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Child Molesters: Images in the Shadows
| Article
# : |
17739 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
4,455 Words |
| Author
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Jon R. Conte
Jon R. Conte is an associate professor at the School of Social
Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He is
editor of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence and Violence
UpDate. A part president of the American Professional Society
on the Abuse of Children, Conte maintains a private practice
in Chicago working with adult and child victims of sexual
abuse. |
Citizens around the world have recently been visited by images of grandmotherly Peggy McMartin and her son, Ray (looking not unlike the guy next door), who were tried for child sexual abuse and other crimes in the longest-running criminal trial in American history. In spite of the jury's not-guilty verdicts, polls assert that many Americans believe that some of the children were sexually abused. But interviews with some of the jurors suggest that they, like many of us, found it difficult to believe the children when they described sexual abuse involving bizarre and horrible practices, or that adults who look like our fathers, brothers, neighbors, ministers, or other respected adults could rape and otherwise sexually abuse children.
Although the last ten years have witnessed a dramatic increase in public awareness that large numbers of children are sexually abused by adults to whom they are related or with whom they have an ongoing relationship, it remains extremely difficult for most of us to fully grasp how it is possible for an adult to have sex with a child, what the nature and etiology of sexual use of a child by an older person is, and how an informed society should respond to adults who commit sexual acts against children.
It is hardly news that people don't like to receive information that is threatening or anxiety-producing. The popular saying "Shoot the messenger" gives expression to human tendency to resent those who tell us things that we don't want to hear. Freudian scholar and author Jeffrey Masson, in his 1985 book The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, suggests that the father of modern psychotherapy developed the theory that children secretly fantasized sexual contact with adults because of social reactions to his initial report of a link between adult mental illness and reports of childhood sexual abuse in eighteen of his patients.
As in Freud's time, many of the concepts used by mental health professionals to understand and treat sexual offenders appear better suited to making the professionals feel less anxious and uncomfortable about what the offenders have done than to coming to grips with the nature of sexual abuse of children. The essential dynamics of many aspects of contemporary legal and mental health practices are really efforts to deal with the difficult task of understanding that members of our families, churches, schools, and communities regularly abuse children.
Estimates of the occurrence of sexual abuse during childhood in the general population vary quite
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