THE OFFENCE BEHAVIOR: USE OF THREAT OR FORCE
The percentages in Table 149 show the extent of coercion in nine offense groups. Because physical force was always used in the aggression offenses they are not included in the table. There was no force in the exhibition or peeping offenses, obviously. Since the heterosexual nonincest offenses were originally classified on the basis of force and nonforce, the latter group ideally would not be included in re present section. However, no behavior ever falls into a perfect two-class system, so here there is also a residue of marginal cases in which the force or threat was so minimal that the offense could not be considered a true aggression and was therefore classed in the nonaggression category.
In none of the nine groups of offenses was force evidenced in more than about one eighth of the cases, or threat in more than about one sixth. Both of these top ranges appear in the incest groups. Homosexual offenses in general show a much lower incidence of force or threat, and as would be expected the already weeded-out heterosexual non-force offenses have the lowest figures. Force is more often employed against children in both the heterosexual and homosexual offense groups than it is against minors or adults. Only in the incest cases does it appear equally in the three age groups. Threat is a much less important element than force among all these offense groups, except in the incest offenses, and here parental authority undoubtedly lends considerable weight.
Examining first the nonaggression offenses in which some degree of force appeared, we find that in the 11 heterosexual offenses vs. children which represent the 4 per cent with minor force there are instances of such action as pushing, grabbing by the arm, pulling down of panties, attempting to undress, and of lying on top. In some of these cases the report is conflicting so that it was difficult to get a clear picture of what actually occurred and of the degree of aggression involved. In one case the offender’s wife held the girl for him (both were drunk), in another the girl was knocked down in a general melee, but apparently without sexual intentions, and in several of the instances the tentative aggression might have become more violent if the child had not run away or if the offender had not been frightened off by her shouts. While these offenses did not portray cooperation by the child in any sense of the word, neither did they seem to merit being classed with the aggression offenses, since most of the marginally aggressive behavior occurred as a preliminary before any sexual activity took place. Such intentions may have been definitely implied, however.
The single case of marginal force in an offense involving a minor female presents a description of roughhousing with a fifteen-year-old baby sitter who evidently provoked it by tickling the offender first. He then pushed her into the bedroom, held her on the bed, spanked her, and “pushed her bloomers to one side.” This was done in the presence of the children. The girl first complained ten days later following an argument with the offender’s wife.
The three cases of minor force in offenses vs. adult females represented by the figure of 1.4 per cent included an incident of slapping a girl during the preliminaries to coitus because she was too noisy, of holding a hand over a girl’s mouth prior to having coitus in a car, and of a fruit peddler in an apartment house who “made advances” to a sixteen-year-old who screamed and scared him away.
When considering force or threat as related to incest, one must recall that these offenses differ from all others because of the father’s unique position of authority. Given then this special paternal prerogative of a high degree of control over one’s offspring, the question arises as to the extent to which force and threat are needed in attaining intimate sexual contact. It will be recalled that the use of force and threat in incest was found to be unrelated to the kind of sexual techniques used.
Inspecting the histories to survey the form that the violence took, one finds in the offenses vs. child daughters accounts of spankings, slapping, and beating, in two cases with some physical damage. Threats were usually used to try to prevent the child from reporting the incest, and ranged from menacing her with whipping or spanking to threatening to kill her and her mother (one case) or to break up the family with a divorce. In the cases of force or threat against minor daughters, the girl’s resistance doubtless became more marked, and as a result the force more violent. Reported behavior of the father here included slapping and knocking down, choking, beating with a belt buckle, pulling hair, and two cases of the use of drugs to minimize resistance. It also includes threats to make her wash dishes and to deny her TV viewing. Other more serious threats were “to beat up her mother,” to administer a beating with a leather strap, and to kill her and her mother (three cases). That these latter were not idle threats made only to gain a sexual end is evidenced by the fact that in one of these cases such a threat was actually carried out when the prisoner escaped following the incest conviction.
Finally, the five instances of force or threat reported against adult daughters actually represent only three offenses since the two threat cases overlap with those in which force is involved. As might be expected these instances also show strong forms of violence and involve in one case a revolver and leather strap, in another a knife, and in a third assaultive battery with resulting physical injury.
Turning now to the homosexual-offense groups, one finds that the 10 per cent incidence of force against children represents a total of 12 cases, which when inspected for details of the aggressive behavior fall into several groups. The largest is a group in which force was used to coerce a boy into sexual activity, usually fellating him. This covers seven cases and typically involved choking, striking, or pushing and holding by a considerably older male. One object was a stepson, another the son of a friend; others were strangers.
Second is a small group in which the force seemed to follow as a result of fright usually caused by the boy’s cries from fear or pain. Typical was the case of an eighteen-year-old sailor, AWOL, who met two boys aged nine and twelve who were fishing. The nine-year-old was an apparently willing partner at first, but when they went behind some brush, anal intercourse proved too painful for the boy, and he screamed. The sailor, frightened, hit him and ran, losing his ID card, which led to his arrest two weeks later.
Third are several cases that might be described as resulting from ineptitude, in which the male seeking homosexual contact blundered into force through lack of comprehension of the situation. In one case a man with defective speech and an IQ estimated between 55-75 asked a four-year-old boy to expose his penis, and then tried to hold him when he started to run away. Another illustration is a sixteen-year-old male, who because he had originally achieved his first erotic arousal by accidently touching a boy’s legs, knew of only this way to obtain gratification. He took a seven-year-old boy behind some bushes in his yard to wrestle so he could touch his legs. The boy was frightened and screamed, and the offender struck him. While in some of these cases the child was definitely mistreated, truly sadistic behavior is recognizable in only one case of homosexual pedophilia. This was a forty-eight-year-old male who picked up an eleven-year-old boy in a movie and kept him for a week in his room. He whipped him for getting too close to the window and admitted he received “pleasurable excitement” from it, although he claimed he was not sexually aroused at the time.
There are also three cases of threat against young boys. One is an overlap with a force case described earlier; in a second, the man was accused by an eleven-year-old Mexican boy of forcing a mouth-genital contact at gun point, but denied the offense; and the third case was that of a thirty-five-year-old offender who told his six-year-old nephew that if he did not give in to his homosexual demands he would “dig a hole and put you in it like those septic tank holes.”
When one examines the homosexual offenses vs. minors in which the incidence of force drops to 4 per cent and threat to 1.6 per cent, the general picture is much the same except that none of the boys appear to be previously known to the offender. In two cases newsboys were picked up; the others are chance contacts also. As to the form of the aggression, typical are two “forced into cars,” one slapped after refusing to perform what he had promised upon payment of $2.50; a third, a fifteen-year-old, forced into foliation in a gas-station toilet by a drunken twenty-five-year-old offender; and finally a twelve-year-old ordered to lie face down in the park grass plot and slapped when he refused. Threats consisted of brandishing a knife in two cases, one of which was also included above, and an approach in a theater in which the offender threatened to “smack” the boy if he did not keep quiet.
In the final group of homosexual offenses, those with adults, one finds the lowest incidence of force, 2 per cent, representing six cases. Adult homosexual relationships are largely consenting; if not, they tend to be interrupted prior to a completed sexual act. No threat cases appear here. Two of the cases occurred in the prison “tank” in a large city. A pair of “buddies” were accused of demanding homosexual favors for protection from other prisoners and helped each other to force the object to comply with anal, intercourse and fellation. Two of the remaining four cases arc accounted for by an older hobo who was accused twice of dragging a teen-age boy to a railroad culvert in a city to try to gain a homosexual contact, and the last two cases are for minor aggressive acts. None of the six eases seemed to include sadistic acts for their own pleasure, but the force was an integral part of obtaining the desired homosexual connection.
It is clear that these few cases represent only a sporadic sort of phenomenon and cannot be considered as showing a trend in the almost 300 offenses vs. adult males under consideration. In these examples of violence there appears to be a tendency for the offense to occur within a hobo, prison, or prostitute context. The homosexual contacts of this character vary considerably from the usual homosexual relationships.
It must be added that violence, and of an extreme kind, does sometimes occur within the framework of homosexual relations. This is evidenced by the startling fact that two of the homosexual offenses vs. adults resulted in murders, among the few in the present total sample. In neither case, however, did the murder occur during a forcing of homosexual relations, but rather as an explosive aftermath. Thus by our present definition the violence cannot be considered as part of the developmental circumstances of the sex offense proper. One case involved a fifty-five-year-old victim, a prosperous banker, and the second a casual acquaintance and both were stabbed to death.
*380\161\2*
