by John Douglas
The subject may be in a relationship with a woman but it will be one of extremes: the woman will be either weak and childlike or dominating and much stronger than he is. Although most girlfriends or wives don’t want to discuss their intimate lives, if you could interview them confidentially, they might admit that their husband or lover has some kind of sexual problem. He is also a collector of child pornography, possibly including photos he’s taken himself. Like the guy I pointed out to Pam at the girls’ dance recital, they may be aroused by photos of children who are not undressed or posed in specifically sexual ways. He may take his camera to the park and shoot roll after roll of film, fantasizing about the children once the pictures are developed. Keep in mind that a pedophile can be turned on by the children’s section of the Macy’s catalogue the same way most normal men enjoy perusing Victoria’s Secret.
Although many pedophiles successfully blend into the social fabric—at least for a while—some aspects of their lifestyle do tend to set off warning buzzers. People who seem excessively interested in our children make us distrustful. An adult who hangs around in arcades, malls, and parks, who seems to have no friends his own age appears out of place. A pedophile knows his sexual tendencies must remain secret so it is hard for him to connect with other adults in any meaningful social way. Often, adult friends are also pedophiles since they offer validation and reassurance.
This type of subject generally uses idealized language, referring to children as innocent, pure, and clean, for example. He may also talk (or write) about children as “objects, projects, or possessions.” Ken Lanning cites excerpts from letters such as, “This kid has low mileage,” or “I’ve been working on this project for six months.”
They will also be very specific in their choice of young friends, though appearance will be more important than actuality; in other words, if a man has a preference for tenyear-old girls, a fourteen-year-old who looks and acts ten is preferable to a ten-year-old who looks fourteen.
Keep in mind that any one of these elements does not make your neighbor a child molester. Taken all together, though, they may indicate some danger. As with any other situation we face as parents, we need to exercise common sense and trust our instincts. The descriptions can help us recognize potential dangers, but they’re no substitute for careful, attentive parenting, child safety training, and, in some cases, just plain luck.
There are some cases where the parents cannot protect the child, or at least one parent can’t because he is the problem. As hard as it is for the rest of us to imagine, many victims are abused by members of their own family, the same people most children turn to for guidance, love, and support. Incestuous child molesters can fit any of the profiles discussed earlier, from repressed to seduction types. And they can be ruthless and calculating in their pursuit of victims: an introverted pedophile may marry and have sex with his wife solely to produce a child he can molest (which is risky for him because he has no guarantee that the child will be of his preferred gender); a seduction-type molester may marry or befriend women who have children the right sex and age, offering to be a father figure for the children. When the children in the family grow too old to appeal to him any longer, he’ll move on to another family situation and start again. These subjects will only have sex with the wife or girlfriend when absolutely necessary, and then must fantasize about children or may ask the woman to dress as a child or talk baby talk.
And it’s not only fathers who do this. Peter Banks, director of outreach at the NCMEC, who spent years on the police force in Washington, D.C., investigating child abuse cases, tells of a heartbreaking case where two police sergeants he met—married to each other—were having trouble with their oldest son. It started with bad grades and generally disrespectful behavior, escalating into petty crimes like shoplifting and finally culminated in a crime spree where the teenager went down to Georgia, stole a car, and got caught robbing a convenience store. As he was being led away, cuffed, his mother asked him if there was anything they could do to make sure his younger brother didn’t grow up like him.
“Yeah,” the boy replied. “Keep him away from Grandpa.” The woman’s father had been living with the family and apparently molesting her oldest son for years, right under their roof. She effectively lost her son and her father the same day.
Why wouldn’t this boy tell his parents the awful truth sooner? Victims of incest have so much to lose by reporting their abuse. If you think about it, our society punishes these young victims in so many inadvertent ways. In addition to the embarrassment, fear, and humiliation, think about what happens to a child who reports one of his family members. In the best-case scenario, where action is taken immediately to protect the child, the molester isn’t removed from his environment, the victim is. The child loses his house, his siblings, his friends, his school, his dog—everything. In the worst case, the person he turns to for help is either unable or unwilling to help, reinforcing to that kid that he’s not worth the time or trouble to help, psychologically traumatizing the child further by sending the message that the abuser’s threats were accurate, and what would happen if he told anyone is true.
It’s also very difficult for a child abused by a nonfamily member to report the situation. In the beginning, a victim won’t tell anyone because he’s flattered by the attention and doesn’t know what’s coming. Later, that molester is just as expert at keeping the child silent as he was at the initial seduction. With all types of molesters, the child victim may be afraid that he or his family members will be hurt physically by his tormentor.
Other emotions also come into play—embarrassment, confusion. The molester may emotionally blackmail the child. And since many are expert at making sure they always have access to children (as a Little League coach or just the “nice guy” who always takes the neighborhood kids camping or on other outings), they can even use group dynamics to keep their victims in line, using competition or peer pressure to keep recruiting new kids and rotating older ones out without being discovered.
The adult molester is more experienced, older, more resourceful, dangerous, and far more manipulative than a child is. The only real protection your child has is the security and self-confidence you give him and continually reinforce.
Ken Lanning describes the predictable post-accusation stages child molesters go through when faced with the risk of a criminal investigation or prosecution. Not surprisingly, the initial reaction is total denial. He may act surprised, shocked, even indignant upon hearing of the claim against him. He may try to explain the action as something the child misunderstood: “Is it a crime to hug a child?” Depending on his social support structure, he may have family, neighbors, or co-workers to back him up and attest to his character.
If there is cold evidence that makes it impossible for him to deny the charges, he may try to minimize them: maybe he touched one child, or it only happened once, or he fondled the child but never for sexual gratification. Often the molester knows the laws and would rather admit to a lesser offense. In these cases, sometimes victims may inadvertently help the offender because of their embarrassment. Adolescent boys, for example, may deny that sexual acts took place even if investigators have found photos proving that they did. Or victims may play down how many times “it” happened.
Another common offender reaction is justification: the molester may claim that he gives the child more attention than the parents do, so it makes more sense for him to teach the child about sex, or maybe he’s been under a lot of stress and/or drinking too much. These guys are constantly trying to justify their urges and actions to themselves—they don’t want to believe they’re sexually deviant criminals. The most common justification usually blames the victim in some way: the victim seduced him and he didn’t know how old she was, or the victim is really a child prostitute. Even if that were so, a crime has still been committed since consent is completely irrelevant when sexual activity involves a child.
Along with the justifications come fabrications, and t
he cleverer the molester, the more intriguing the lie. There was one pedophile who said some children made a sex video and when he found out about it, he kept it to show to their parents. Less creative but equally desperate molesters may suddenly develop mental illness, or play the sympathy line, hoping that remorse and strong ties to the community will make people feel sorry for a troubled but basically good guy. In a sick, backward way, they will try to defend themselves with their contributions to their community, like volunteer work with kids, which only exist to provide access to children.
There is also always the possibility that the molester will try to cop a plea to a lesser crime to avoid public trial. One advantage is that the young victim won’t have to suffer the trauma of testifying in court, but it can be confusing in cases where the offender pleads “guilty but not guilty.” He could plead guilty without admitting that he committed a crime, or he could plead not guilty by reason of insanity. In the end, the public may never know what the molester did and the child may wonder why his tormentor isn’t considered guilty by the law.
Finally, like a lot of criminals who lose control of their lives once they’re found out, any child molester who’s been arrested is a high suicide risk. And since a lot of them come from middle-class backgrounds with no history of previous arrests, if a suicide occurs, it’s possible that the police will be blamed for the death—and, again, the child victim or victims will be left confused.
Like the boy abused by his grandfather who got in trouble with the law, many child molesters were themselves victims of some form of abuse as children. While this doesn’t excuse their behavior, it illustrates the cycle of victim/victimization we see over and over again. As Peter Banks puts it, walk into a police department and look at the names of children in the abuse/exploitation files. Then look in the files of juvenile delinquents. Finally, look in the files on prostitution and violent crimes. You’ll find many of the same names in all three. Although not every abused child ends up in the later files, virtually everyone who does get there started out as an abused child. They may be future victimizers (of children and/or adults) or what we call “professional victims”—women who keep getting involved with abusive men, or turn to prostitution at a young age, for example. As a society, we have to be prepared to reap what we sow. If we see something that’s not quite right about a child’s living arrangements and we don’t try to deal with it today, we’re running the risk that we’ll have to deal with it down the road.
Richard Allen Davis, the man convicted of kidnapping and murdering twelve-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma, California, in October 1993, claimed his bad childhood made him what he is. In closing arguments during the penalty phase of his trial, the defense portrayed the defendant’s mother as an emotionally distant woman who once held her son’s hand over a flame and virtually abandoned the boy after divorcing his father. In a desperate but unsuccessful bid to avoid the death penalty, the defense also claimed his father was abusive, once severely injuring his son’s jaw with a punch.
In contrast to Davis’s background, what’s particularly heartbreaking about Polly’s case is that her parents lost their child from an environment they’d tried to make the safest of all safe havens—her own home. For an abductor, this is a very high-risk crime.
Late one night, Davis quietly broke into Polly’s mother’s house in Petaluma and abducted the girl at knifepoint in front of two of her friends who were there for a slumber party. At the time, Polly’s mother and half-sister were asleep in nearby bedrooms. The abduction was considered so highrisk for the offender that just about everybody working the early investigation suspected it had to be an inside job: the offender had to be someone who had access to the house. Early on, police speculated that Polly’s father, divorced from her mother and living elsewhere, may have somehow been involved. The ordinarily sleepy northern California community grew even more shocked and terrified as it became apparent to them and to investigators that he had nothing to do with the crime—a stranger had invaded their home.
Ironically, in the first few hours as investigators were looking into Polly’s father as a possible suspect, Davis had a run-in with sheriff’s deputies near Santa Rosa, just twenty-five miles north of Petaluma. Investigating a trespassing call, they found Davis trying to get his white Ford Pinto out of a ditch. They questioned him, searched his car, and let him go, unaware of the description of a wanted man put out by the Petaluma police and unaware that Davis had temporarily hidden the girl—still alive—nearby. Davis returned to his victim, strangled her, and left her body in a shallow grave alongside a freeway.
It was another, more successful encounter between Davis and police that eventually led to resolution for the Klaas family. Davis was arrested for drunk driving and police matched his palm print to one left by Polly’s abductor. Along with his confession, he provided a description of where he left her body. Later, in the trial, the defense claimed the abduction and murder came as the result of a botched burglary attempt and denied that he tried to assault Polly sexually. Prosecutors, however, presented witnesses who placed him in her neighborhood just days before the abduction, indicating he’d stalked her, which fit with an earlier pattern of assaults against women. In the end, the jury didn’t buy his claims.
Clearly, parents can’t be expected to stand as armed guards over their children as they sleep. In this case, it was the justice system that failed to protect the child. At the time of the abduction and murder, Davis was on parole, having served half of a sixteen-year sentence for an earlier kidnapping. His adult life had largely been spent in prison for one crime after another and, like a lot of offenders, Davis had been growing more and more violent with each crime. Instead of being rehabilitated, after release from prison his crimes escalated. Davis’s record included convictions for assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, and robbery. The prosecution in the Klaas case introduced testimony of some of his earlier victims, still suffering from the terror of their attacks, to reinforce that this horrible crime was just one piece of a larger, dangerous pattern of behavior. In closing arguments, prosecutor Greg Jacobs called the abduction and murder “a grievous affront to humanity” and apparently the voting public of California agreed. Polly’s case is considered largely responsible for the state’s passage of one of the nation’s toughest versions of a “three strikes” law, mandating life sentences for repeat offenders.
In addition to a difficult childhood, Davis’s defense team stressed his troubles with alcohol and substance abuse. I can sympathize with a person truly making an effort to overcome these problems and do something positive with his life, but Davis made a conscious choice when he committed his crimes. Fortunately, in Polly’s case, the jury held him accountable. Although his defense team tried to convince jurors that his life should be spared because Davis was remorseful, their client brazenly indicated otherwise, making an obscene gesture for media cameras when he heard the guilty verdict. For his conviction of first-degree murder with special circumstances of kidnapping, burglary, robbery, and attempted lewd act with a child, the jury recommended a sentence of death by lethal injection.
The abduction and murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman on January 13, 1996, in Arlington, Texas, snatched off her bicycle on the side of a road with witnesses nearby, wasn’t quite so daring, but also high-risk nonetheless. In that case, if the perpetrator had been a little more skillful and quicker on his feet, he would have been able to allay the concerns of witnesses who heard the girl’s screams by throwing the bicycle in the back of his truck and saying something to the effect of, “All right, that’s it, young lady! I’m taking you home.” My point here is that if we see conflict in a public place between an adult and a child, we can’t necessarily assume that adult is a parent disciplining his or her son or daughter for a tantrum or other misbehavior.
So why is it that some predators of children are content and able to blend into a community, molest the kids in their neighborhood, and never abduct—let alone kill—any children, while ot
hers like Davis steal them away at knifepoint? Keeping in mind that every offender has individual needs and impulses driving him, Ken Lanning and Dr. Ann Burgess of the University of Pennsylvania, who collaborated with us on our extended serial killer study back in the 1970s and 1980s, describe some of the differences between molesters who do and molesters who don’t abduct children as part of their criminal activity. According to their analysis and research, most abductors are social misfits who are less likely to have had a previous relationship with the child they abduct, in part because they have less contact with children than molesters who don’t abduct. With poorly developed social skills, abductors can’t get easy access to children like the seducers can. Their lack of social competence also makes it harder for them to develop relationships with women, even as a cover, so they’re also usually unmarried. Since they can’t manipulate or lure a child away, they often carry weapons which are used more to help them intimidate and control their victims than to physically harm them. And, like other types of offenders, abductors usually showed signs of trouble as a child.
Ken Lanning describes four phases of abduction for the offender: buildup; abduction; post-abduction; and recovery/ release. In the buildup, the subject engages in fantasy that creates some need for sexual activity, although it may not start out child-oriented. He validates and rationalizes his fantasy by talking to others who share or encourage it or by looking at pornographic material that fuels it. There could be a precipitating stressor that prompts the subject to act on his fantasies, and then either an opportunity presents itself or the offender plans and creates one. When the subject is ready to carry out the abduction, victim selection becomes key.
Choosing a complete stranger that he can’t be linked to is critical to his odds of not getting caught. Ken calls “thought-driven” offenders the ones who plan an MO and stick to it, weighing risks and using opportunities to their advantage, selecting any victim who fits a broad profile. Planning ahead and exercising discipline in victim selection, if he can resist impulsive or sloppy mistakes, gives the abductor a much better chance of getting away clean.