Pedophilia

In New York City's Staten Island last week, a 57-year-old WPA house painter used a grasshopper in a bottle to lure a 4-year-old child to a shack in a marsh where he attacked her, strangled her, and then left her dead under a 50-lb. lump of brick and mortar. In The Bronx it was discovered that nine little girls aged 9 to 12 had been voluntarily submitting to indecencies at the hands of a 56-year-old plumber and a garage proprietor, 64. In Brooklyn, a 37-year-old ex-convict, only seven months out of Sing Sing where he had been sent for a sex crime, was sentenced to 25-years-to-life for taking two girls, 8 and 10, to a cinema and carnally molesting them. Indicted in Brooklyn was another ex-convict, 49, and twice convicted of statutory offences against children. He had strangled and assaulted an 8-year-old girl in the basement of her tenement home. In Chicago, a 17-year-old high-school junior was convicted of assaulting a girl of 9 in the basement of an apartment building. The girl recovered from 37 stabs from a rusty ice pick, a file and a pair of shears, was the State's principal witness. In Los Angeles, a 32-year-old watchman was on trial for raping and murdering three little girls aged 7, 8 and 9.

With these appalling examples of pedophilia, the lust of mature men for prepubescent children, spreading daily in the Press, it looked to laymen as if a national wave of sex crimes against children was in full surge. In the opinion of competent medical authorities, however, the number of cases of this kind of psychosis that reached print was purely accidental, although both the older Brooklyn convict and the Staten Island house painter declared that their crimes had been suggested by newspaper accounts of similar assaults earlier in the summer.

Accidental or not, however, the publicity given these cases had two immediate effects: It revealed that very little has been done in big cities to protect children from a very prevalent type of lunatic: and it spurred the police of New York and Chicago, at least, to get busy and do something about it. In Chicago State's Attorney Thomas Courtney hurriedly organized a central Sex Bureau to keep up-to-date records of all men accused of molesting children. Whenever a new case is reported, detectives are to study the records, social service workers observe social causes, psychiatrists give mental examinations, and physicians search for venereal and other diseases. At the end of an investigation the accused will go to an insane asylum if he is a proven psychopath, or be prosecuted for felony if he is not.

In Manhattan, Mayor LaGuardia, father by adoption of a young daughter, burst into a fine Italian rage, summoned his commissioners of police and correction and ordered one to set up a Sex Bureau like Chicago's, the other to do everything possible to keep all sex offenders locked up until their cases could receive a thorough psychological investigation. Roared the impetuous little mayor: "There are many legal loopholes through which these offenders can now escape full punishment for their crimes. But, God help the judge who turns one of these men loose if anything happens afterward."

To the citizens of the community, he gave this advice: Keep children away from lonely places; teach them to avoid strangers and never to accept any gifts from strangers; teach them to report all cases of molestation; and see that the man is arrested.

Why? Primitive men take no sexual interest in children. They think the very idea silly. Pedophilia, however, is not strictly a phenomenon of modern city life. It occurs on isolated farms and in hamlets. Nor is it a phenomenon of any particular age. Pubescent boys are victims, as well as senile men. It is not confined to a particular social level.

The problem is medical, not social. But psychiatrists, specialists who deal with abnormal behavior, generally shy from public utterances on so offensive a subject. Last week, however, two Manhattan psychiatrists, stirred by the local excitement, spoke up. Said Dr. Abraham A. Brill, Manhattan psychoanalyst: "Sex crimes are committed only by people of defective mentality. All mental defectives have either actual or potential sex abnormalities. A distinction must be made between a mental defective who has committed sex crimes (or at least has the potentiality for committing such crimes) and the man of normal mentality who at some particular time has some uncontrollable sex-craving. Thus, among these criminals we find two types: Those who have always craved children because of some emotional fixation in their own childhood; and those who have some uncontrolled impulse and happen upon children. The latter are not really pedophiliacs. Nor are those who seize upon children because of a feeling of inferiority."

Dr. David Henry Keller, writer for such tawdry-looking but sound little monthly magazines as Your Body and Sexology, and onetime (1919-28) clinical diector of the Central Louisiana State Hospital at Pineville, La. which contained many pedophiliacs, spoke from, direct observation. Said he: "It is a form of personality behavior which is incurable. . . . It is characterized by early development of cruelty, egotism, a disregard for the rights of others, a complete indifference to legal restraints, and a complete inability to recognize any personal responsibility for their illegal conduct. . . .

"Any psychiatrist who has seen a number of these cases can easily learn to recognize them. Obtaining an accurate 'history' is rather easy. The criminal of this type is grandiose and has little hesitance, once the ice is broken, to tell of his past career. He blames himself for nothing except his stupidity in being caught. There are three points in regard to such an individual that should never be forgotten:

"1) He develops his criminal tendencies early in childhood.

"2) He is certain to repeat the same crime over and over.

"3) By no known form of treatment can he be cured."

Prophylaxis. To prevent development of rapists, Dr. Keller proposed stern measures:

"1) A psychiatric study of every juvenile offender. Once the diagnosis of constitutional psychopathic state is made, treatment covering the entire lifetime of the criminal should be advised by the court. Since it is thought that under no line of treatment will recovery take place, then segregation is the only means of protecting society.

"2) Simplification of the criminal codes which will permit more rapid trial, no release on bail, no parole, no suspended sentences, and no segregation for short periods.

"3) The organization in every State of a farm-hospital-prison where all cases of constitutional psychopathic states--sex offenders--can be kept for life and forced to earn their own maintenance.

"Castration of every individual on commitment to above institution. It has been shown that short prison sentences, fines, commitment to hospitals for the insane, and even sentence to death, are not feared sufficiently by these persons to cause them to stop their sex-criminal tendencies. But, if they knew that after the first offence they will be castrated, and placed in a working institution for life, they will at least migrate to some country that is more kind and lenient in the treatment of their crimes. There is nothing these criminals fear more than castration (this does not mean simple vasectomy but removal of the sex glands) and a life sentence which would have no release for good behavior."

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