UNITED STATES
The Daily News
By Dr. Joseph Langen
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Soon after I started work at a mental health center in the 1970s, probation referred a sexual abuse case to me. Not having experience with such cases, I asked in our staff meeting how I should go about treating such a person. No one knew. There had never been such a referral before.
With all that has since been written about the matter, it is hard to imagine our blissful ignorance back then. Now it is a rare day in which at least one person is not identified in the newspaper as a perpetrator of sexual abuse. Courts have been tough on them. Treatment programs have arisen in our communities as well as in prison. An ongoing scandal arose over priests and other clergy abusing children and adults and church officials hiding rather than addressing the problem.
So what accounts for such behavior? In my practice as a psychologist and through research for my novel, “The Pastor’s Inferno,” I discovered a number of motivations. One is anger about something in the abuser’s life driving abusers’ actions when not able to deal with his or her (usually his) anger directly. Another is power or control over the victim in abusers who tend to feel powerless and seek a victim to dominate. A third is sadism or sexual arousal from causing pain to others. These motivate abusers of adults, adolescents and children. About a third of convicted sex offenders were themselves abused as children, but two thirds were not.
At one time it was thought that all sex offenders were hopelessly addicted to a life of abusing more victims every chance they got. Research has suggested that treatment can lead to good results with child molesters and exhibitionists. However there do not seem to be any clear positive results from treatment of rapists.
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