HETEROSEXUAL AGGRESSORS VS. ADULTS: THIRDVARIETY OF OFFENDERS

Mar
27
2009

HETEROSEXUAL AGGRESSORS VS. ADULTS: THIRDVARIETY OF OFFENDERS

The next commonest variety of aggressor, constituting perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of the aggressors vs. adults, might be termed the explosive variety. These are men whose prior lives offer no surface indications of what is to come. Sometimes they are average, law-abiding citizens, sometimes they are criminals, but their aggression appears suddenly and, at the time, inexplicably. As one would expect in situations where individuals snap under hidden emotional stresses, there are often psychotic elements in their behavior. The stereotype of this variety of aggressor is the mild, straight-A high school student who suddenly rapes and kills. For total unexpectedness, one of our cases is equally dramatic. A small, physically delicate, devoutly religious eighteen-year-old had been reared by his mother, who seems to have dominated him. While heterosexually oriented, he never developed sociosexually with girls of his own age; instead, on rare occasions he engaged female children in what would be called childhood sex play had he been preadolescent rather than fifteen or older. He was never able to achieve coitus, but usually ejaculated when the children struggled or when his penis touched their genital area. This behavior resulted in his being sent to a juvenile institution for about a year. On his return home and only a few days after his eighteenth birthday, during his mother’s absence he asked a neighbor woman to come into the kitchen and light the oven for him. When she entered he struck her on the head with a hammer, hoping to knock her unconscious so that he could have coitus. She was not rendered unconscious by the blow and succeeded in escaping.

While the above case is unusual in that the subject was so sociosexually underdeveloped, in the following case the man’s sexual history was normal. He was a hard-working, semiskilled laborer described by the prison psychologist as having “many fine traits, . . . deep respect for authority, family pride, sense of personal responsibility, a knowledge of right and wrong and a willingness to abide by the same, . . . etc.” His dossier contained numerous and various letters attesting to his good character and respectability. The only negative note was his wife’s statement that he tended to worry excessively and became emotionally upset easily. This statement is biased by the fact that the behavior of the wife and her relatives directly led to the sex offense. This conservative and respectable man had made the error of marrying a girl from a very low socioeconomic stratum who brought with her to marriage not only an unborn child, but a number of shiftless, drunken, parasitic relatives. The resultant bitter arguments essentially destroyed the marriage, and the man decided to make the best of a bad situation by having extramarital coitus with some of his promiscuous female in-laws. He chose his mother-in-law, having interpreted her behavior toward him as provocative; the psychologists say that this choice also was unconsciously motivated by a desire for revenge against his wife and all her relatives. In any case, coitus occurred and the woman was at least partly forced.

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