ATLANTA — The general perception is that society is at the mercy of sexual abusers and molesters, with little recourse besides knowing where they live.
But that view is not shared by experts and professionals in the field.
Prevention probably is possible, and treatment—which can break the cycle of the abused becoming abusers—can be effective, a group of those experts said at a meeting of the National Adolescent Perpetration Network. Actually, many who commit acts of child molestation want help and will seek it out, said Deborah Donovan-Rice, director of public policy for the Stop It Now! campaign.
Illustrating her contention, she said her group's Minnesota program had sponsored a single billboard in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The billboard had a simple design: It showed a man, with one hand on his forehead, gesturing anguish, and the other raised as if to ward something off. It asked: “Having sexual thoughts of children?”
Then, the billboard gave the number of the confidential helpline.
The billboard doubled the number of calls from Minnesota that the helpline had been receiving each month, Ms. Donovan-Rice said. It was not a slew of calls, but somewhere around 18. Even so, that is a big number for sexual abuse, she added.
“It's very exciting to think that the people who are having sexualized thoughts about children would call before they acted on those thoughts,” she said.
In addition, the organization has been conducting focus groups with people convicted of child sexual abuse crimes. It has found that many members of those groups state that they would have wanted help but did not know where to turn. Those individuals also often report that they had previously sought help for psychiatric problems, such as depression, meaning they were accessible to mental health professionals and thereby could have potentially been identified, Ms. Donovan-Rice said.
In an interview, Ms. Donovan-Rice said that Vermont was one of the first states in the country to establish a Stop It Now! chapter and helpline. The Vermont group also found that passage of the federal Megan's Law, which requires states to provide public information on where known sex offenders reside, had a noticeably chilling effect on calls to the helpline.
Prevention requires being able to identify the persons likely to commit sexual abuse, to target them with intervention. And a new, very large survey suggests there may be a way to do that, although with a fairly narrow window of opportunity, Nora Harlow, a researcher with the Child Molestation Research and Prevention Institute in Atlanta, said in another presentation at the meeting.
Ms. Harlow's institute has a database of sexual-interest screening test results from 13,000 adult males who admitted child sexual abuse, and 10,000 adolescents who also took the test for a variety of reasons.
The test, designed by Ms. Harlow's husband and partner in the institute, Dr. Gene Abel, is administered at more than 500 sites across the country and Canada, and it is used by law enforcement personnel, lawyers, counselors, and others. And it is set up so that all test results come back to a confidential database. A review of the results of the adult tests suggests that 84% of child victims of sexual abuse are abused by people who meet criteria for the DSM-IV diagnosis of pedophilia, Ms. Harlow said.
While that may seem obvious, it is an observation that could have tremendous implications, said Ms. Harlow, who noted that the diagnosis does not require that the individual has actually touched a child.
“This is huge,” she said. “It is very important for public health, because it is such a big cause. There are a zillion causes of lung cancer, but when we found smoking it changed our entire society.”
Further, the data show that 47% of the men reported having been abused themselves as children, a figure consistent with other research.
The data from the adolescents' tests show that among those who admitted sexually abusing another child (5,682 individuals) and who had been abused themselves, the average age of their own abuse was 7 years and the average age of their first abuse of someone else was 11 years, she noted.
Among the sexually abused adolescent males who had taken the test, 72% had sexually abused younger children, as had 54% of sexually abused adolescent females. Though those who are younger that 16 years cannot receive the diagnosis of pedophilia, the screening test found that about 40% of the adolescent abusers had pedophilia-like interest or fantasies about younger children.