Abstract
In this book, we have assessed the impact of framing sex offenders, and especially people who sexually abuse children, as monsters and predators who must be excluded from the human community. The exclusion of sex offenders is accomplished, in the criminal justice system, by imposing long prison terms as the first line of defense against lawbreakers. We have had little to say about criminal penalties for sex offending. Instead, our focus has been on the civil and quasi-civil measures of depriving offenders of their liberties, and therewith their basic human dignity, after they have served their prison sentences. After all, from the perspective of the monster metaphor, sex offenders cannot be changed by either punitive measures or treatment; they can only be contained and segregated. And the notion that they have a residual dignity as persons strikes many people as ludicrous. There is no evidence, however, that punitive criminal or civil measures have been effective in preventing sex offending. In this chapter, we shall outline an alternative to containment and segregation strategies for dealing with people who commit violent sexual abuse: public health. We cannot here develop a complete public health approach to sex offending, both because of limitations and space and limitations of expert knowledge, but we will present what we believe is at least a program for future research. Chemical dependency has long been regarded as a public health problem, and that framework is now being suggested as an alternative, or at least a complement to, its criminalization (Bishop 1919; Hunter et al. 2012). Similarly, sex offending behavior, to the extent that it has an element of compulsion, shares features with chemical addiction, and should also be framed as a public health problem.
Sexual health is more than freedom from sexual disease or disorders … Sexual health is non-exploitive and respectful of self and others … Sexual health is dependent upon an individual’s well-being and sense of self-steem. Sexual health requires trust, honesty, and communication.
Eli Coleman, Director of the Program in Human Sexuality at University of Minnesota
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Notes
- 1.
One example of an illness narrative written by the victim of a sex offender is Come Here (1993) by Richard Berendzen. Berendzen, former president of American University in Washington, D.C., was caught making sexually oriented phone calls to day care providers from his university offices. He was forced to resign from American University in the subsequent wave of publicity. Berendzen’s book relates his story of incest by his mother, which occurred between the ages of 8 and 11. After the incest stopped, he suppressed the trauma, becoming an astronomer, professor at Harvard, and finally, president of AU, before the memories resurfaced in the form of disturbing compulsions. Although Berendzen would not be considered a sex offender, his illness narrative is unique because he was caught, very publicly, acting out his lingering trauma in inappropriate ways, although he claims that he did not derive sexual pleasure from the telephone calls.
- 2.
There have been a few books of sex offender narratives published but these have not been widely disseminated. Why They Did It: Stories of Eight Convicted Child Molesters by Shirley O’Brien, which was published in 1986, has long been out of print. Not Monsters: Analyzing the Stories of Child Molesters, by Pamela D. Schultz, was published in 2005. Although offender narratives give insight to the motivation behind the behavior, they are difficult to hear and may put the offender narrating his story at risk. On June 1, 2012, an Associated Press (2012) article discussed the release of a 27-page “sexual history” written by Robert Van Handel, a defrocked Franciscan cleric accused of molesting at least 17 boys. The essay had been penned as a therapy assignment and kept secret for years, then released as part of a $28 million settlement between the Franciscans and 25 clergy abuse victims that also called for the disclosure of the religious order’s internal files. The accused priests fought unsuccessfully to keep the documents private but lost the battle. The AP obtained more than 4,000 pages from a plaintiff’s attorney in late May 2012 and promptly published portions of the cleric’s narrative in detail, including a chronological list of the offenses and the locations where they occurred. The article ends with “A psychiatrist evaluating him for sentencing once asked Van Handel about his worst fear. The priest’s answer was specific. The public release of his sexual history” (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/01/ex-history-window-to-pedophile-priest-mind/).
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Douard, J., Schultz, P. (2013). Public Health Approach to Sexual Abuse. In: Monstrous Crimes and the Failure of Forensic Psychiatry. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5279-5_9
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