THE OFFENCE BEHAVIOR: DEGREE OF PRECAUTION SHOWN BY THE OFFENDER
As has been pointed out, some men commit certain sex offenses with a fair degree of regularity without ever being caught or convicted. Thus the question arises: What circumstances explain why the illegal sexual behavior of the men in the present sample was reported and resulted in arrest and conviction? Was clear lack of precaution, if evident, more characteristic of certain types of offenses than of others? While some aspects of this problem were discussed in the sections on incest offenders and heterosexual and homosexual offenders vs. adults, it merits a fuller analysis.
Certain types of sex offenses are by their very nature more likely to be reported to the authorities than others. Offenses involving aggression clearly fall in this vulnerable category. Similarly, but for different reasons, there are special risks associated with acts of pedophilia. Younger children have little sense of guilt and are poor secret-keepers. Thus any male sexually accosting a child, male or female, is running a strong risk that the event will be described to others and eventually reach the ears of a concerned adult who will lodge a complaint. Yet there are pedophiles who have been known to operate for long periods of time, who made dozens of sex contacts with young children, and who have never been reported to or apprehended by the authorities. The careful choice of the social milieu in which to operate, the avoidance of force, and the skill and judgment of the pedophile in selecting a compliant child probably are important factors in such cases. Although the general circumstances surrounding pedophilic offenses are carefully chosen, the inevitably vulnerable link in the chain of events-secrecy on the part of the child—is largely an unpredictable element in the picture. The high degree to which the arrest of the offender in offenses involving children and minors was dependent on whether or not the object kept silent is shown in Figure 27.
In the four major offense categories involving children and minors the factor of dependence on the secrecy of the young person was most strongly shown in the offenses vs. children. The percentages ranged from 78 per cent up to 100 and were all higher by approximately ten or more percentage points than in the comparable offenses vs. minors. In the great majority of these categories there were no means by which the offense could have become known unless the child or minor reported the event to someone. What usually happened was that the youngster described it to a sibling or more often a schoolmate, who in turn divulged it to an adult, who then made the official complaint. As will be shown later, few minors and still fewer children made direct reports to the authorities. The fact that the offenses vs. children reflect a higher degree of exclusive dependence on the secrecy of the child indicates that the circumstances probably were more carefully chosen. The element of privacy was of paramount importance. The extreme is seen in the cases of incest vs. children, in which the risk of detection or observation by outside sources was reduced to practically nil.
In offenses vs. adults certain other factors enter into an evaluation of the risk taken by the offender: the likelihood that the case will be reported to the authorities and the chances that the person who committed the offense can be located and identified. Such elements as the time of the day, the conspicuousness of the action, the presence or absence of witnesses, the degree of offensiveness of the act, whether the offender was known to the person who was approached, as well as whether he was on probation or parole and hence already known to the police—all these can be taken into consideration.
One purpose in making these estimates of the degree of precaution shown at the time of the offense is to examine the evidence for the “flight into custody” motif often advanced in the psychiatric, and more often psychoanalytic, interpretations of the relationship of crime and guilt. This theory suggests that the lawbreaker’s sense of guilt often leads him to behave in such a way that his arrest and conviction are almost inevitable. Presumably by creating an opportunity to expiate his offense he gains relief from the pressures of his intolerably heavy guilt. This mechanism is supposed to take place largely at an unconscious level. Sex offenses with their strongly moral overtones appear to present a particularly appropriate framework for examining this theory of foolhardy risks. If the hypothesis is sound, one might well assume that the types of sex offenses that are under the most disapprobation socially would tend to produce in the offender the strongest sense of guilt and hence best illustrate the phenomenon. When we examine the data, however, this does not particularly seem to be so. According to the table, aggression offenses vs. adults and exhibition show the greatest degree of high risk-taking, while a moderate risk with possible apprehension was strongly evidenced in peeping, and moderately in incest and homosexual offenses vs. adults. Most unlikely to be apprehended were the offenders involved in the heterosexual offenses vs. adult women. Incest and homosexual offenses show about a quarter of the cases as unlikely to be detected. While the theory of “flight into custody” might apply in individual cases, it does not seem that the data here bear it out in general. Peeping, a minor offense, is high in risk-taking, as is exhibition. Incest with daughters sixteen and over, andhomosexual offenses with adult males are both highly taboo but do not reveal comparatively high levels of foolhardy risks. There is, of course, the possibility that the present materials are not complete enough for this type of analysis, since all the current offenses were in fact detected.
Alternative explanations of high risk-taking cannot be overlooked, such as an inability to judge the risks because of low intelligence, projection by the male of his own feelings of sexual arousal to the female, unforeseen unlucky “breaks,” and lack of judgment resulting from a narrowing of perceptions because of emotional stress. The last point would be particularly applicable in sex offenses.
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