Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior

by Robert I. Simon

  Mike’s rape was typical of the compensatory rapist, an acting out of his lifelong fantasy of dominance over women as a means of compensating for his personal limitations and inadequacies. His grandiose fantasy of himself as a compelling sexual object led him to misinterpret the victim’s startled reaction to him as sexual arousal. His passivedependent sexual wishes toward his father and his feminine sexual identification with his mother were projected onto the victim, whom he saw as enjoying his sexual assault. In this acting-out, he psychologically compensated for feelings of fear, sexual doubts, loneliness, abandonment, passive homosexual desires, and his general life failures. Despite knowing that he assaulted and raped the victim, he was so distanced from reality by his fantasy that he gave the victim his phone number, enabling him to be identified and arrested.

  The Exploitative Rapist

  The exploitative rapist’s sexual behavior takes the form of an impulsive, predatory act. It has far less psychological meaning to the offender and is less a part of his fantasy life than for the compensatory rapist. Exploitative rape is driven by situation and opportunity, rather than by conscious fantasy. The rapist, a man on the prowl for someone to exploit, intends to force the victim to submit. He is not concerned with the arousal or welfare of the victim, or with forming a relationship with her. He may not be sexually aroused as the incident begins, but the situation itself may trigger his arousal. Low-impulse exploiters display sexual behavior in response to a threatened macho self-image. High-impulse exploiters are usually antisocial personalities—psychopaths.

  The following example depicts a high-impulse exploitative rapist:

  Joe, a 34-year-old engineer, regularly patronizes a bar, where he frequently meets and sexually exploits women. At age 24, he was dishonorably discharged from the army with a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. Joe has had numerous scrapes with the law, especially for repeatedly writing bad checks. At the bar, Joe meets Lisa, a 20-year-old secretary. In talking with her, he discovers that she has an alcohol problem. Lisa confides that she loses her memory of events when she drinks. Joe reassures her and orders another round of drinks. Eventually, they go to his apartment. Joe presses some more drinks on Lisa. When he attempts to have sex with her, she refuses. Joe grabs a baseball bat and threatens to kill her if she does not submit. Paralyzed with fear, she submits. Joe forcibly performs sexual intercourse. Eventually, Lisa falls asleep. The next morning, she awakens on the couch with no memory of the rape. Joe tells her they had a wonderful time together, listening to music, before she fell asleep.

  The Sadistic Rapist

  Sexual sadism was named after the Marquis de Sade, who wrote vividly about sexual acts of domination, degradation, and violence. The sexual sadist becomes sexually excited in response to another person’s suffering. All rapists cause their victims to suffer, but only sexual sadists intentionally inflict psychological and physical suffering to enhance their own sexual arousal. During their sexual assaults, all too often they perform acts of extreme cruelty.

  For rapists who employ excessive aggression, the arousing sexual aspect of the assault is intimately linked to hurting or humiliating the victim. Such aggressive behavior is usually poorly controlled, reaching peaks of brutality and violence before subsiding. The offender’s aggressive behavior goes far beyond what might be necessary to obtain the victim’s compliance for a sexual purpose. For instance, the sadistic rapist is verbally abusive, sometimes shouting obscenities at the victim. Compliant behavior by the victim may arouse more aggression from the attacker or may provoke cold, calculating, viciously demeaning behavior as a means of expressing his power and control.

  The sexually sadistic rapist aims at abusing, hurting, humiliating, or killing the victim through the use of a large variety of implements and behaviors: knives, sticks, cigarettes, bottles, restraints, blindfolds, pinches, spankings, paddlings, whippings, beatings, electrical shocks, strangulation, mutilation, and an almost infinite variety of other tortures. If the sadistic behavior is less severe, the aggression may take the form of inserting foreign objects into the vagina and other practices that may be strange but do not cause substantial physical injury. The sadist’s violence is usually directed at body parts having sexual significance: the breasts, buttocks, mouth, anus, and genitalia.

  The following example represents a sadistic rapist:

  At a party, Sam, a 26-year-old, straight-A graduate student in mathematics, meets an undergraduate woman. During the party he spikes her drink with a tranquilizing drug, then escorts her out of the party and to his apartment. Although she is partially awake, she is unable to resist his advances. He becomes sexually aroused. He has prepared a “rape kit,” for this attack has been carefully planned. He ties her arms and legs to the four points of the bed, and shaves her vaginal hair. Then, hooking up to her genitals an electrical device that he has designed for such an occasion, he gives her electrical shocks until her screams bring someone knocking on his outer door. He sends the knocker away. He inserts a soda bottle into the victim’s vagina and anus. With a pocket knife, he carves Xs and Os into her abdomen, and with a cigarette he burns her breasts. When she screams, he punches her in the mouth, drawing blood. “Blood turns me on!” he shouts, “Blood turns me on!” He becomes sexually excited and, in a frenzy, performs vaginal and anal intercourse, and then forces her to perform oral sex. Later, Sam falls asleep. His victim is able to escape and to call the police.

  Sam is the third of four sons born to a family in which the parents divorced when he was 3 years old. Both parents physically abused him. His father locked him in a closet for hours. Although he kicked and screamed, these actions brought no response from his parents. His mother was seductive and sexually abusive, taking baths with him and masturbating him. When he became sexually excited, she would laugh at him. He found it difficult to get along with his brothers or with other children and frequently got into fights. He did well in school but had few friends. He began to peep on his female neighbors and make obscene phone calls. As an adolescent, he was arrested for setting fires and for cruelty to animals. On one occasion he was apprehended with blood all over his hands and clothes, which was discovered to have come from a cat whose abdomen he had slit open before hanging it in a tree. He had also tortured other animals with a cattle prod, then killed them. During these actions, he masturbated.

  Sam’s frequent bed-wetting caused him to be the butt of his brothers’ jokes. His mother’s bathing of him continued until he was 14. During these baths, she would wash his private parts and tell him sexual jokes. On several social and family occasions during his adolescence, she humiliated him by revealing the fact that she still bathed him.

  Sam developed fantasies of sexually dominating and hurting women, particularly by using knives and electric shocks. He imagined using naked women as dart boards, carving out board games on their abdomens. Baroque in detail, these fantasies were accompanied by masturbation. He spent a great deal of time each day intensely elaborating his sadistic fantasies.

  In college, Sam had a few dates but quickly acquired the reputation of being an “animal” because he slapped and punched his dates if they refused his sexual advances. He once stuffed a date into the trunk of his car and, after she became hysterical, sexually forced himself on her.

  In such ways, Sam redirected the hatred he felt toward his mother against other women. In his childhood years, his mother forced him to experience inappropriate sexual stimulation, coupled with humiliation. The sexual and aggressive overstimulation that Sam experienced found its first outwardly harmful expression in wetting his bed, setting fires, and torturing animals. This triad of behaviors has been associated with the violent behaviors of some individuals in later life. Hostility, hatred, and sexual pleasure continued to be combined in his mind and coalesced into compelling fantasies. Later, by acting out his detailed, sexually aggressive fantasies, he found sexual excitement in physically hurting women.

  The Displaced-Anger Rapist

  Sam wa
s a sexually sadistic rapist, and although he felt much hatred, he was not considered a displaced-anger rapist. The distinction is an important one. For the displaced-anger rapist, sexual behavior is an expression of anger and rage. The victim is the displaced object for the rapist’s aggression. Usually, the rapist’s anger originates in early relationships that were abusive and depriving. There is no erotic aspect to his aggressive acts because the pervasive feelings he has are of contempt and hate. His abuse is more likely to be verbal rather than physical. His hatred of women, however, may be expressed through actions that run the gamut from verbal abuse to murder. Although sexual feelings or fantasies may trigger the aggressive behavior, the sexual assault itself is frequently devoid of sexual meaning. A sexual attack on a victim may occur directly on the heels of a real or perceived insult to him, or a rejection of him by a female figure that is significant in his life.

  Whereas sexual sadists direct their attacks at sexual parts of the body, the anger rapist’s violence is not so ritually fixated or directed, as in the following example:

  Tom is a 27-year-old store manager. His marriage of 3 years has been extremely stormy from the beginning. He was physically abused as a child by his alcoholic mother. He had numerous hospitalizations for traumatic head injuries from the abuse. Occasionally, he was knocked unconscious. As an adolescent, he was frequently involved in fights. His coworkers at the store were afraid of his temper.

  On this particular day, Tom comes home early from work to find his wife in bed with a neighbor. Tom threatens to kill them both and storms out of the house. He then breaks into the home of a 78-yearold woman a few houses down the street and rapes her. Tom is immediately apprehended.

  Everyone’s Ultimate Nightmare

  Rape has devastating physical and psychological consequences for its victims. Short of homicide, rape is the ultimate violation. It is an invasion of a person’s innermost, private space. It is not only an orifice that has been invaded, it is the self. The psychological damage that follows this loss of autonomy and control may be severe and permanent. Some rapists use the blitz attack, first stunning and overpowering their victims, then forcing themselves on them, causing immediate bodily injury. Other rapists use a surprise attack, for example, waking a woman who was previously sleeping. The most insidious rape approach is a con, wherein a man passes himself off as a policeman or repairman to place himself in a position to rape the woman. Each of these approaches produces a different pattern of psychological damage in the victim.

  As many as 80% of rape victims develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTS D). It is estimated that 1.5 million adult female rape victims suffer from PTS D. Although the disorder severely affects the victim, many experts insist that it is a normal response to a life-threatening event. For the victim, terrifying flashbacks and nightmares of the rape are common, and may persist for a long period. If the rape includes physical injury, the victim’s stress disorder may be magnified. If the victim has previously suffered from psychological disorders, he or she will be rendered even more vulnerable to the chronic, emotional consequences of rape trauma.

  A few years ago, I evaluated a 22-year-old college senior who had been viciously attacked and raped in her dorm room. Although she had PTSD symptoms, they were surprisingly mild, given the severity of the multiple knife slashes she had received that almost killed her. On further inquiry, I discovered that the brutality of the attack upon her was softened by a profound religious experience she had as she lay on the floor bleeding and in shock. She saw a beautiful white light more intense than anything she had seen before. As she groped toward the light, she experienced overpowering feelings of peace and love. She no longer felt the terrible pain. After being rescued and recovering from her physical injuries, she came to look upon the rape as providing her with a religious experience few other human beings have had: an intimate, life-transforming encounter with God, much like Moses had on Mount Sinai. She became profoundly religious.

  Some people want to combat rape by detailing ways in which the rape victim should deal with the attacker. As the profiles in the previous sections have revealed, rapists come in different psychological packages. Therefore, no one method of defense is adequate to the task. Rapists do not wear identifying labels that enable a potential victim to defend herself or himself properly. Resisting robbery is occasionally successful, but often it is not and ends in greater damage to the victim. People are advised not to fight a robber. Should they not fight a rapist? The choice should be the victim’s, based on his or her values and the exigencies of the situation. I believe that rape victims should have the option to submit, and that if they do, the law or society should not hold them as an accomplice in their own rape.

  Advice on how to deal with a rapist is unreliable because so much of what happens in a particular rape depends on where and when the attack occurs, the type of rapist committing the act, and the psychological and physical strengths and weaknesses of the victim. In some instances, confronting a rapist may burst his fantasy and bring the rape attempt to an end. In other instances, confrontation and resistance by the victim might trigger lethal violence from the rapist. Some rapists are sexually stimulated by resistance, others by expressions of fear. In one instance, a victim was dragged to the roof of her Manhattan apartment building for a rape attempt and was killed while trying to resist the armed intruder. Even women who are trained in martial arts may find that in certain situations it is too dangerous for them to resist a rapist.

  Elizabeth Xan Wilson, of Austin, Texas, submitted to a rapist and asked him to wear a condom. In court, she was subjected to a withering cross-examination for having made this request, which the defense insisted was evidence that what had taken place was not rape. Wilson angrily pointed out:

  Rape is the only felony that places the onus on the survivor. If an assailant held you at knife point, asked you for your wallet and you complied, there would be no question that a crime was committed. You would not be asked [in court] if you have consented, you would not be asked if you tried to resist. Only survivors of rape are asked these questions. This [practice] must stop now.

  On the stand, Wilson described her ordeal in words that speak volumes about the psychological damage that rape victims sustain:

  It is everyone’s ultimate nightmare to confront an unknown, knifewielding assailant in their home. The terror is indescribable and, unfortunately, never-ending. I am not the same person I was.

  How was she different after the rape? She described what many rape victims experience:

  I no longer trust my neighbors or strangers. I have many sleepless nights, bolting upright from the slightest noise, especially when my dog barks. I see men that resemble [the rapist] and I am filled with terror. I awaken many nights at 3 A.M., the hour that my rape began.

  She described her self-image, which had been deeply despoiled, as follows:

  I have felt tainted, violated, filthy, and used. I fear that I will never have a healthy relationship with a man if he knows that I have been raped. Who wants damaged goods? This is how I feel, and I don’t know when it will stop, or if it will. I hope it does…. [The rapist] took a part of my life, my soul, my body, and security that will never be replaced or healed.

  The law is a blunt instrument, and never more so than in regard to rape cases. If victims want to bring their rapists to justice, they must be prepared to withstand the rigors of an adversarial legal system. They will need a lot of cooperation from medical examiners, police, prosecutors, and grand juries. They will require validation and support from family and friends. And they must have the psychological staying power and the determination to see the case through.

  As Ms. Wilson so heartfully articulated, there are many long-term consequences of rape. These include:

  • Mistrust and avoidance of men or a hesitation to form relationships

  • A variety of sexual problems, which are frequently manifested as sexual disturbances and marital conflicts

  • Persistent phobia
s

  • Emotional distress, brought on by events that trigger once more the original trauma

  • Heightened anxiety and avoidance of gynecological examinations and procedures

  • Suicide or suicide attempts, based on self-blame, guilt, and depression

  The emergence of rape crisis centers in the 1970s has been instrumental in the early treatment of rape victims. These centers remain an essential source of the emotional support that enables victims to deal effectively with the psychological traumas caused by rape. Survivors of other experiences that have led to PTSD—such as being in the Vietnam War—have shown that peer support is essential for recovery from the disorder. The interventions of rape crisis centers show similar positive results flowing from their psychological support of rape victims.

  There are certain techniques that assist in rape prevention. A male voice or a dog barking in the background on one’s answering machine may deter rapists who are hunting for a victim. Contrary to the conventional thinking that designates one’s home as the safest place in the world, people must understand that one’s own home is an extraordinarily dangerous place in which to encounter a rapist. If a rapist has gained entry, and the inhabitant is alone, it is just the rapist, the inhabitant, and the four walls. When outside the home, individuals should be aware of situations in which they could be abducted. For example, women are advised not to get out of their cars if they are next to a van. When traveling alone and booking hotel rooms, one should be extra vigilant. One can ask for a room above the first floor, a room whose only door leads to an inside hall, a room that has a peephole and chain lock on the door. Once inside the hotel room, one should not answer the door unless the knocker can be definitely identified and is known or expected. Rape crisis prevention centers can provide readers with many other helpful tips.