INCEST OFFENDERS VS. ADULTS: CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE OFFENSE

March 27th, 2009 by admin

By definition the incest offenders vs. adults must be older than most sex offenders, the median individual being forty-six at the time of the offense. The range extends from thirty-five into the early sixties.

Compared to the other incest offenders, fewer of these men were married and living with their wives (68 per cent as opposed to 85 to 87 per cent), and a correspondingly larger proportion (28 per cent) were separated, divorced, or widowed.

Of all the groups, more of the incest offenders vs. adults (12 per cent) had histories of neurosis or psychosis. No more than 2 per cent of the only other group of offenders with willing adult females as partners, the heterosexual offenders vs. adults, had a history of mental trouble.

The offenses were not accompanied by any unusual amount of drunkenness, and we have no record of any drug use being involved.

There were no copartners in the offenses; no wives were charged with being accomplices, although some could have been.

The offenses were all either premeditated (80 per cent, a moderate figure) or partly premeditated (20 per cent, a high figure); none were judged as opportunistic or committed while the father did not realize what he was doing. This does not imply calm and thoughtful planning, but merely that the father knew what was going on and could foresee the sexual outcome of his preliminary behavior.

As usual in such cases, the incest took place most often—in 96 per cent of the occasions—in the family residence. The average (median) daughter was 17.7 years old at the time; of the offense for which the father was convicted. The age distribution was thus: 60 per cent were sixteen to seventeen, 20 per cent were eighteen to nineteen, and another 20 per cent were twenty to twenty-five. None was older. The emphasis on die younger ages reflects the fact that the incestuous behavior began in most cases before the girl was sixteen. Girls of eighteen or over have, as a rule, some experience in deflecting or avoiding male sexual advances and are also old enough to leave home and take care of themselves. Girls under eighteen are less experienced and are usually economically helpless.

Since the females were of suitable age, it is no surprise to find that 91 per cent of the offenses were actual coitus. No other sex-offender group has so high a figure. In part this is due to definition: under the law, penetration must occur to constitute incest, and society is reluctant to prosecute a man’s activities with his acquiescent or willing adult daughter for anything less than coitus. The child or minor daughter should, in society’s eyes, be protected from any sort of sexual activity, but the degree of public concern weakens as the daughter becomes older until what was at one age a heinous offense becomes in adult years merely a salacious bit of scandal. At any rate, we have record of only two offenses that were not based on coitus.

On the basis of only half of our cases (the other half lacked relevant official data), the offender and the authorities agreed that in 58 per cent of the offenses the daughter was a voluntary participant, being either encouraging or passive. In 8 per cent of the cases both sources of information agreed that she resisted. In one quarter of the cases the man claimed that his daughter encouraged him or was passive, whereas the official record says she resisted him. In any event, the degree of cooperation is much higher in these offenses vs. adults than in any other incest offenses.

The incest offender runs two great risks, one being detection by his wife, and the second the risk of having his daughter inform on him in a moment of anger. We found that his wife complained to the authorities in about a third of the cases and the girl herself complained in about one fifth, the first figure being the lowest and the second figure being the highest among the incest groups. Another fifth was accounted for almost equally by friends or relatives and by police investigations aimed at other goals.

The incest offender vs. adults was most prone to deny his guilt: no less than 42 per cent did so to the authorities (the largest figure recorded) and 25 per cent denied their behavior to us (also the largest figure). To one unfamiliar with these offenders such a large number of denials would be; amazing considering how easy it would be for them to rationalize, giving as excuses the suitable age of the girl, the temptations of propinquity, the “sex education” excuse, seduction by the daughter, etc. But these offenders did not avail themselves of these mitigating factors as much as one would expect, simply because they are an inhibited, rather rigid, and sexually knotted-up group of men. Most of them simply could not confess either publicly or privately (or possibly even inwardly to themselves) to sexual misbehavior of any magnitude. Instead they often hid behind a facade of morality and injured innocence, a facade marred by the paranoid explanations that maintenance of innocence necessarily demanded. Generally the tale was that false charges were being brought to facilitate a divorce, or to get control of the man’s finances, or because he opposed his daughter in some way. Despite all this, it is interesting that more of these incest offenders than the other incest offenders made legal pleas of “guilty,” evidently realizing the futility of contradicting the testimony of an adult daughter.

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