On the whole, the offenders vs. minors were a healthy group, and had had an excellent relationship with their parents. Their prepubescent life, which was protracted by a high percentage who reached puberty late, contained little sexual activity.
Adult life was marked by a great emphasis upon heterosexual activity; masturbation and nocturnal orgasms were unimportant, and homosexual activity was moderate to low in quantity. In their heterosexuality, they lean toward simple direct behavior; mouth-genital contact, variation in coital positions, etc., they seem to regard as unnecessary frills. This tendency toward simplicity is again seen in the small amount of dream content and masturbation fantasy; these men are rather unimaginative. Seeing or thinking of females or seeing erotica arouses little response in them. Neither mental troubles nor alcoholism can be said to have complicated their lives, but they are one of the intellectually dullest groups.
For a large percentage, the sex offense represented their first and only conviction, and relatively few were convicted on a sex charge a second time. Their nonsexual criminality, while substantial, consisted chiefly of property offenses of a moderate to almost trivial nature. These men are neither professional criminals nor amateurs given to armed robbery or violence.
Two thirds of their offenses vs. minors came to light chiefly through friends or relatives of the girls involved or as a by-product of police investigations of other matters. Only rarely did the girl herself make a complaint to the authorities.
All in all, these offenders appear to be uneducated, somewhat simple-minded males in a low socioeconomic bracket; while not basically criminal, they are free and easy with other people’s property and not particular about their female sexual partners. It is interesting that they stressed gambling more than any other sex-offender group. They try to satisfy their desires in a simple immediate way, which usually consists of taking what they want regardless of circumstance.
This description also fits the offenders vs. adults. Indeed, the two groups constitute a whole consisting of males in a lower socioeconomic stratum who differ from their control-group brothers in being less responsible and more given to immediate gratification with little thought of possible social complications. One might with justification say that the backgrounds and behavior of the offenders vs. minors and adults are essentially the same and that it was almost fortuitous whether their convictions were for sexual activity with girls twelve to fifteen or sixteen and older.
On the other hand, one cannot regard the offenders vs. minors as entirely would-be offenders vs. adults who were either a bit too careless regarding age or who were simply the victims of statistical probability. The group contains a number of men who have some sexual interest in very young females. These are visible when one studies the multiple sex offenses: of those men with over one, more had been convicted of offenses vs. children than offenses vs. adults. The reason seems to be that the usual offender vs. minors or adults “learns his lesson”—he confines his subsequent sexual activity to suitable older females or at least exercises more care in his affairs. In any case, he is seldom convicted again. The pedophile variety of offender, on the contrary, finds it difficult to make a satisfactory upward shift in the age of his female partners, and since he continues to single out children under twelve he is more likely to undergo a second arrest and conviction.
If one were to weed out those with pedophilic tendencies and a few others who were mentally seriously defective, the remaining majority of offenders vs. minors would scarcely merit the emotionally charged label of sex offender. The near-peer variety constitutes a moral issue rather than a legal problem; and the subculture variety could be dealt with at the level of warnings and misdemeanor convictions. We shall always have with us our quota of well-intentioned extroverts who are not very bright, and we do no one a service by branding their errors of judgment as felonies.
*59\161\2*
