The Child Molester:

An increasing amount of attention is being focused on the sexual victimization of children, yet no exact statistics exist in regard to this problem for a number of reasons: Many such victimizations may go unreported or undetected, or the suspect may not be apprehended; or there may be insufficient evidence to go to court; or the offender is not convicted; or even if he is convicted his offense may fall under a number of different statutes which are not age-specific-in Massachusetts, for example, the sexual victimization of a child can be encompassed under 25 different statutes-and therefore it is impossible to retrieve the number of identified sexual offenses committed specifically against children. Nevertheless human service and criminal justice professionals are encountering more and more reported incidents of inter-generation sexual activity. The authors of this chapter are clinicians who have worked with identified sexual offenders against children in a variety of institutional and community-based settings. Our professional experience to date has spanned 16 years and encompassed over 500 such offenders, and our aim in this chapter is to share our clinical observations, ideas, and impressions derived from our work in the hope that this will offer others a useful overview and approach to understanding and working with the child molester. Our sample of identified offenders may be biased-there may be better integrated individuals who commit similar offenses with more discretion and circumspection and thus remain undetected- but our offenders have in fact encompassed a sufficiently broad spectrum in regard to age, education, and occupation to persuade us that the fact of identification and conviction is not a distorting variable with regard to the psychology of the child offender. With increasing opportunity to work with and study such offenders our knowledge of the offender, his offense, and his victim continues to develop, and we find that many of the commonly held assumptions in regard to the child molester (pedophile) are not being substantiated.