Читать книгу Predators Live Among us - Diane Roblin Lee - Страница 24

A pedophile can be an unshaven stranger who hangs around playgrounds, obviously scoping out his prey; or perhaps the executive on the 34th floor, or maybe a neighbour like Matt – or – the stranger can be a husband with whom one has lived for 38 years.

Some data suggest that up to one-third of child molesters are female. ²⁸ Accurate statistics are impossible to compile because abuse by women is often not reported and often not considered abuse. While contradictory studies show that number to be much smaller, we do know that the majority are men.

Despite child advocate John Walsh’s advice to parents never to hire a male baby sitter, however, it’s important not to marginalize men. Some go so far as to say that people who refuse to hire male nannies (mannies) are practising male profiling, not unlike police who pull drivers over for DWH: “Driving While Hispanic or Hungarian.” While it’s important to foster warm relationships between wonderful, healthy men and children, a refusal to hire a male baby sitter is not about equal rights or profiling. It’s just about minimizing risk. Having said that, for the sake of simplicity, most references are to “he” in this book.

A child molester can be a doctor, a garbage-collector, a teacher, a musician, a son, a brother, a teenager, a senior, a billionaire, a pauper, a homosexual, a heterosexual, a Christian, a Buddhist or an agnostic. He can be fighting trim or flabby; American, French, Russian or Oriental. He can be the recognized ex-convict down the street who has served his time—or he can be the nice man next door whose worst known offence was a speeding ticket in 1997. He can be the gentle grandpa or the personable baby-sitter.

It used to be that parents warned their little ones not to talk to strangers. However, today’s research relegates stranger danger to a smaller role. Tragically, the greatest incidence of child sexual abuse is within the family. In L. Halliday’s research ²⁹ on over 1,000 subjects, only 13 percent of the abuse was committed by strangers. Fifty-seven percent was committed by family members and 28 percent involved friends. Twenty-one percent involved natural fathers, 12 percent stepfathers, 10 percent uncles, 10 percent brothers, five percent grandfathers, 19 percent family friends and three percent baby-sitters. Children in step-families are at greater risk because, with the addition of more extended family, more people have easy access to them.While numbers differ according to the differing studies, it’s impossible to document exact numbers or demographics because so many incidents go unreported.

One thing is clear: the stereotype of the “dirty old man” is misleading. There’s general agreement that the majority of offenders are under the age of 35.³⁰

In a 1986 interview in The New York Times, Ted Bundy, one of America’s worst killers, a handsome, articulate law student working in the Republican party, said, “What people have to realize is that...in all significant respects, I am essentially like everybody else.” His lawyer, James Coleman said, “He’s your next-door neighbor. People don’t want to believe that their next-door neighbor can behave like this.”

Unless convicted, pedophiles and child-molesters don’t come with labels that warn people. If convicted, the labels mean little because it’s impossible to know whether the bearers will ever offend again. It is possible that the least dangerous man is the one who has been caught, served his time and truly dealt with his dark heart. It is possible that the most dangerous person is the unsuspected man who sits beside one in church.