Forensic Psychology For Dummies (150 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
14 years old: Austria and China
Focusing on a distinct group: Child sex offenders
Child offenders who commit sexual offences – such as sexual harassment, child molestation and rape – are a separate group of young criminals. Youngsters in their mid- to late teens or younger commit perhaps as many as one in four of these sorts of crimes.
A young person gets a life sentence
In 1999, Kathleen Grossett-Tate was babysitting 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick along with her 12-year-old son Lionel Tate. Not long after Kathleen went upstairs to rest, leaving the two children alone together, Lionel disturbed her to say that Tiffany had stopped breathing. She was indeed dead. He said that he’d been showing her ‘professional wrestling moves’ – he was about four times larger than Tiffany.
The prosecution claimed that Tiffany’s injuries were so brutal that they couldn’t have occurred as Lionel claimed. He was convicted and became the youngest person in the US to be sentenced to death. He won an appeal against the conviction on the grounds that his competency to stand trial hadn’t been assessed for his initial trial. However, his subsequent criminal activity, including holding up a pizza delivery man with a gun, led to him being sentenced to 30 years in prison in May 2006.
Boot camp failure
One approach to trying to rehabilitate juvenile offenders, favoured by many conservative politicians, is known as the ‘Boot Camp’. This idea follows the model of basic training in the military. The youngsters assigned to these places are forced to live a highly regimented life. They get up early each morning and have plenty of drills and exercise with harsh discipline, rigid codes of dress and frequent admonishments to ensure that they follow camp rules.
The idea is that these children simply need some firm authority and a healthy lifestyle to refrain from antisocial behaviour and criminality. However, studies of the effects of these regimes show that, although most inmates obey the rules while in the boot camp, these institutions have no lasting effect. They don’t deal with the underlying psychological problems that lead to delinquency in the first place. All society ends up with is fitter, more athletic criminals!
Male and female juvenile sex offenders tend to be rather different from other sorts of young offenders. They often exhibit sexually abusive behaviour at a young age; some of their victims are male and they often have had a number of different victims. Lack of social skills can be an important aspect of their offending, as well as low intelligence, but a family history of sexual abuse is also often present.
Don’t confuse these sexually abusive children with youngsters taking part in natural childhood explorations of sexuality. The ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ games of early childhood can be healthy if limited and under control, and not turned into some desperate secret that then produces tremendous adult disapproval. Discovering what’s private and what’s for public display is a natural part of child development that needs to be handled sensitively.