt or psychic trauma "than might be expected." A follow-up study posited that in many cases "it was highly probable that the child had used his [sic] charm in the role of seducer rather than that he [sic] had been the innocent one who had been seduced." Af ter the experts had ferreted out the hidden complicity of children, they sighed and chastised "submissive," "passive" or "negligent" mothers for failing to protect their young.

So children were to blame and mothers were to blame. What about the offenders? America's own original sex expert, Alfred C. Kinsey, he who said that the difference between a rape and a good time depends on whether the girl's parents were awake when she finally came home (see footnote page
1
79) , paused in the middle of a discourse on impotence in Sexual Behavior
in
the Human Male to remark:

A problem which deserves noting is that of the old men who are apprehended and sentenced to penal institutions as sex offenders. These men are usually charged with contributing to delinquency by fondling minor girls or boys; often they are charged with attempted rape. . . . Many small girls reflect the public hysteria over "being touchedn by a strange person; and many a child, who has no idea at all of the mechanics of intercourse, interprets affection and simple caressing from anyone except her own parents as attempts at rape.
In
consequence, not a few older men serve time in penal institutions for attempting to engage in a sexual act which at their age would not interest most of them, and of which many of them are un doubtedly incapable.

This
.
represented almost the sum total of Dr. Kinsey's thoughts on rape in his opus on the human male. In Sexual Behav ior
in
the Human Female, Kinsey returned to his singular theme. One in four women interviewed (all
white,
predominantly
middle
class) had reported an unwanted preadolescent sex experience of some sort with an adult male. Trying to deal with this astonishing incidence-So percent reported that they had been frightened Kinsey theorized:

It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed by having its genitalia touched,

or disturbed by seeing the genitalia of another person. . . . Some of the more experienced students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of the parents, police and other adults . . . may disturb the child more seriously than the contacts themselves. The current hysteria over sex offenders may well have serious effects on the ability of many of these children to work out sexual adjustments some years later in their marriages.

As the social worker and writer Florence Rush has written, "With the usual male arrogance, Kinsey could not imagine that a sexual assault on a child consttutes a gross and devastating shock and insult, and so he blamed everyone
but
the offender. The fact remains that sexual offenses against children are barely noticed except in the most violent and sensational instances. Most offenses are never revealed, and when revealed, most are either ignored or not reported.
If
reported, a large percentage are dismissed for lack of proof, and even when proof can be established, many cases are dropped because of the pressure and humiliation forced on the victim and family."*

In 1969 the Children's Division of the American Humane Association, under the direction of Vincent DeFrancis, released a detailed analysis of adult sex crimes against children in Brooklyn and the Bronx, using as its core sample
2
50
cases that had been reported during an eighteen-month period to police and child protection agencies. No case involving an offender below the age of 16 (or victim above 16) was included. The Association's definition of a sex crime encompassed rape, attempted rape, incest, sodomy and carnal abuse. In other words, some form of abusive physical contact was the determining criterion. Noncontact cases of inde

cent exposure and "impairing the morals of a minor" were omitted. The core sample represented a fraction, less than one-sixth, of all reported cases at the Association's disposal, for well over one thou sand cases were reported in Brooklyn alone during a single year. Those who worked on the study cautiously estimated that the actual incidence was probably twice that. Among their major find ings were these:

*
I am deeply grateful to Florence Rush for putting much of her material on child molestation at my disposal, and
I
eagerly await the publication of her book.

• 8
  I
  AG'MNST··..OUR"'W&L
  fi. \.
  

  • The sexually abused child is statistically more prevalent than the physically abused, or battered, child.
    

  • The median age of sexually abused children is
    11,
    but in fants have not escaped molestation.
    

  • Ten girls are molested for every one boy.
    

  • Ninety-seven percent of the offenders are male.
    

    In a book-length report of specific findings the Humane Associa tion disclosed that
    

  • In three-quarters of the Brooklyn-Bronx cases the offender was known to the child or her family. Twenty-seven percent lived in the child's home (father, stepfather, mother's lover, brother ) . Another
    11
    percent did not live in the home but were related by blood or marriage. A significant number of offenders were local storekeepers, next-door neighbors, landlords, janitors and youths entrusted to baby-sit. Only
    2
    5 percent of the offenders were re ported to be total strangers.
    

  • In more than
    40
    percent of the cases the sexual abuse was not a single, isolated event but occurred over a period of time ranging from weeks to, in one case, seven years.
    

  • Force or the threat of force was used against
    60
    percent of the children. Another
    15
    percent were enticed by money or gif ts. For the remaining one-quarter, "the lure was more subtle and was based on the child's natural loyalty and affection for a relative or near-relative."
    

Out of the
2
50
cases in the Brooklyn-Bronx study, police managed to make
1
73
arrests. In some of the outstanding cases the offender remained unknown; however, in 48 cases a parent of the child withdrew the complaint-usually because the offender was a relative or friend. In order to prosecute the
173
offenders, the victimized children put in an aggregate of more than
1,000
per sonal appearances in court. Nearly half of the cases were eventually dismissed because of a New York State law requiring corroboration of a victim's testimony.*

The Humane Association, unlike some of its predecessors in

* In
i974
the New York State legislature repealed the corroborative require ment for sex offenses committed against adults, but kept the additional evi dence requirement for cases of assaults against children. The precept that children lie is more deeply entrenched in the law than the precept that adult women lie.

the field, was acutely sensitive to the emotional damage done to the child victim.
It
found that two-thirds of all sexually abused children had suffered some form of identifiable emotional disturb ance and 14 percent had become severely disturbed. The most common reaction among the children was the taking on of deep feelings of guilt (articulated by the victims as "the trouble" that they "had caused the family") , shame and loss of self-esteem. "To shatter the ego even further," the report noted, "some parents projected blame on the child and used every opportunity to up braid and remind the child of the consequences of bad behavior." Emotional damage also appeared in the form of disruptive, rebel lious behavior at home and at school, truancy and an inability to concentrate in the classroom. A few children began to display behavior imitative of the offense. A four-year-old who had been abused by her father was later observed playing a similar "game" with her three-year-old brother. Some of the older girls careened into promiscuity.
In
addition to the emotional trauma,
29
of the girls had become pregnant as a result of the offense.*

An interesting profile of the adult offender emerged from the Brooklyn-Bronx study. The age of reported offenders ranged from 17 to 68, with a median age of 3i. More than 30 percent were under the age of 24 and almost 60 percent were under the age of