Brick wall blocking progress on sexual violence

Forty years after the women’s rights movement brought attention to the widespread nature of sexual violence, the overwhelming majority of offenses still go unreported. Even when a brave victim does come forward, prosecution is rare and conviction even rarer.

That unpleasant reality was the starting point for this week's international conference on sexual violence at Middlesex University in London. Delegates from around the world -- including from Europe, Turkey, Israel, Australia, Canada and the United States -- met to brainstorm next steps in the battle against this catastrophic pandemic.

The consensus among delegates seemed to be that the legal system -- despite the best of intentions of many within it -- is ill equipped to rectify the "justice gap" between sexual violence perpetrators and their victims.

The "brick wall" (in the words of criminologist Betsy Stanko of "the Met," London's Metropolitan Police) blocking progress is built of so-called "rape myths" that make women unwilling to come forward, and impede successful prosecution when they do.

Myth Number One is that only bad and/or crazy men rape. As I explored in my opening keynote address, the promotion of this fiction by a powerful sex offender treatment industry has had the paradoxical effect of making the everyday rapist and child molester even less recognizable than ever by jurors and judges.

Myth Number Two is that men cannot control their sexual impulses. The corollary of this is to blame women for rape: Why did she get drunk? Why did she go with him? Why did she act (or dress) that way? Women have internalized these messages and so - unlike, say, burglary victims -- feel deeply humiliated and ashamed when they are raped.

Conference organizers Jackie Gray, Miranda Horvath,
and Susan Hansen (Photo credit: The Times)

These myths are so universal in Western cultures that even feminist women working at a women's health clinic communicate them in private, informal conversation, according to new research by one of the conference's organizers, Susan Hansen of Middlesex University. (The other two organizers were Miranda Horvath and Jackie Gray.)

Compounding the problem is the fact that rapists tend to target vulnerable women who do not fit the profile of a virtuous victim, so do not make good witnesses. In the "vast majority" of London cases tracked by the Met, around 85 percent, victims were (1) seriously intoxicated at the time of their assault, (2) involved in an intimate relationship with the perpetrator, (3) mentally ill, and/or (4) minors, Stanko reported. These are not ideal victims, from the standpoint of successful prosecution.

What to do?

As noted by long-time activist Liz Kelly, chair of the Child & Woman Abuse Studies Unit of London Metropolitan University, sexual violence exists on a continuum, from predatory leers, touches and verbal harassment -- to which virtually all women are subjected -- on up to illegal sexual assault. Direct confrontation of the male entitlement undergirding this entire spectrum of behaviors will be critical to meaningful progress against sexual violence, speaker after speaker emphasized.

In other words, delegates argued for reintroducing gender into the professional discourse. As Moira Carmody of the University of Western Sydney in Australia pointed out, gender-based analysis of sexual victimization is often perceived as too threatening. So it is replaced with gender-neutral discourse about interpersonal conflict, in which the gender of perpetrator and victim become interchangeable.

I had witnessed this dynamic in action the previous day, at the international consortium on multiple-perpetrator rape. As so frequently occurs in these types of professional gatherings, someone brought up the topic of female perpetrators, sidetracking discussion onto this tangential topic. I say tangential, because the reality is that group rape is an overwhelmingly male activity. Even on the exceedingly rare occasions in which women or girls are present, they are almost always auxiliaries, for example the wife of a sexual deviant, or a female gang member pressured to help her boyfriend procure a victim.

In addition to addressing the gender hierarchies and other power imbalances that facilitate victimization, we need to empower young people so that they perceive of themselves as active agents who have choices and practical tools for negotiating complex social situations.

Stieg Larsson, the author of the popular Millennium trilogy, did not feel this power when he was 15 years old. Thus, he did not intervene during a group camping trip, as three of his friends raped a 15-year-old girl. "Her screams were heartrending, but … his loyalty to his friends was too strong," writes longtime friend and biographer Kurdo Baksi. "He was too young, too insecure." Larsson struggled with guilt for the rest of his life, even naming the heroine of his novels after the rape victim, Lisbeth.

To empower young people in these types of situations, Carmody has developed an educational program that trains participants both in how to behave ethically in their own sexual encounters, and how to be "ethical bystanders." The curriculum, funded by the Australian government, has been successfully introduced with boys, girls, men and women from a variety of backgrounds, from rugby players to Maoris in New Zealand to gay men and lesbians.

New Zealand is using this ethical bystander approach in an innovative public health campaign to combat an expected rise in sexual assaults during the Rugby World Cup. An eight-minute video, "whoareyou," pushes the idea that everyone is responsibility for the safety of those around them.

A first step in primary prevention, then, is teaching and training young people to behave ethically toward each other.

On a larger level, we will need to directly challenge the rape myths undergirding an entire spectrum of intimate intrusions by men and boys against those with less social currency. Only then will victims feel empowered to step forward, and will judges and jurors be able to recognize and condemn the everyday offender who stands before them.

Knocking down that brick wall will be no small task.

Steffan's Alerts #6: Tattoos, bias, homicides and death penalty attitudes

Professional biases in diagnosing child sexual abuse

In a new issue of Child Abuse and Neglect, Mark Everson and Jose Miguel Sandoval surveyed 1,106 child maltreatment professionals in order to explore personal biases and attitudes that might account for how professional judgments of child sexual abuse differ based on the same evidence.

Does information about the death penalty alter attitudes?

In a new issue of Crime and Delinquency, Scott Camp and colleagues report data suggesting that the answer is "yes" but the extent of the effects depends on personal characteristics.

Branding of the criminal lifestyle through tattoos

Alicia Rozycki Lozano and colleagues examine the connection between prison tattoos and criminality in their new article in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. As a group, offenders with prison tattoos are at higher risk for recidivism and incur more institutional infractions than do offenders with non-prison tattoos or no tattoos, the authors report.

Risk assessment among homicide offenders

Several articles in the new issue of Homicide Studies might pique your interest: 

• Amy Nivette reports on the limitations of using cross-national research to identify predictors of homicide.

• Sharon Smith and colleagues of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used qualitative analyses to derive four categories that they hope will improve understanding of sexually motivated homicides.

• Melanie-Angela Neuilly and colleagues present a classification tree analysis, based on  320 homicide offenders in New Jersey, that they contend is useful in predicting recidivism.

• Jeff Gruenewald compared homicides committed by extremists with those perpetrated by other types of persons in the United States. He found both similarities and differences.

    Click on a title to read the article abstract;   
    click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.   

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.

Sexual violence prevention: Recommended journal issue

The current issue of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry features an excellent collection of diverse scholarship on the prevention of sexual violence. Papers address the empirical and moral foundations of prevention from the perspectives of law, psychiatry, criminology, psychology, and public policy. Here's a preview of a couple of the articles I've read so far….
 

Paraphilia battle pivotal to future of U.S. civil liberties

Jerome Wakefield, a professor at New York University and an influential theorist of mental disorder, provides a searing analysis of the messy paraphilia debacle that the DSM-5 task force has waded into. After providing a brief history, he dissects the current proposals to show how their conceptual invalidity will open the door to widespread abuse in forensic practice:

 

Needless to say, prosecutors availing themselves of civil commitment processes and wishing to keep offenders from release find it in their interest to argue for the most expansive possible interpretation of the DSM criteria for paraphilic disorders -- lending enormous weight to the details of the diagnostic criteria…. The convenience of these criteria in forensic evaluations seems more than offset by the potential for prosecutorial abuse and the long-term undermining of the credibility of the distinction – sanctioned by the Supreme Court as a constitutionally crucial one – between mental disorder-driven behavior and other motives for criminal behavior.

Wakefield joins the ranks of other respected figures to recognize the high stakes involved in the battle over whether sex crimes equate to mental disorder. As he bluntly puts it, the struggle over how sexual paraphilias are defined is “tactically central to the future of civil liberties in our country.” If the government can indefinitely detain men who have served prison time for sex crimes based on bogus psychiatric labels that supposedly impair their volitional control, it's only a matter of time before other groups are rounded up, too. 

Of all of the controversial paraphilias, Wakefield asserts, the “most flawed and blatantly overpathologizing” is pedohebephilia, which would expand pedophilia to encompass attraction to pubescent minors. Arguments by its proponents are both weak and misleading, he writes:

The first argument for the expanded category is that hebephilia is similar to pedophilia in that both involve attraction to physically immature individuals. This is about as valid an argument as saying that both dyslexia and illiteracy involve difficulties reading, thus illiteracy should be considered a disorder. The kind of immaturity involved in pubescence is vastly different from the kind in prepubescence from the specific perspective of its ability to trigger normal sexual interest, so in fact the dissimilarity is more important than the similarity…. The other two arguments – that some prosecutors are currently using the diagnosis “Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified (Hebephilia)” and that the ICD [the World Health Organization’s diagnostic system] allows sexual preference for early pubescence as a disorder – ignores the critical question of whether these uses are valid…. Hebephilia as a diagnosis violates the basic constraint that disorder judgments should not be determined by social disapproval. This is a case where crime and disorder are being hopelessly confused.

Although the sexual disorders work group has backed down on two of its three most controversial proposals, it is clinging tenaciously to pedohebephilia, the brainchild of the Canadian laboratory that employs two members of the work group. Hopefully, a newly established scientific review committee for the DSM-5 will heed the increasingly strong warnings emitting from mainstream social scientists and psychology-law practitioners such as Wakefield, and have the common sense to squelch this ridiculous proposal. Otherwise, as Wakefield puts it, “the forensic tail [will be] wagging the validity dog, and we are likely to get criteria that possess a misdirected pseudo-validity that will not serve us in the long run and set a dangerous precedent for future tensions between civil liberties and civil commitment for mental disorder.”

Inevitable recidivism: An urban legend

Tamara Rice Lave, a law professor at the University of Miami, tackles the essential premise underlying current social policy toward sex offending: that apprehended sex offenders (especially child molesters) will continue to re-offend. As Lave shows, the courts and the public accept this premise with an unquestioning and almost religious fervor, ignoring a growing body of empirical evidence to the contrary.

Inevitable recidivism has saturated the media, political and popular discourse, and thus it has become the dominant frame due to its availability…. This sets up a dialectical process in which the public believes that sex offenders inevitably recidivate; the media write stories that bolster this belief, and politicians pass laws that are responsive to this belief. The effect is to have inevitable recidivism become a socially constructed fact.

When actual evidence of sex offender recidivism is examined, a huge gap exists between what is assumed and what the data actually shows because most sex offenders do not in fact recidivate. Thus there is a galaxy of sexually violent predator laws and an entire branch of Supreme Court jurisprudence that is founded upon a demonstrable urban legend.

The special issue, Beyond Myth: Designing Better Sexual Violence Prevention, was co-edited by professors Eric Janus (author of Failure to Protect, an essential text on sex offender law and policy) and John Douard. Both are, like myself, firm believers that we should be focusing scarce resources on primary prevention of sexual violence rather than on misguided campaigns rooted in moral panic and hysteria. Such campaigns are not only ineffectual, but they may actually increase the very problems they are aimed at solving.

The articles are:

Jerome C. Wakefield:  DSM-5 proposed diagnostic criteria for sexual paraphilias: Tensions between diagnostic validity and forensic utility [request from author HERE]

Tamara Rice Lave: Inevitable recidivism: The origin and centrality of an urban legend  [full text available online HERE]

A preview of all of the articles in the special issue, Beyond Myth: Designing Better Sexual Violence Prevention, is HERE. Clicking on a preview of an article allows one to email the author to request a reprint.

Steffan's Alerts #5: Miranda warnings, child custody, and more

Click on a title to read the article abstract; click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.

Global prevalence of child sexual abuse

Marije Stoltenborgh and colleagues, in a new issue of Child Maltreatment, report the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse based on over 9 million subjects extracted from 217 publications from various countries.

Public views of child custody arrangements

Using hypothetical cases, Sanford Braver and colleagues examined judgments of various custody arrangements by jury-eligible citizens in Arizona. Reporting their findings in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, the authors suggest that a significant gap exists between the judgments of the public and what occurs in the family law system.

Miranda rights: What don't suspects understand?

In the same issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Richard Rogers and colleagues continue their research on defendants’ comprehension of Miranda warnings. Based on analyses of 416 pretrial defendants’ understanding of current Miranda terminology, the authors offer recommendations to simplify Miranda phrases so that persons with academic and cognitive limitations may more easily understand their rights at the time of interrogation.

Accuracy of methods for diagnosing pedophilia and assessing sexual recidivism

Robin Wilson and colleagues examine the accuracy of four methods for assessing pedophilia and appraising risk of recidivism among a sample of 130 child sexual abusers. They report their findings in a new issue of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment.

Availability of treatment programs in juvenile justice facilities

In a new issue of Child and Youth Services Review, Rebecca Yazzie analyzes the types of treatment programs available in the United States through a sample of 3,163 juvenile facilities. Compared to public facilities, private facilities appeared better equipped, with more mental health staff and treatment programs. Facilities that offer family counseling reported a lower incidence of suicide.

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.

Psychiatry rejects new rape disorder for DSM-5

Regular blog readers will be familiar with the heated battle over a controversial proposed mental condition of "Paraphilic Coercive Disorder" for rapists. Now, the American Psychiatric Association has issued its latest draft of the DSM-5 diagnostic manual, with the condition relegated to the appendix. The proposal was favored by psychologists working for the government in Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) civil commitment cases, as it would have made it far easier to testify that sex offenders are mentally ill. It had met with strong opposition from scientists, including premier rape researcher Raymond Knight of Brandeis University.

Among other outspoken opponents was psychiatrist Allen Frances, an emeritus professor from Duke University who chaired the DSM-IV Task Force. In blog posts soon to go live at the Psychiatric Times and Psychology Today, he cautions that the battle is not over: The current attempt to place the pseudoscientific condition into the appendix of the DSM 5 as a condition warranting further study is still a mistake.

"Important message"

Dr. Frances said the rejection should send a strong message to those involved in the SVP civil commitment industry:

Dr. Allen Frances

The evaluators, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and juries must all recognize that the act of being a rapist almost always is an indication of criminality, not of mental disorder. This now makes four DSM's (DSM III, DSM IIIR, DSM IV, DSM 5) that have unanimously rejected the concept that rape is a mental illness. Rapists need to receive longer prison sentences, not psychiatric hospitalizations that are constitutionally quite questionable.

This DSM 5 rejection has huge consequences both for forensic psychiatry and for the legal system. If "coercive paraphilia" had been included as a mental disorder in DSM 5, rapists would be routinely subject to involuntary psychiatric commitment once their prison sentence had been completed. While such continued psychiatric incarceration makes sense from a public safety standpoint, misusing psychiatric diagnosis has grave risks that greatly outweigh the gain…. Preventive psychiatric detention is a slippery slope with possibly disastrous future consequences for both psychiatry and the law. If we ignore the civil rights of rapists today, we risk someday following the lead of other countries in abusing psychiatric commitment to punish political dissent and suppress individual difference.

This DSM 5 rejection of rape as mental disorder will hopefully call attention to, and further undercut, the widespread misuse in SVP hearings of the fake diagnosis "Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified, nonconsent". Mental health evaluators working for the state have badly misread the DSM definition of Paraphilia and have misapplied it to rapists to facilitate their psychiatric incarceration. They have disregarded the fact that we deliberately excluded rape as an example of Paraphilia NOS in order to avoid such backdoor misuse. Not Otherwise Specified diagnoses are included in DSM only for clinical convenience and are inherently too idiosyncratic and unreliable to be used in consequential forensic proceedings.

Exclude coercive paraphilia from appendix

All along, promoters of this new diagnosis have conceded that this would be a tough sell, given its lack of scientific foundation. Indeed, they said publicly that they would consider it a victory if they could even get paraphilic coercive disorder included in the appendix of the upcoming diagnostic manual (due out in mid-2013), as a condition meriting further study. But as Dr. Frances points out, even that would be a major error:

The sexual disorders work group proposes placing "coercive paraphilia" in an appendix for disorders requiring further research. We created such an appendix for DSM IV. It was meant as a placement for proposed new mental disorders that were clearly not suitable for inclusion in the official body of the manual, but might nonetheless be of some interest to clinicians and researchers….

If "Coercive Paraphilia" were like the average rejected DSM suggestion, it would similarly make sense to park it in the appendix -- as has been suggested by the DSM 5 sexual disorders work group. This might facilitate the work of researchers and also provide some guidance to clinicians....

But "coercive paraphilia" is not the average rejected DSM diagnosis. It has been, and is continuing to be, badly misused to facilitate what amounts to an unconstitutional abuse of psychiatry. Whether naively or purposefully, many SVP evaluators continue to widely misapply the concept that rape signifies mental disorder and to inappropriately use NOS categories where they do not belong in forensic hearings.

Including "Coercive Paraphilia" in the DSM 5 appendix might confer some unintended and undeserved back-door legal legitimacy on a disavowed psychiatric construct. Little would be gained by such inclusion and the risks of promoting continued sloppy psychiatric diagnosis and questionable legal proceedings are simply not worth taking. The rejection of rape as grounds for mental disorder must be unequivocal in order to eliminate any possible ambiguity and harmful confusion. We did not include any reference to "coercive paraphilia" in DSM IV and it should not find its way in any form, however humble and unofficial, into DSM 5. 

If you agree that this pseudoscientific condition needs to be placed in the wastebasket once and for all, now is the time to speak up. The current public comment period ends June 15. While you’re at it, you might want to state your opposition to a couple of the other controversial proposals with potential for profound negative consequences in the forensic realm – pedohebephilia and hypersexuality.

Postscript: Thanks to the suggestion of an alert reader, I have added the direct links to the DSM-5 comments pages. You must register in order to submit a comment.

• Click HERE to comment on the proposed diagnosis of Pedohebephilia.
• Click HERE to comment on the proposed diagnosis of Paraphillic Coercive Disorder.

Related posts:

• Psychiatrists ramp up opposition to forensic misuse of DSM: "Pedohebephilia" would make bad situation worse, they warn (March 10, 2011)
• Europeans first to shoot down controversial paraphilia (Oct 26, 2010)
• Psychiatrists vote no on controversial paraphilias (Oct. 24, 2010)
• Rape as psychiatric illness: Battle heats up (June 24, 2010)
• Latest hebephilia critiques: Point-counterpoint (March 12, 2010)
• More prominent voices join chorus of DSM-5 critics (March 1, 2010)
• DSM-V: Will shoddy manual implode years before launch date? (Feb. 20, 2010)
• New Scientist expose of psychiatry’s "civil war" (Dec. 10, 2009)
• Scientist razes proposed "Paraphilic Coercive Disorder" (Nov. 6, 2009)
• Hebephilia struck by third blow: Down but not out? (June 5, 2009)
• Wrangling over psychiatry's bible (Nov 16, 2008)
• DSM makeover: What will they come up with next? (Oct 13, 2008)
• Invasion of the hebephile hunters (Oct 31, 2007)

ATSA issues call for change in sex offender policy

The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers has just issued a major policy paper calling for a shift in public policy toward sex offending. The balance has tipped too far toward criminal justice punishments, causing unintended consequences such as families who fear coming forward to report sexual abuse, the paper emphasizes.

Experts agree that a criminal justice response alone cannot prevent sexual abuse or keep communities safe. Yet, tougher sentencing and increased monitoring of sex offenders are fully funded in many states, while victim services and prevention programs are woefully underfunded.

Key recommendations of the 54-page policy statement include:

1. Design and implement evidence-informed policy.
   
   
2. Develop successful community policies that expand the notion of what constitutes abuser accountability; encourage community responsibility and healing; and provide safety, restitution, healing, and avenues for input for victims.
   
   
3. Integrate what is known about perpetration into prevention programs, victim services, and public education.

The reported is co-authored by Joan Tabachnick, a well-known educator on sexual violence prevention, and Alisa Klein, ATSA's public policy consultant. It was partly funded by a grant from the Ms. Foundation for Women.

The introductory quote from Eleanor Roosevelt makes me optimistic that this may signal a major shift for ATSA, which has significant legislative influence around the United States, in the direction of primary prevention.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will
act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Steffan's Alerts #4: Supermax, school shooters and Asperger's

Click on a title to read the article abstract; click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.

Ethics of solitary confinement and supermax prisons

The Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice has published online a new issue focusing on ethics in criminal justice settings. Sharon Shalev offers an analysis of ethics in solitary confinement and supermax prisons and calls for more active participation by health professionals in these settings.

Asperger’s Disorder and the criminal justice system

Criminology and Criminal Justice has published Laura Caulfield and Ann Browning’s review of the literature on the connection between Asperger’s Disorder and criminality as well as the criminal justice system’s understanding of the condition.

Serious assaults on prison staff

In the Journal of Criminal Justice, Mark Cunningham and colleagues examine assaults on prison staff occurring over a 14 month period in a state correctional system. They provide data on prevalence of serious assaults and characteristics of inmate perpetrators and staff victims.

Are school shooters and suicide bombers more alike than different?

Adam Lankford and Nayab Hakim posit that they are, based on their review of school shooters in the United States and suicide bombers in the Middle East. Their article appears in Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Assessing intervention targets in sex offender treatment

Melissa Grady and colleagues review the psychometric properties and validation of measures commonly used in sexual offending treatment programs. The authors offer recommendations on measures to assess core treatment areas in their new article in Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Treatment for child sexual abuse victims and their families

In the same issue of Aggression and Violent Behavior, Poonam Tavkar and David Hanson offer information on effective treatment options for victims of child sexual abuse and their non-offending family members.

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.

Steffan's Alerts #3: Women, children, fire-setting and the public

Click on a title to read the article abstract; click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.

JAAPL: Plethora of mental health and law offerings

As always, the new issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law is a goldmine for those interested in law and mental health matters. All articles may be accessed for free online. Topics include use of the DSM in litigation and legislative settings, rational understanding and competency to stand trial, treatment of sexual offenders, hebephilia and the DSM-5, competency of pregnant women with psychosis, diversion of women into substance abuse treatment, and analyses of several recent legal rulings, to name a few.

Sins of the father

In a new issue of the British Journal of Criminology, Sytske Besemer and colleagues examine whether children whose parents have been incarcerated are later involved in the criminal justice system at disproportionate rates compared to children whose parents have been convicted but never imprisoned in the Netherlands and England. After controlling for a number of possible intervening variables in their longitudinal study, the authors provide data showing that children in the latter--but not the former--country are adversely affected by their parents' incarceration.

Advancing understanding and predictive utility of childhood firesetting

Although mental health professionals have long held that deliberate fire setting by children is prognostic of future conduct problems, Ian Lambie and Isabel Randell review how science in this area has progressed -- or not progressed -- in a new issue of Clinical Psychology Review. They call for future research to address the relationship between youth firesetting and future antisocial behavior as well as to update best practices in assessing and intervening with children who set fires.

Factors involved in reporting rapes

Data from a national survey of 3,001 women in 2006 indicated that the rate of reporting rape has not significantly changed since the 1990s. In a new issue of Journal of Interpersonal Violence, lead author Kate Wolitzky-Taylor explores barriers and predictors of reporting sexual assaults to law enforcement.

Criminal justice response to female offenders

In a forthcoming issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Shabnam Javdani, Naomi Sadeh, and Edelyn Verona advance theory on the legal and social policy factors involved in the increasing arrest rates of girls and women.

Public's views on sentencing practices

Does the public really support tougher sentencing of offenders? Preliminary data suggests this is not the case in Australia when members of the public are provided details about the personal lives of offenders. In a new issue of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Austin Lovegrove sampled several hundred participants through their review and discussion of judges' sentences on six offenders in four actual cases.

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.

Group rape: Spotlight on shadowy terrain

Seminar series, online forum kick off international initiative

Scene from Casualties of War, based on a true story
about U.S. soldiers in Vietnam

Sexual violence is a hot topic, with myriad books, articles, and even entire journals devoted to its study. But despite their frequency, there is very little study of rapes committed by multiple offenders. Group rapists are often lumped together with other types of offenders, including solo rapists and pedophiles. This is unfortunate, because multi-offender rape is a different beast, often less about sex than about male peer group dynamics. I think of it as a form of cultural theater, in which the victim becomes a dramatic prop through which men publicly demonstrate their heterosexual masculinity to each other.


Two British researchers aim to change the current climate of neglect. Jessica Woodhams of the University of Birmingham and Miranda Horvath or Middlesex University have an ambitious goal of developing an international network and research agenda focused on understanding and preventing multiple-perpetrator rape.

They have secured funding from the British Psychological Society for a seminar series at Middlesex University in London this fall. Gearing up, they have just launched a month-long public forum at the international Sexual Violence Research Institute’s site.

To kick off the discussion, they tossed out the following intriguing questions:

1. Are all perpetrators of multiple perpetrator rape equally responsible for their actions?
2. Is multiple perpetrator rape only a significant problem in certain populations/social groups?
3. How can we best tackle multiple perpetrator rape in terms of prevention, interventions with perpetrators, supporting victims, and improving investigation and prosecution?

I'm sure many of you who have done treatment, evaluation, and/or research with violent offenders have some thoughts on these questions. If so, join the online discussion. You do have to register (giving yourself a screen name and a password), but that is quick and easy (and free). Check it out HERE.

Of related interest:

Dr. L'Heureux Dumi Lewis, a professor of sociology and Black studies at the City College of New York, talks about race and community reactions to the high-profile multiple-perpetrator rape in Cleveland, Texas at his blog, Uptown Notes.

Additional resources are listed on my web page on multiple-perpetrator rape, HERE. 

This blogger to give keynotes in Australia, UK

I am excited to announce that I will be delivering keynote addresses at forensic conferences in Australia and the United Kingdom later this year. I hope to be able to meet some of you in person at one or the other.

After the floods and cyclone -- join me on the Sunshine Coast

I will be giving both a keynote address and an all-day training at Australia's national forensic psychology conference, taking place from August 4-6 in Noosa, in the state of Queensland. Other keynote speakers are Australian forensic psychologists Paul Wilson, Don Thomson and Alfred Allan, and fellow Americans Tom Grisso and Leslie Morey.

This year's theme is "Diversity and Specialism in Forensic Psychology." If you think you have a good idea for a forensic talk or workshop, I would encourage you to submit a proposal. Be quick about it, though, as the deadline is the end of February.

Along with an exciting scientific program, the organizers are promising fun social functions and a chance to network "in a friendly and relaxed environment." Noosa is not too far away from the recent catastrophic flooding and Cyclone Yasi, but I'm sure flood waters will have receded by August. I'll be sharing more details in coming months.

Next up: Sexual violence conference in London

On September 8, I will be delivering another keynote at a Sexual Violence conference sponsored by the Forensic Psychological Services program at Middlesex University in London. My focus will be the role of culture and masculinity in multiple-perpetrator rape (the topic of my 2004 theoretical article). Again, stay tuned for more details.

I am excited to be a part of this program because of the organizers' cutting-edge efforts toward preventing sexual violence, especially rape by multiple perpetrators. The Forensic Psychological Services Program at Middlesex University sponsored similar conferences on hate crimes in 2008 and 2010, with an innovative focus on offender motivations and prevention.

You can get involved in this one, too. The organizers are inviting proposals for papers and debate panels pertaining to sexual violence, especially those based on empirical research and/or involving new and emerging topics. One of their major goals is to foster more exchange of ideas among practitioners, academics and policy makers. The deadline for submissions is April 15 (Tax Day, here on the other side of the Atlantic).

Child abuse assessment: Special issue

Forensic psychologist Eric Mart has guest edited a special issue of the Journal of Psychiatry and the Law on assessment and testimony in cases of child abuse. The articles address both scientific and practical aspects of child abuse assessment, testimony, and research. They include:

Maternal Filicide and Mental Illness in Italy: This retrospective review co-authored by Geoffrey McKee, who has written books on filicide, and Alesandra Bramante compares the forensic characteristics of mothers with and without severe mental illness who killed their children.

Interviewing Immigrant Children for Suspected Child Maltreatment: Lisa Aronson Fontes examines challenges posed in forensic interviews of immigrant children when there is a suspicion that these children may be victims of child abuse or neglect. Suggestions are made
for interviewers regarding the interview setting, preparations, building rapport, conveying respect, narrative training, pacing the interview, and trauma symptoms that may stem from issues unrelated to the abuse.

Persistent Problems with the "Separation Test" in Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy: Munchausen syndrome by proxy remains a controversial diagnosis because information is easily tainted to make the mother appear responsible for her child’s symptoms. Loren Pankratz critiques (and offers alternatives to) the “separation test,” a scientifically problematic procedure that is often used to gather evidence against the mother.

Common Errors in the Assessment of Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse: Finally, the special issue editor himself tackles common errors in the complex, challenging, and high-stakes undertaking of assessing CSA allegations. After reviewing frequent causes of substandard investigations, the illustrious Dr. Mart provides ideas for research-based methods to improve the situation.

Cheer for rapist or else, appellate court rules

First, she was raped.

Then, she was told she must cheer for her rapist.

Now, a federal appeals court ruling that she had no grounds to protest is putting the tiny town of Silsbee, Texas on the map.

It all started when a group of boys grabbed 16-year-old "H.S." at a post-football game party two years ago, dragged her into a room, locked the door, and proceeded to sexually assault her.

After the assault, H.S. went back to cheerleading at Silsbee High School. But when her rapist sauntered up to the foul line for a free throw, H.S. sat down and turned her back.

"I didn’t want to have to say his name, and I didn’t want to cheer for him," the girl said. "I didn't want to encourage anything he was doing."

The district superintendent, his assistant, and the school principal called her outside and demanded that she cheer for the star athlete, Rakheem Bolton. Either that, or go home. Fans, meanwhile, sat in the bleachers and mocked the crying girl.

As is frequently the case in gang rapes involving athletes and other cultural icons of masculinity, the high school and community rallied around the rapists. H.S. was forced off the squad. In the coming weeks, she and her family underwent a campaign of harassment in the small town of 6,300.

"They were the star athletes, and I was standing up to them," San Francisco Chronicle legal reporter Bob Egelko quotes her as saying.

A panel of three of the most conservatives judges on the Fifth U.S. Circuit of Appeals in New Orleans has denied her claim that her free speech rights were violated. As a "mouthpiece" for the school, she had no right to refuse to cheer for her rapist, they ruled. Indeed, it was she and not the school whose rights were violated:

As a cheerleader … H.S. was contractually required to cheer for the basketball team, whose roster included Bolton…. H.S. served as a mouthpiece through which [the school] could disseminate speech -- namely, support for its athletic teams…. [H.S.'s refusal to cheer] constituted substantial interference with the work of the school because, as a cheerleader, H.S. was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering, a position she undertook voluntarily.

The girl's lawyer said he will petition for a rehearing in front of the full appeals court.

While the cheerleading aspect of this case is unusual, gang rapes by members of the masculine elite such as athletes, soldiers and fraternity members are common. As I discuss in my theoretical overview of gang rape in Sexuality Research and Social Policy, such assaults serve a variety of functions, including social bonding, the celebration of power, and the public display of heterosexual masculinity through the subordination of women. In other words, group rape of women is a form of cultural theater, in which the victim serves as a mere dramatic prop.

As in this case, the main weapon of these group rapists is alcohol. Also common is for police, prosecutors, judges, school officials and other representatives of the power structure to side with the assailants against the victim.

Here, it appears that H.S. was re-victimized at every stage in the process.

Although Bolton and two alleged co-participants were arrested almost immediately, an initial grand jury declined to indict. Meanwhile, H.S. and her family were told that the rape kit collected that night would not be processed for DNA evidence for more than a year, due to a backlog of cases. The boys were allowed to return to school, and Bolton was allowed back on the basketball team.

When H.S. complained to school officials that students were taunting her in the cafeteria, they told her to keep a low profile and stay out of the cafeteria, according to her court documents.

Eventually, a special prosecutor was appointed. Bolton pleaded guilty to a lesser assault charge and was expelled from the school. He has denied raping H.S., and said it was all a "misunderstanding." The case of codefendant Christian Rountree is still pending.

No matter what the 5th Circuit Court says, it seems outrageous to me that someone can essentially be fired from a job for refusing to cheer for her rapist. But, hey, that's just me.

Bob Egelko's excellent article, explaining the legal landscape of diminishing free speech rights on high school campuses, is HERE. The 5th Circuit ruling is HERE.

Photo: Ultra-conservative jurist Priscilla Owen,
one of three judges who issued the ruling against the cheerleader.

Report: Sexual abuse rampant in U.S. prisons

I will never forget "Sean," a young man I treated in prison. When he first arrived after a minor theft conviction, the 19-year-old was assigned a cell with an older convict who saw him as fresh meat. When Sean reported being raped, he was moved to a segregation housing unit for safety. Solitary housing was like torture for this active young man. After months without stimulation, he tried to hang himself. He was punished by being transferred to a harsher prison.

Sean came to mind when I saw the report released today from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reporting epidemic levels of sexual abuse of prisoners across the United States. At least 88,500 prison and jail inmates were abused last year, many repeatedly. Several facts in the report, mandatory under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, are worth highlighting:

• Guards commit much of the abuse
• Women prisoners are more at risk from other prisoners, while men are most at risk from guards
• Gay, transgender, and effeminate prisoners are at heightened risk, as are prisoners with histories of sexual abuse
• Much of the abuse happens on the first day
  

Graphics credit: Just Detention International

The news comes as no surprise to the folks at Just Detention International, an organization dedicated to ending sexual abuse behind bars. They receive dozens of letters a week from prisoners who are being sexually abused.

• William in Texas wrote that he would misbehave to get locked in the hole just to get away from the guard who was sexually abusing him. He has tried to kill himself, and fears telling his longtime girlfriend.

• James, a gay prisoner in Michigan, has been raped more than 20 times by numerous prisoners. "Do you know what it's like to see their faces each day? Seeing the look they give me? Knowing that they smile and laugh,” he wrote.

A call for research and action by psychology

Just ahead of the report's release, two psychologists published an article in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law calling for more attention to the problem. "To date, psychology has been largely silent on the issue of prison rape," wrote Tess Neal and Carl Clements of the University of Alabama.

In their article, "Prison Rape and Psychological Sequelae: A Call for Research," Neal and Clements call for research into the "rape subculture" that makes sexual victimization more prevalent in American prisons than elsewhere in the world:

It appears that prison rape in the United States is a much more serious problem than it is in other countries. This fact calls for comparative analysis of systems to look for correlates of victimization rates. What is it about the U.S. prison system that exacerbates the problem of prison rape? Some would argue that inordinately high incarceration rates, and policies that capture more persons with mental disorders is part of the systemic problem. Can these conditions be reversed?

They go on to discuss the "serious and long-lasting" effects of prison rape, "with potentially devastating physiological, social, and psychological components":

Many rapes are violent, bloody, and physically traumatic to victims. Gang rapes are often characterized by extreme abuse and may be particularly traumatic. In addition, the threat and reality of contracting HIV/AIDS has added a new dimension of physical and psychological terror for victims. Loss of social status in the prison facility, labeling, stigmatization, and further victimization are other potential consequences for victims…. The postrape symptoms of prison rape survivors may be even more complex and pervasive than those of other types of sexual assaults based on the fact that many victims are repeatedly assaulted, experience negative social reactions from the prison community, including many staff, and may be perceived as homosexual. The humiliation and perceived loss of one's masculinity, as well as the extensive victim blaming found in prisons could perpetuate the negative psychological effects, possibly increasing the risk of developing PTSD.

The role of expert witnesses

Under the 1994 U.S. Supreme Court case of Farmer v. Brennan, prison administrations are liable when they practice "deliberate indifference" to prison rape. Neal and Clements discuss how expert psychological testimony may be useful in such civil litigation, the authors explain, both to explain the psychological sequelae experienced by prisoners and to discuss the environments that foster prison rape. Further research is also needed into the legal atmosphere surrounding such litigation, they note:

Courtroom dynamics in these atypical cases (e.g., when a male prison rape survivor is a plaintiff filing suit against prison officials) need to be examined. Public biases should be identified so that they can be countered with informative testimony to dispel them. Investigations using the diagnosis of PTSD in these circumstances should be initiated to learn more about how jurors respond to the traumatic aspects of prison rape victimization. As research uncovers more accurate descriptions of the psychological sequelae of such victimization, researchers should examine how jurors respond to these new descriptions in a courtroom setting

The full report by BJS statisticians Allen J. Beck and Paige M Harrison is HERE; selected highlights and a press release are HERE. Correspondence concerning the Psychology, Public Policy, and Law should go to Tess Neal of the University of Alabama.

Related blog posts:

• Prison pipeline for transgender youth (March 26, 2008)
• Researching prison rape (Aug. 10, 2009)
• Reports of sexual assault in prison implicate guards (Aug. 18, 2007)

Furor over France’s "pornographic" anti-smoking ads

A French anti-smoking campaign comparing smoking to sex slavery is being accused of everything from dissemination of pornography to insensitivity to child sexual abuse victims.

The ads -- set to be published in newspapers and posted in bars -- feature teens smoking cigarettes in such a way that they look like they might be performing oral sex on a man in a suit. The caption reads, "Smoking means being a slave to tobacco."

"Traditional advertisements targeting teens don't affect them. Talking about issues of health, illness or even death, they don't get it," a spokesperson for the Association for Nonsmokers' Rights told AP in explanation. "However, when we talk about submission and dependence, they listen."

The 16-year-old who alerted me to the controversy thought it was quite a hoot. But the family minister of France is not laughing. She is calling for a ban on the ads as "indecent exposure" and "an affront on public decency." Likewise, a child welfare group called the ads cruel and insensitive toward young child abuse victims. Tobacco company representatives are also incensed at being compared to pedophiles. "It's no longer prevention, but out of place provocation," one tobacco association said on its web site.

Ironically, the advance uproar is giving the anti-smoking campaign so much publicity that it will make the formal ad campaign unnecessary.

Hat tip: Greg

Paraphilic coercive disorder: Contagious virus?

I posted last week about a proposal to create a new mental disorder in the DSM-V for preferential rapists. A shocking news story out of Australia makes me think that if Coercive Paraphilic Disorder exists, it must be contagious. Not just contagious, but virulently contagious in certain all-male environments.

Of the 198 students at St Paul's College at the University of Sydney, a large proportion were apparently infected with a highly contagious form of the virus. If Paraphilic Coercive Disorder makes it into the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, St. Paul's will be Ground Zero for the epidemic.

According to an article in today's Sydney Morning Herald, men at the elite, all-male college proudly set up a pro-rape Facebook group called "Define Statutory" that promoted sexual aggression against women. But the elite students did not stop with words. They fostered an alcohol-fueled climate in which rapes were common, most sexual assaults went unreported, and women students felt so unsafe that they quit school, the story reports.

Reporter Ruth Pollard documented a series of rapes and sexual assaults, including one incident in which about 30 drunk, naked men broke into a college and surrounded a young woman, touching and taunting her.

The good news is that, if it's a contagious illness, there could be an immunization like the one for the H1N1 virus. So, while the DSM developers are frenetically creating new diagnoses, let's not forget to work on finding some cures, too.

The Sydney Morning Herald article is HERE.