The causes and treatment of pedophiles

For the past decade, we have been hearing horror stories of child molestation going on in Indian residential schools, churches, young offender facilities, orphanages and public schools and even in the privacy of the victim’s homes but this isn’t a new revelation. It’s being going on since Man has walked on the Earth and Mankind has known all along that children have been sexually abused by adults.

It has been estimated that one in three girls and one in seven boys under the age of 18 have experienced some form of sexual abuse.

The most common place of sexual assaults against children is the victim's home, followed by the perpetrator’s home.

The prevalence of pedophilia is difficult to estimate. Few pedophiles come forward spontaneously to request treatment, (because of the fear of being arrested) and there is no way of knowing how many pedophiles simply resist the impulse to approach a child their whole lives, or else behave so discreetly -- for example, limiting their activities to seemingly accidental touching of a child's genitals during horseplay -- that they are never apprehended. It is at most, however, a tiny proportion of the adult male population.

Admittedly, there are pedophiles that roam the streets looking for children to molest but it isn’t as common as one would think. The concept of the ‘dirty old man on the street’ is a myth. There are also those who visit countries in the Far East searching for young victims to prey on. The dangers of pedophilia are for the most part, lurking in the home. Pedophiles are very selective in the victims they choose. They tend to avoid kids that have a father living with them. They want to find children alone, unsupervised, and lonely. For this reason, they are often attracted to single moms who have sole custody of their children and for this reason, the risk of coming under the "care" of a pedophile is increased hundreds of times in circumstances such as these.

It is a sad fact of life that single woman with one or more children are lonely and in many cases, they will accept as partners, any men who expresses any interest in them and who are employable. Unfortunately, in a great many of these situations, the man isn’t looking for love from the woman but rather is looking for sexual release from her offspring.

Priests are celibate but nevertheless have sexual needs that they must keep under control -- no easy task for any human being. It is because of the sexual frustration
that they are forced to endure that many succumb to molesting children (usually boys) in the sanctity of their church.

Many school teachers, both in private and public schools have molested their students and in private schools, their young victims have been of the same sex for obvious reasons and in public schools, their young victims have generally been of the opposite sex.

What causes pedophilia? Although experts debate the etiology of pedophilia and whether it should be considered a mental disorder, there is a degree of consensus that pedophilic arousal patterns often begin with puberty. The offending behavior, however, often does not begin until a youth is in his middle to late teens.

There are exceptions of course. Children as young as eight have sexually abused younger siblings but I doubt that eroticism was their motivation. Further, I do not consider young children playing doctor as being sexually motivated. It is curiosity that brings that act into play.

The possibility that neurodevelopmental problems before birth may increase a male's risk of pedophilia does not preclude the possibility that neurodevelopmental problems after birth may also increase the risk of pedophilia.

Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, declared: "Some research suggests that some genetic and hormonal abnormalities may play a role in pedophilia.

In an article, "'The Main Thing is Being Wanted': Some Case Studies on Adult Sexual Experiences with Children," the author says that one-third of the pedophiles he has studied claimed that "their sexual desire for children is a natural part of their constitution. This desire is variously described as 'inbred,' 'innate,' 'a fact of nature,' 'inherent in them,' etc.

Is being a pedophile hereditary? The jury is still out on that one, just as it is as to why some people are gay. Is it genetics or a choice?

This may explain why professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and accountants who had never been charged with child molesting and who voluntarily submitted themselves to a phallometric apparatus many years ago, showed signs of sexual arousal when shown pictures of nude children.

This is an area of sexology that must be investigated further.

It is not uncommon for pedophiles to claim that as a result of a brain injury, they became pedophiles. Perhaps their reasoning is to some degree true but whether it can be scientifically proved is a matter of conjecture.

Previous research has found that pedophilic men referred for clinical assessment of their sexual behavior are more likely to report that they suffered head injuries before their 13th birthday than are nonpedophilic men referred for the same purpose.

I believe that some children with very low IQs are susceptible to being pedophiles because they too have sexual fantasies and seek to find a need to seek release from these fantasies. Unfortunately for them and their younger victims, they don’t fully understand that what they are doing is morally and legally wrong.

The ingestion of alcohol or drugs into a person’s body will lessen inhibitions but at the same time, it will also reduce the libido. The two main causes of disturbed sexual function are psychological stress and the accumulated side-effects of pharmaceutical medications. Alcohol and certain medications will actually interfere with a man’s ability to get aroused so I find it difficult to believe that intoxication by alcohol or drugs is a legitimate defence to molesting children.

In Regina v. Daviault, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1994, that a man who had self-induced his drunkenness could not form the intent to rape his victim and as a result, the appellant was acquitted. This raised a hue and cry in the press.

Shortly after that decision, I wrote an article for the Globe and Mail in which I said in part;

“As I perceive it, anyone who drinks to such an excess (this would apply also to those who take drugs to excess) that he cannot appreciate the fact that he is committing a criminal act, should be held accountable for his actions.” unquote

In my article, I recommended that such persons should be charged with criminal recklessness. The following year, the Criminal Code of Canada was amended and
section 33.1 of the Code states that intoxication is not a defence to an assault or any other interference or threat of interference by a person with the bodily integrity of another person. This of course includes any form of sexual assault.

What kind of fantasy can a child molester have that causes him to sexually molest a young child? I suppose there is no limit as to what the human mind can conjure up when creating sexual fantasies but they are based on one of two basic aspects of human nature -- sadism or masochism.

We all accept the premise that sadomasochism is an anomaly that includes not only the inflicting of physical pain but also certain scenarios in which flagrant humiliation (for instance, master-slave relationship) is a feature in the erotic play.

The pedophile is either playing the role of the sadist (active role) or alternatively, the victim, (passive role. He can’t play both as everyone fantasizes (or at least most) what single role he or she is playing when participating in the sex act. Many men and women fantasize being the submissive victims of gang rape during their participation of the sex act. This by itself is not a perversion. When the man or woman fantasizes molesting or physically harming his or her sexual partner, merely having such a fantasy is not necessarily perverse. It becomes perverse when it is physically enacted to the point of making an attempt or the actual bringing about injury to the partner.

Many years ago in England, two small villages were separated by a small forest. A path led to both villages and it crossed through the forest. One year there was a woman who waited for small-sized men who would walk through the forest at night and she pounced on them, stripped them and sexually molested them. When this became known amongst the men in both villages, some of them with deliberation ventured into the forest at night, hoping that they too would be attacked and molested by the unknown woman. When one of the men innocently walked through the forest one night, he was pounced on by the woman and the man recognized her and reported her to the police. She was arrested and sent to prison. The man who reported her to the police was later severely beaten by a number of men from both villages because he had brought about an end to this unusual sexual escapade they were purposely participating in and enjoying. They were masochists who enjoyed being violently molested by a woman they could hardly see.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that many rapists and pedophiles sexually assault their
victims, not necessarily for the sexual joy they might get from the act but as a means of exacting revenge for some perceived wrong committed against them in the past. It is that motive that is common among rapists. Unfortunately, the victims
of these sexual assaults are not the persons the violators are trying to punish -- as these victims are merely the surrogates. Usually, it is the adult victims who are the surrogates, not the children as no child can really anger an adult to the point that the adult exacts severe and humiliating punishment on his child surrogates.

Another motive molesters have in raping adults or children is the sense of power they feel that they have over their victims. There can be no doubt that when these rapists and molesters hear their victims cry and scream; they know that they are in control. Often these rapists and molesters get turned on this way. They are generally people who have been nagged much of their lives, people who have had to obey the orders of almost everyone in their lives and this is their way of getting a piece of the action -- being in charge,so to speak.

But what is hard to describe is a third motive -- the child molester’s love of the
child. Many child molesters truly have an intense feeling of love for their victims. It could be because as children themselves, they never had a sibling of their own approximate age to play games with so when they become adults, that desire to play with children surfaces when the pedophiles become adults.

They actually enjoy playing games with the children and taking them to movies but
they also find themselves molesting them, not out of hate or seeking a sense of
power over them but because the molesters are sexually immature and shy away from having sex with other adults (for fear of being turned down) and prefer to take the easy way out and have sex with children who are more apt to easily give their consent. That way, the relationship with the adult molesting them doesn’t come to an abrupt end. These molesters will take great care not to hurt their victims physically for two reasons. The first is that the relationship would come to an abrupt end but also because when the pedophile truly loves the child, he or she doesn’t really want to hurt the child unnecessarily.

What many of the pedophiles don’t know is or alternatively choose to ignore is that they are harming the child psychologically because victims of child molestation often grow up as child molesters themselves or alternatively, they feel so ashamed of having permitted themselves to be molested, they shy away from having normal sex with adult partners later when they grow up,

There is an old adage -- 'different strokes for different folks’ which is most applicable in situations like this.

Every one of us knows how to squeeze pleasure from pain -- someone else's or our own – but sometimes the pain can merely be the risk of being caught. For example, some couples get a rush when they copulate in a location where members of the public may actually walk by and see them and report them to the police. This can apply to pedophiles also. This risk factor of being caught intensifies the joy of the sexual act.

If you include that along with one or more of the other motives previously described in this paper, it is easy to see why the pedophile becomes truly addicted to the perversion of molesting children.

The most difficult question to answer is; ‘How do we cure the pedophile?’

Physical castration (as done in mid-eastern countries) is not a cure as it is done rather as a punishment, a deterrent and for reassurance that the rapist or molester won’t re-offend in that same manner he did before. In Western countries it is considered as being inhumane. In any case, physical castration of a rapist doesn’t necessarily mean that the rapist’s libido will be reduced.

Rapist Wayne DuMond of Arkansas said that while awaiting trial, masked men broke into his house and castrated him. The sheriff in the county later displayed DuMond’s testicles in a jar on his desk. DuMond's sentence had been set at life in prison, plus 20 years. In 1992, Clinton's successor in the Arkansas governor's mansion, Jim Guy Tucker, reduced that sentence to 39 years, making DuMond eligible for parole. He left prison in 1999 and he ended up in Missouri. Not long after he arrived, he was arrested again - this time for sexually assaulting and murdering a woman named Carol Sue Shields. DuMond was also the leading suspect in the rape and murder of another woman. He was convicted of murdering Shields and sentenced o life. He eventually died in prison in 2005.

Chemical castration on the other hand is simply a revisit of the old method of reducing sexual arousal -- putting saltpeter in one’s food. Antiandrogen and hormonal treatments for the male sexual offender are used for the reduction of sexual drive in men who are sexually aggressive and who have poor control over their sexual behavior. They also are used in the treatment of the paraphilias as with pedophiles.

The effect of antiandrogen treatment is the reduction of available androgen, specifically of testosterone.

The trouble with chemical castration is that it is only temporary. Once the prisoner is released and no longer under the control of a parole or probation officer,there is really nothing that can be done to ensure that the former molester is keeping to the regimen of ingesting the chemicals that will reduce his or her erotic drive.

There is another method of treatment that has had some success. I am speaking of
aversion therapy. Simply put,if you spank a child for some wrongdoing, the next time it thinks of committing that specific wrong, the child remembers the spanking and doesn’t commit the wrongdoing again. In principle, this works. Although spanking a child for a singular wrong it has done can be effective, (spanking nowadays is considered abuse) pedophilia on the other hand is a disorder of the mind that has been ingrained into the pedophilia’s brain for a long time and the therapy needed to help this unfortunate person is much more complex than that of simply punishing a child for a singular wrongdoing.

The willing pedophile is placed into a phallometric apparatus in which he is subjected to a short but not too painful burst of electricity if his penis swells as a result of an erection. The measure of erotic arousal is monitored during the presentation of potentially erotic test stimuli which includes 30-second film clips of nude adults or children smiling and walking slowing toward the camera (but not engaging in any overtly sexual or even seductive behavior. These stimuli include eight categories of human types: physically mature women, pubescent girls, 5- to 8-year-old girls, 8- to 11-year-old girls, and four corresponding categories of males. I should add that this kind of treatment is purely voluntary and the subject can withdraw at any time from the program.

The theory is that the subjects gets shocked so many times that later, the mere thought of seducing a child turns them off. There is a risk in this method of treatment that cannot be overlooked.

The ability of sex offenders to learn to control their penile responses to deviant stimuli in a test situation would reflect their ability and motivation to control their sexual arousal in real situations of temptation. However, learning the ability to deceive their therapists about changes in their sexual feelings could be a negative rather than a positive therapeutic change. It has been suggested that the use of behavioral reconditioning of men with deviant physiological sexual arousal patterns may have been one factor contributing to the poorer response of those treated compared to the untreated sex offenders in the Californian Sex Offender Treatment and Evaluation Project.

There can be doubt in anyone’s mind that the possibility of being sent to prison and being murdered in prison by inmates who hate rapists and child molesters is definitely a powerful deterrent to pedophiles and in some cases, will cause some pedophiles to defer their pedophilic temptations to participating in more safer alternatives such as having sex with an adult, be it a man or a woman. But many pedophiles are aware that the prison authorities have a legal obligation to isolate pedophiles from the general prison population so the fear of being murdered in prison isn’t as great today as it was years ago.

There is however, one possibility that must be considered with respect to reducing recidivism of pedophiles. But before I get into that possibility, I want to deal with the issue of what kind of person is a pedophile who has been arrested, convicted, imprisoned and possibly given therapy and finally released into society?

Does that person still suffer from pedophilia if he has been given therapy and the authorities believe that he is no longer a danger to society? The answer is yes, he does. Consider this. When an alcoholic gets off the wagon, and stops drinking alcohol, he is still suffering from alcoholism because if he takes a drink, it will inevitably lead him down the road as an alcoholic again. It follows that if a pedophile is successfully treated for pedophilia but finds himself unexpectedly in the presence of a nude child, he may very well be sexually aroused.

Obviously, the threat of imprisonment is a real deterrent factor that will play an important role in his rehabilitation. But there is one factor in his rehabilitation that many people haven’t considered. I am speaking of the pedophile upon his release later obtaining assets that he will lose if he is sent back to prison. The assets I am speaking of are as follows; a good job with a future, wife and kids, close and trusting friends, a good reputation, a home, a car; the list is endless.

When the pedophile finds himself is a situation where the temptation to regress back to his original problem surfaces, he will think of the consequences that will follow if he succumbs to the temptation to molest another child. He realizes that within a very short period of time, he could lose everything that he has obtained and achieved. In other words, it will be all for naught.

I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that this theory doesn’t always apply. Many years ago, the publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press was a leading figure in that city. Despite that, he had sex with street kids. He lost his job and his reputation. Soon after his sentence (he didn’t go to jail) he and his family moved to another city to begin his life again.

The pedophile who is released from prison will have no future at all if his name and his crime becomes public knowledge and as a result, he is shunned by everyone. He will lose nothing by re-offending other than his freedom.

We as a society must learn to forgive the offender even though we don’t forgive the crime. It is only then, that the former child molester has a chance to regain the trust of members of society and successfully rehabilitate himself. To treat him as a pariah will simply turn him back to what he was; a non-reformed child molester who for no other reason, does it to wreak revenge on the society that he perceives is doing him wrong.