Articles About Sex Offenders

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Jewish Articles

1. The Awareness Center's Brochure  

2. Heinous Crime  (12/22/1992)

3. Helping bad boys be better (April 28, 2000)

4. Testimony of Rabbi David Saperstein, Director, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism - In Support of The Prison Rape Reduction Act of 2002   (07/31/2002)

5. Can Sex Offenders Ever Be Cured?  (08/07/2002)

6. When A Family Member Molests: Reality, Conflict, and The Need For Support  (October, 2003)

7. When Melodies, Torah Scholars, and Abuse Collide  (2003)

8. Prison Service: More and more inmates turning to religion  (10/12/2005)

Secular Articles

1. Do Sexually Abused Kids Become Abusers?

2. Experts say pedophilia may never be cured

3. Explaining Pedophilia - What Is Pedophilia?

4. Sex Offender Behaviors

5. "Grooming" or Setting Up Your Victim

6. What is grooming?

7. Lock up sex offenders

8. To Prevent Sexual Abuse, Abusers Step Forward

9. The Making of a Molester

10. US Department of Justice: Sex Offender Management - Recidivism of Sex Offenders (2001)

11. What is DARVO? ("Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.")

12. Who are sex offenders? (06/14/05)

13. Oprah Show - Series on Sex Offenders

    • Kidnapped by a pedophile: the Shasta Groene tragedy; discussion of child predators and how we as a nation can get child predators off the streets  (10/04/2005)

    • Oprah captures child molesters; Oprah viewers help in the arrests of two child molesters  (10/11/2005)

    • The Day I Found Out My husband was a child molester  (01/13/2006)

14. Accord on Bill to Detain Sex Offenders  (03/01/2007)

15. Doubts Rise as States Hold Sex Offenders After Prison (03/04/2007)

16. For Sex Offenders, a Dispute Over Therapy's Benefits (03/06/2007)

Heinous Crime

By H. Ginsberg

The Jerusalem Post - December 22, 1992, Tuesday  SECTION: Opinion

Sir, - I read with horror and rage a small news report on December 7, "Rapist gets 28 months." Judge Aharon Tomashoff handed down a sentence of five years to the rapist of a five-year-old.  The criminal was a relative of the girl for whom he was a babysitter. As usual, the name of the criminal was not printed.  Why is the name of the rapist is never noted in such articles?

To emphasize the travesty of justice, the sympathetic judge took into consideration that the perpetrator of this heinous crime had no prior record and so suspended 32 months of the sentence. So the criminal sits in jail for two years while the child will suffer for the rest of her life.

H. GINSBERG, Kibbutz Misgav Am.

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Committee on the Judiciary - United States Senate

July 31, 2002

Contact: Alexis Rice or Michael Weiner 202-387-2800

http://www.rac.org/news/073102a.html

Rabbi SapersteinGood afternoon. I am Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and I'm pleased to join you today to speak in support of the Prison Rape Reduction Act of 2002. This important legislation would address a profound violation of human rights whose shameful prevalence has been overlooked in this country for far too long.

First, let me commend Senators Kennedy and Sessions and Representatives Wolf and Scott for their passionate, bipartisan leadership on this issue. We could not ask for congressional champions more dedicated to upholding the basic values of human dignity. Their example should demonstrate to all Americans our shared capacity to transcend religious, ideological, and partisan differences and unite behind a common vision of fundamental decency on issues where core principles are at stake.

The scourge of prison rape is just such an issue: Studies show that nearly 25 percent of the more than two million individuals in federal and state prisons across the country will be the victims of some form of sexual assault or harassment during their period of incarceration. In a typical state prison, one in 10 prisoners will be the victim of a completed rape. Once so brutalized, victims are far more likely to be victims of repeated rape. These are staggering statistics that should by themselves arouse the moral outrage of all people of conscience.

The comprehensive Human Rights Watch report No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons reminds us, however, that these statistics represent traumatic incidents of violent abuse that have been perpetrated upon real people. The report contains information from more than 200 prisoners in 34 states, and notes that in addition to the often "unimaginably vicious and brutal" physical effects of sexual assault, prison rape victims also suffer serious and enduring psychological stress, manifesting itself through "nightmares, deep depression, shame, loss of self-esteem, self-hatred, and considering or attempting suicide. Some of them also describe a marked increase in anger and a tendency toward violence." And tragically, AIDS, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases devastate lives physically and emotionally. Sadly, too many prison officials turn their backs on the problem, or even worse, encourage it as a means of control.

All religious traditions teach that the ultimate judgment of a society depends on how it treats the most vulnerable of its inhabitants. Certainly, incarcerated individuals fit into this category. No matter what crime a person has committed, no one deserves to be brutally raped as a condition of his or her punishment. But for too many people in the American penal system, prison rape is merely par for the course.

We must not allow this terror to continue. The bill at issue today provides a responsible, measured approach to the problem, setting up mechanisms for the study, reporting, and prevention of prison rape. Most importantly, the legislation promises to bring to the forefront a tragic plague that is too often a punch line and too rarely a subject of genuine concern in our civic life.

The Prison Rape Reduction Act would direct the Justice Department to set up three programs to address the problem: one to collect and publish comprehensive information, one to serve as a clearinghouse for the reporting of sexual assaults in prison and to provide training and assistance to prison officials, and one to make grants to state and local programs aimed at preventing and punishing prison rape. Further, the bill would establish a national commission charged with setting standards for averting sexual misconduct in penal facilities and able to play a critical role in educating the American public on this crisis. As one who was honored to serve as the chair of a federal commission established by a unanimous act of Congress, I can testify to the potential of such commissions to be a vitally effective goad to executive and legislative officials and to the public conscience.

These reforms would, for the first time, signal a serious engagement with the problem by the federal government. Such an engagement is vital, because turning our back on prison rape would not only violate the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment, it would also mean betraying our most fundamental moral values, which tell us unequivocally that if we can prevent another person from being viciously attacked, we must.

I'm here today to tell you that we can prevent prison rape; we should prevent prison rape; and we must prevent prison rape.

Because of the profound moral clarity of the issue, a remarkable coalition of conscience has come together in support of this legislation. Jewish, mainline Protestant, Evangelical, and Unitarian groups, civil rights, human rights, and criminal justice reform advocates, health care professionals and youth workers, liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between - we all believe that prison rape is wrong, and that we can, and must, do something about it.

Some of us work together frequently; others less so. For example, it is not so common that Reform Jews and conservative Evangelicals find common ground to work together, but when we do, you can be sure that the issue at stake is one that cuts to the heart of a principle so basic that no reasonable person can stand in the way of its genuine manifestation.

We have joined together in the past on issues of similarly essential principle. Our common concern for the world's poor brought us to the table to advocate international debt relief. Our common disgust at the most foul human rights violations drives our work to prevent international sex trafficking and to end slavery in the Sudan. Our common understanding of the ennobling power of religious belief guides our quest for religious freedom, and to end religious persecution both at home and around the world.

One of the Torah's most radical innovations was to put forward the notion that human beings are created b'tselem elohim - in the image of God. The use of divine terminology to describe the human state serves to raise up humankind, to proclaim the infinite worth and potential of each individual person.

The implications of such a concept are far-reaching and profound, imposing on individuals and societies the obligation never to degrade others, to recognize the potential in all for redemption, and to assist the most vulnerable.

That this includes the prisoner is clearly reflected in the Bible in two separate places, where it pronounces a prohibition on raping those captured in war (imprisonment for criminal activity was not known in the ancient Jewish world), both women (Deuteronomy 21:10-16) and men (Deuteronomy 23:16-17). Intrinsically, rape is regarded as a vile sin - under some circumstances, the Bible holds rape to be a civil wrong that requires payment of damages by the perpetrator as compensation for pain, suffering, shame, and blemish (Deut. 22:28-29); in others, rape is categorized as a capital offense (Deut.22:25).

We must recognize that to allow the epidemic of prison rape to continue unabated is to reject the spirit of the divine that connects us all. Therefore, I urge the members of this committee to join with Senators Kennedy and Sessions in supporting the Prison Rape Reduction Act.

Thank you for your time.

###

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is the Washington office of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), whose 900 congregations across North America encompass 1.5 million Reform Jews, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis(CCAR) whose membership includes over 1800 Reform rabbis.

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Commonly Asked Questions About Sexual Abuse (Part Two)

By Yechezkel Chezi Goldberg

The Jewish Press - August 7, 2002

http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=1429

With specialized treatment and adequate support groups, a sex offender who accepts full accountability for his or her crime can learn to control his or her abusive behavior. The public holds the myth that sex offenders have the highest recidivism rate of any crime. In reality, the recidivism rate for most sex offenders is quite low, even lower when the abuser gets specialized treatment as part of his or her criminal sentence.

Like many other diseases and dysfunctions (like alcoholism) we cannot expect a cure, but we can expect and demand control of behavior throughout a lifetime. When people who abuse have the support and "tough love" of their friends and families, they are more likely to complete their treatment programs and live productive, abuse-free lives.

Ohel founded just such a program a few years ago in Brooklyn. After being approached by DA Charlie Hynes about secrecy in the Orthodox community, a secrecy that ends up protecting pedophiles from prosecution, Ohel took the initiative and created a program to answer the need. Any pedophile from the community brought before a judge is given the choice of entering the Ohel Support Program for Pedophiles, or going to jail. The last I spoke to David Mandel from Ohel about the program, there were 16 pedophiles who had molested thousands between them before entering the program.

Pedophiles have a disease. Ohel has taken the lead in offering them a way to live and overcome their lust disease. Those who would like more information about the program should contact Ohel directly.

Are All Sexual Abusers The Same? Do They All Pose The Same Risk To Re-Offend?

No, not all abusers are the same. Like any other population, there is a wide range of behavior and a variety of people who sexually abuse children.

It is important to keep in mind what the experts state about sexual abuse. Children who are abused, if they are not promptly treated therapeutically, will often turn around at some point in their lives and become abusers. Some will react this way sooner, and others will suddenly find themselves acting out sexually years later.

This is important for parents to know. ``Molestation`` is not something that goes away. Time itself does not heal victims of sexual abuse. As painful as it is to hear about one`s child being molested, and as much as parents of child sex abuse victims wish that the nightmare would just disappear, it is crucial to face the painful reality of what happened and to seek out competent treatment for any child who has suffered sexual abuse. This is to prevent the child from turning around and becoming an abuser and is to ensure that the perpetrator of the abuse does not roamfreely preying on other children.

There is a positive side to all of this. With specialized treatment and full accountability for their crimes, many abusers can change and never offend again. However, child sexual abuse in any form is a crime and must be dealt with first through the legal system.

There is no escaping the legal ramifications. People who are aware of sexual abuse that is ongoing and fail to report it to the authorities, are compromising themselves legally. If at some time in the future, police do get involved and in their investigations the law finds out that you knew and did not report, you can be held legally responsible.

That being said, ultimately, if a pedophile admits his problem, then we do what we can to help him get help. The goal is to get everyone who wants to change into the best treatment available and help him never to hurt a child again.

Why Do People Sexually Abuse Children?

People abuse children for a sense of power and a sense of pleasure. They may seek children to abuse because they have had a long history of sexual attraction to children, or because they took advantage of an opportunity to abuse a child in their trust. They may have started abusing because they had been abused before, or because they never learned that the behavior is wrong and is a crime.

How Can We Keep Our Children Safe From Sex Offenders?

We need to teach children about safety. We, as adults, also need to learn more about abuse and abusers. This is the first step. Read what you can about sexual abuse. Become wiser. Check out resources in your community. Surf the Internet to quickly gain access to more in-depth knowledge on the topic. Then, once you feel that you understand the basics, you can start to talk to your children about sexual abuse.

Here are some things that you and your family can do to prevent the sexual abuse of a child you know and love.

Adults need to:

• Watch for signs of possible sexual abusiveness in adults, between adults and children, and in children.

• Show by example in your own life, how to say "no" when someone you know and care about does something you do not like.

• Set and respect family boundaries.

• Speak up when you see "warning sign" behaviors.

• Practice talking about difficult topics such as sexual abuse with other adults.

• Teach children the proper names of body parts.

• Teach children the difference between "ok touch" and touch that is "not ok".

• Teach children that secrets about touching are "not ok."

• Set up a family safety plan that is easy to remember.

• Complete a list for yourself of whom to call for advice, information, and help.

Yechezkel Chezi Goldberg is a Jerusalem counselor. In his clinic he deals extensively as a counselor for overseas yeshiva, seminary and university students in Israel. Contact information is 972-2-58-000-41. E-mail address: cheziscorner@yahoo.com. Postal address: 13 Noam Elimelech St., Beitar Illit 99879, Israel.

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By Dan Williams

The Jerusalem Post - April 28, 2000, Friday, FEATURES; Pg. 5B

Dan Williams spends a day at Sharon Prison's juvenile ward and talks to the boys and their caretakers about rehabilitation

A seat was left vacant at the Seder held in Sharon Prison's juvenile ward last week in memory of 17-year-old D., who had hanged himself in his isolation cell three days earlier.

The ward staff insisted on the gesture, having noticed that their own consternation at D.'s drastic act was not shared by the inmates.

"The boys accepted the suicide with equanimity," says Betty Lahat, warden of Sharon Prison. "They think he was very brave, and he's become something of an admired figure."

D., who was serving a two-year sentence for assault, was put into isolation after almost killing another inmate in a fight.

"The others know that D. always carried everything to the extreme, and now they figure that he just wanted to end it all," Lahat adds.

Though suicides are rare events at the ward, according to its director, Itamar Yefet, at any one time there are about 30 boys on the "danger list." These are closely monitored to make sure they don't harm themselves or others, and anything in their possession that could be used as a weapon is confiscated.

Nonetheless, Lahat says, if an inmate is determined to kill himself, ultimately he will succeed. Besides, she says, the problem exists well beyond the prison walls. Conversations with her own teenage son have convinced her that "boys of this age haven't any value for life."

This truism seems to be borne out by the fact that Israel has no similar facility for girls.

And the hazards of puerile recklessness and rebellion are magnified tenfold at the Sharon Prison's juvenile ward, the country's only facility for under-aged felons. That's why, say both Lahat and Yefet, a special mix of vigilance, strictness, and sensitivity is required at all times.

THERE are approximately 100 boys aged 14 to 17 at the ward, the number varying as arrested juveniles are brought in for lockup pending trial. They are kept in complete isolation from Sharon's 400 adult inmates.

Most of the young convicts are serving three month- to three-year terms for larceny or drug offenses, some four- to seven-year terms for rape, a handful 25 years for murder.

The ward is divided into three cell blocks: Brosh is the most spare, housing new arrivals and inmates who have been punished or isolated from the others for their own protection, while Erez and Gefen are decorated and more comfortable, allowing the inmates to mingle.

The boys bunk two to a cell, but sometimes a third friend will sleep on a mattress on the floor.

Apart from the bars in the windows, the cells, with their music posters, pin-ups, and coffee paraphernalia, recall the accommodation at many Israeli boarding schools.

Most of the boys come from broken homes, Yefet says, where they never learned the importance of trust.

"From the beginning, we match each with a cellmate we feel will not influence him for the worse, and with whom he can develop a rapport," he says.

Often, Yefet adds, a boy will warn the staff if his cellmate is feeling despondent or is at risk of committing suicide because of a fight he had with the others, helping prevent tragedy.

Roll-call, lock-up, and lights-out is at 9 p.m., and at 7 a.m the inmates are woken up for breakfast. The food - standard three-course fare, much like at kibbutzim or army bases - is delivered from the main prison refectory, and the boys are also given snacks throughout the day.

Twice a month, they can buy their own supply of chocolates, chips, and other junk food at a canteen set up especially for them. Chewing gum, however, is off-limits, lest it be used to block up keyholes.

The boys' currency is tokens they earn for good behavior or for doing errands around the compound. They are also awarded for attending matriculation classes given by teachers from the ORT school system, at an enviable ratio of eight pupils to a teacher.

There are further education opportunities in the weight room, in the kitchen, and, as of this month, in the NIS 300,000 computer room.

"To us, one juvenile inmate is like 10 adult prisoners in terms of expense, but there's no other choice," says Yefet. "Look outside, at how much is invested in children; their schooling, clothes, activities. We have to give these kids the same investment so they can return to the world."

"FOR YOUTHS, the whole legal system is different," says Prisons Service spokeswoman Levana Levy-Shay. "From the courts, the social services, to the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry's juvenile department, they separate them from other criminals."

More than 30,000 police files involving juveniles were opened in 1999, up 8 percent from the previous year, completing a decade in which youth crime rose significantly every year. However, Dep.-Cmdr. Suzy Ben-Baruch, head of the Israel Police Juvenile Crime Section, says that the statistics paradoxically reflect the success of enforcement efforts.

"Following all the murders of children by children over the past two years - in Rishon Lezion, Upper Nazareth, and Jerusalem - there was a national outcry, and we increased our staff and operation," she says.

"Because there is more work in the field, more crime is uncovered."

The police's Unit for Preventing Youth Crime has been doubled in size, and the 70 juvenile units nationwide have been beefed up with volunteers, social workers, and special agents who monitor street gangs.

Moreover, six new regional detective units have been opened, and half have already infiltrated some 200 high schools to break up drug rings.

Dr. Malka Alek of Bar-Ilan University's psychology faculty concurs with Ben-Baruch's assessment.

"I think there is more crime," she says, "but there is also greater awareness and concern, and greater willingness to uncover criminal incidents by agencies that feared they would be seen as not so good; for example, schools that feared the bad press of exposing crimes in their midst."

Alek believes the various agencies dealing with troubled youths - the welfare officers, the boarding schools and halfway homes - should coordinate their efforts better. However, at the same time, she notes approvingly that the system uses incarceration in the juvenile ward only as a last resort.

THOSE inmates who turn 18 before serving out their sentence are transferred to a normal penitentiary, sometimes joining the adult inmates of Sharon Prison.

Otherwise, there is no overlap between the two prisoner communities. Even arranging for the boys to use the prison's sports pitch requires elaborate coordination to ensure they don't come into contact with their grown-up counterparts.

This confinement, says Yefet, is a deliberate effort to turn the ward into "a sort of greenhouse," where a new sense of responsibility and pride can be cultivated in the boys before they are returned to normal society.

The exception to this is the Shalhevet program, where an adult convict near the end of his term and who has passed a special training course speaks with the youths, offering himself as a cautionary example of where crime leads. There are also three psychologists on staff to provide counseling.

Given that many of the inmates have never had proper adult attention, they sometimes initially respond to the discipline with reflex rebellion.

According to Yefet, one favored form of inmate protest is carving their arms with pieces of wire. Recently, one boy bit a guard.

Lahat says the staff members have to be unyielding in punishing the boys, but are careful to be encouraging at the same time.

"If you give them a punishment, say isolation for a boy who threw boiling water on another inmate, they don't believe they'll come out of it," she says.

"They can begin to despair. You have to give them reason to be optimistic, tell them they'll get another chance."

The younger the criminal the more chance there is at rehabilitation, says Yefet, adding that once the boys reach their twenties the process gets harder. "At a young age, a boy is impressionable, he finds it hard to make decisions. But if you manage to get through to him, you get through all the way."

"GOD WILLING, my four-year sentence will be cut for good behavior," says Z., a soft-spoken 17-year-old who hopes to begin a career as a graphic designer.

He chats about the computer classes, the once-monthly visits from his siblings, and the tolerable schnitzel sandwiches. But he declines to discuss the reason for his incarceration - rape.

Similarly, 15-year-old S., who got 25 years for molesting and murdering a five-year-old girl, is reluctant to discuss his crime. He prefers to complain about the fact that Lahat, fearing he'll try to escape, has confined him to his cell block until the ward's main quadrangle is covered with fencing.

Lahat and Yefet are careful to treat sexual offenders, and other inmates whose crimes are especially repugnant, with the same decency afforded all the boys. But this does not mean the crime is forgotten.

"As long as he denies committing it, we don't even let him leave for furloughs," Lahat says. "And when he finally admits to it, he starts going though group therapy, run by a specialist in juvenile sex crimes.

"It's a very long-term process."

"Maybe he'll be able to get over his problem," adds Yefet.

"Maybe, thanks to treatment available here in the prison, where, after all, he'll spend six or seven years of his life, he'll develop some sort of mechanism to make sure there won't be another victim who suffers."

Alek claims such optimism is unfounded. "Imprisonment (in the juvenile ward) is completely worthless in terms of rehabilitation and treatment," she says. "The prison sentence is a sort of surrender."

Levy-Shay confirms that there is no reason to believe that Israel's 70 to 75 percent recidivism rate does not equally apply to juvenile convicts.

Nonetheless, the staff at the Sharon Prison juvenile ward remain determined to focus on that quarter-chance of rehabilitation.

"We'll give each inmate all the services available," says Yefet. "I don't see it as an indulgence, or that the institution is too pleasant or nice.

"We want to return him to society, if not completely reformed, then at least somehow improved."

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By Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondent

Haaretz - Ocxtober 12, 2005

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/634497.html   

Convicted murderer Ami Popper, who is serving a 40-year prison sentence for the murder of seven Arab workers in Rishon Letzion in May 1990, wears a white shirt and a kippah (yarmulke), and his face is framed by a beard. He lives in Wing 8 of the Ma'asiyahu Prison in Ramle, which is occupied entirely by religiously observant prisoners.

Over the past decade, Popper, 36, has "become strengthened," as the phrase goes - he entered prison as an utterly secular person, but under lock and key drew closer to religion. On Tuesday afternoon Popper refused to grant an interview, as usual, but was full of praise for the prison's rabbis who are accompanying him on his path.

Popper is not alone: Some 70 prisoners, many of whom have commited crimes such as rape, indecent assault and murder, occupy the religious wing at Ma'asiyahu. Two other such wings exist in the Ayalon prison in Ramle, and at the Dekel prison in Be'er Sheba. The Prisons Service notes a dramatic 50 percent rise in the number of prisoners who have returned to religion - two years ago some 250 prisoners attended religious study classes at the prisons, while the number has recently climbed to 550, and is expected to climb higher.

The Prisons Service cannot quite put a finger on the reasons behind the prisoners' spiritual awakening. Some officers say the prisoners are an accurate reflection of broader societal trends, while others say that once prisoners begin to pay their debt to society they become aware of the emptiness of their lives, and try to fill them with content.

Others speak of a "herd mentality" whereby prisoners who see their friends "enter the tents of Torah" also want to join in. Rabbi Moshe Toledano, chief rabbi of the Prisons Service, describes the trend as a "spiritual thirst" and says: "I myself find it hard to absorb how dramatically the numbers of religious and newly religious prisoners has risen."

The Prisons Service rejects the explanation that prisoners are attracted because of privileges received in the religious program, including being exempt from wearing the prison uniform. On the contrary, they point to the religious wings' strict codes of conduct: no television, no newspapers, early morning prayer, Sabbath observation, Torah study.

"The prisoners sign their agreement to these conditions, and those who violate them leave the wing," says Toledano. "There are others on the waiting list."

Over the past few days prisoners from Wing 8 at Ma'asiyauh have been erecting a huge Sukkah - the booth built outdoors during the Feast of Tabernacles - in the courtyard adjacent to the prison cells. Still lacking a green canopy and decorations, on this morning it is already full of prisoners studying Talmud and Halakha. S., a 19-year-old from Jerusalem serving a 10-month sentence for property crimes, says his father is a well-known rabbi from the capital, but that despite his family lineage, he "lost the path."

"I was reckless, a pleasure-monger," says S. "This is not my first prison sentence. All told, I have already spent close to three years in prison. Now I feel like I'm getting close to religion again. I've come to the conclusion that for every pleasure I sought I received a slap in the face. Something always happened that made me regret the fun I had. I realized there was no choice but to `become strengthened'."

As part of their return to the fold, prisoners often visit the graves of saints: prisoners from Negev jails go to prostrate themselves on the grave of the Baba Sali in Netivot, while prisoners in the center and the north go to the graves of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai on Mount Meron, or to Amuka, where it is customary for single men and women to ask the saint for a suitable match. In the past few weeks, the residents of the religious wings rise well before dawn for the traditional Selihot prayers. Though they remain groggy-eyed throughout the day, the prisoners don't complain.

Director of Ma'asiyahu Prison, Brigadier General Rami Ovadiah, says that some 50 percent of the prisoners in the religious wing were convicted for sexual crimes, incest or pedophilia. He believes that the religious wings have supreme reformative value: "In many cases new immigrants who had no exposure at all to religion hear the prayers over and over again and ask to join the activity," Ovadiah says. "They feel they can imbue their life with content. Suddenly a door is opened for them."

The Prisons Service statistics reveal that most prisoners who complete their sentences will return at some point because of involvement in other crimes, with the rate of recidivism at 65 percent. However, among religious prisoners recidivism is only 8.5 percent. The Prisons Service also report relative quiet in the religious wings, almost no incidents of violence and few disciplinary problems.

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Do Sexually Abused Kids Become Abusers?

Study Shows Family Violence, Neglect Are Important Risk Factors

By Salynn Boyles

http://my.webmd.com/content/article/60/67158.htm?lastselectedguid={5FE84E90-BC77-4056-A91C-9531713CA348}

Feb. 6, 2003 -- It is widely believed that boys who are victims of sexual abuse become abusers themselves. Studies of pedophiles suggest this often is the case, but new research shows that the risk may be smaller than previously thought.

Roughly one in 10 male victims of child sex abuse in a U.K. study later went on to abuse children as adults. But the risk was far greater for sexually victimized children who came from severely dysfunctional families. Family history of violence, sexual abuse by a female, maternal neglect, and lack of supervision were all associated with a threefold-increased risk that the abused would become an abuser. The study is reported in the Feb. 8 issue of The Lancet.

"The message here is that sexual victimization alone is not sufficient to suggest a boy is likely to grow up to become a sex offender," study author and psychiatrist Arnon Bentovim tells WebMD. "But our study does show that abused boys who grow up in families where they are exposed to a great deal of violence or neglect are at particular risk."

Bentovim and colleagues from London's Institute of Child Health identified 224 adult male victims of child sexual abuse whose childhood medical and social service records were available for review. They then searched arrest and prosecution records to determine their later criminal activity. Most of the subjects were 20 years old or older when the study was conducted.

Twenty-six of the 224 sex abuse victims (12%) later committed sexual offenses, and in almost all cases their victims were also children. Abused children who came from families where violence was common were more than three times as likely to become abusers as were those who experienced maternal neglect and sexual abuse by females.

One-third of the adult abusers had been cruel to animals as children, compared with just 5% of the child abuse victims who did not grow up to commit sexual crimes. But abusers and nonabusers experienced similar levels of physical abuse as children, and there were few significant differences in the severity or characteristics of the sexual abuse they suffered.

"It is clear that prevention of sexual abuse involves not just treating the victim, but ensuring that the family environment is safe," Bentovim says. "If you leave a child in a family situation where he continues to be subjected to abuse, even if it is not sexual, you are probably wasting your time."

Child health specialist Paul Bouvier, MD, tells WebMD that the real incidence of abused boys becoming pedophiles themselves is probably higher than the U.K. study suggests because it only included sexual predators who had been caught.

In an editorial accompanying the study, Bouvier argues that much can be learned by studying child sexual abuse victims who do not go on to become sexual predators or experience long-lasting trauma.

"It is quite important to know the risks for these children to have a bad outcome," he tells WebMD. "But it is also important to look at those who are resilient and who don't become abusers later in life. What are the characteristics of those who evolve beyond this experience and go on to have a meaningful life?"

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by Jane Reuter

Summit Daily News - May 8, 2003

http://www.summitdaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2003305080103

SUMMIT COUNTY - District Attorney Mark Hurlbert said he sees several child sexual abuse cases in Summit County every year. In most cases, the perpetrator is not a stranger.

"Most of the time it's a parent," he said. But most of the time, because publicity on such cases can further traumatize the victims, the cases are kept out of the limelight. "I see them multiple times a year. In Summit County, I don't think we're quite into the double digits yet."

Hurlbert, like Mountain Counseling Center counselor Chad Spears, said the young victims of sexual abuse suffer from the encounters well into adulthood, sometimes for life. Two Summit County men violated as boys by convicted sex offender Joe Hildyard became addicted to drugs. One of them, Seth Astuto, eventually committed suicide. Sadly, Spears said, those stories don't surprise him.

"Men actually take it worse than women do in a lot of ways, because men are supposed to be tough and deal with things," said Spears, who for years worked with pedophiles before counseling sexual abuse victims. "Especially when it is a male sexually abusing another male, it carries the stigma of sexual abuse and also the trauma of the same-sex occurrence."

In his 15 years of working with victims of sexual abuse, Spears said only about 5 percent of his patients have been men.

Despite the trauma victims endure, many of them return to the perpetrator time and again. Spears admits that appears difficult to understand, but said the offender generally gains control of the victims.

"The adult either convinces them that they're worthless or that they really like it," he said. "They play mind games with them. They sometimes threaten. They tell them they'll hurt somebody they care about, or, if they tell, their parents won't love them. They're very, very manipulative."

Spears said new research suggests pedophiles may suffer from a brain defect.

"There are things that are supposed to be abhorrent to us and child abuse is one of them," he said. "It appears there may just be some kind of wiring in the brain (of a pedophile) that didn't hook up like it was supposed to.

"I don't think you ever cure a pedophile, but you sometimes can try to get them to not do it anymore."

Research shows pedophiles have a high rate of repeat offenses - with study statistics varying between 65 and 80 percent.

Other research suggests offenders have an excess of testosterone, a belief that gives credence to the idea that chemical castration will put an end to the deviant behavior.

A Texas man convicted of child molestation firmly believed that. Larry McQuay, who was paroled in 1996 after serving time for abusing a child, asked Texas authorities to castrate him before he was freed. Without the procedure, McQuay - who admitted to molesting more than 240 children - warned he might reoffend. His request was denied, and McQuay walked free in 1996.

"There's no question they know it's wrong," Spears said. "But you certainly hear a lot of rationalizations."

Hurlbert agreed.

"I've had sex offenders say sex with a 5- or 6-year-old was consensual, that (the kids) wanted it," he said. "They'll say (the children) were curious about things and, "I wanted them to learn it from me and not anybody else.'"

Signs of Possible Abuse

• Explanation of injury to a child not believable

• Repetitive injuries without adequate explanation

• Inconsistent explanations of injury

• Significant and sudden mood change - perhaps more withdrawn, poor concentration or more aggression

• Lack of interest in usual activities

• Decrease in school performance

- From the Kempe Children's Center, a Denver-based agency on prevention and treatment of child abuse

Impact of Child Sexual Abuse

• It is estimated 60 million survivors of childhood sexual abuse live in America today.

• Approximately 31 percent of women in prison state they had been abused as children.

• Approximately 95 percent of teenage prostitutes have been sexually abused.

• Long-term effects of child abuse include fear, anxiety, depression, anger, hostility, inappropriate sexual behavior, poor self esteem, tendency toward substance abuse and difficulty with close relationships.

• Adolescents with a history of sexual abuse are significantly more likely than their counterparts to engage in sexual behavior that puts them at risk for HIV infection.

• Young girls who are forced to have sex are three times more likely to develop psychiatric disorders or abuse alcohol and drugs in adulthood than girls who are not sexually abused.

• Among both adolescent girls and boys, a history of sexual or physical abuse appears to increase the risk of eating disorders.

- From the prevent-abuse-now.com Web site

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By Martin Downs

http://my.webmd.com/content/article/14/1687_51642.htm?lastselectedguid={5FE84E90-BC77-4056-A91C-9531713CA348}

Recent revelations about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have put pedophilia in the national spotlight like never before. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- all the loud headlines and lurid accounts of child molestation, many people still don't understand what this mental illness is all about.

The biggest misunderstanding many people have is that pedophilia and homosexuality are one and the same. But to say that all homosexuals are pedophiles, or that all pedophiles are homosexual, is like comparing apples to rat poison. "They certainly are two distinct things," says James Hord, a psychologist in Panama City, Fla., who specializes in treating sexually abused children.

Hord explains that while some pedophiles may prefer boys over girls, or vice versa, it's not so much about gender as it is about age. For homosexuals, Hord says, sexual preference is "simply not linked to the age." If a man, for instance, is attracted to other adult males, he is a homosexual. A man who is sexually attracted to male children is not considered a homosexual: He is a pedophile.

As with all things sexual, however, it's not always so simple. Heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual men and women may become sexually attracted to children even though they're also attracted to adults. When this happens, it's usually because of insecurity or stress in an adult relationship, says Anthony Siracusa, a psychologist in Williamstown, Mass., who specializes in treating abused kids and sexual offenders.

These people, Siracusa says, are called "regressed offenders" because they have literally regressed: They lose the social skills they need to deal with other adults, which makes children more attractive to them. Regressed offenders may "bounce back and forth" between normal sexual relationships and criminal relations with children.

Insecurity, Hord agrees, is at the heart of pedophilia. Typically, pedophiles have trouble relating to people their own age. They need to feel they have power and control in a relationship, which is easy with children. One pedophile, "PwC," attests to this, writing on a pedophilia Web site:

"I'm 21 years old, and a virgin, I've never even kissed a girl. I have no job, and can't keep one. I'm frustrated that I'm a virgin, and it seems very unlikely that I'll ever get the kind of woman I want, and I'm desperate, because I need love. I never have molested a little girl, never! I want to though, I'm truly desperate. I want to hold a little girl in my arms, and tell her I love her, and that I'll keep her safe, and protect her, that appeals to me greatly."

This man is remorseful, but there are plenty of pedophiles who are not. Men and women who molest kids "for sport," as Hord puts it, are the most dangerous. They are also the ones who try to justify their sexual preference, arguing that pedophilia should be "normalized," just like homosexuality has been.

Homosexuality was, in fact, listed as a mental illness in psychiatry's main reference book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, until the third edition came out in 1980. This edition included a category for homosexuals who were troubled by their sexuality and wanted to change it. All mention of homosexuality, however, was purged from the manual by 1987.

"It was well overdue," Siracusa says.

According to a 1994 statement from the American Psychiatric Association, the change came after decades of research showed that "a significant portion of gay and lesbian people were clearly satisfied with their sexual orientation" and showed no signs of mental illness. "It was also found that homosexuals were able to function effectively in society, and those who sought treatment most often did so for reasons other than their homosexuality."

Mental health professionals agree that pedophilia should never be considered normal, because it is truly a disease. None of the things that make homosexuality a normal variation of human sexuality apply to pedophilia.

Sadly, there is no "cure" for the disease. Therapy combined with drugs like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) works well for many people with other mental illnesses, but it doesn't work for most pedophiles. The best doctors can really hope for is to help keep pedophiles from acting on their urges.

More Than Innocence Lost

The first thing that jumps to mind when we hear about a child having been sexually abused is the "loss of innocence." But that's our reaction, not necessarily the child's.

Although you may shudder to hear it, the fact is that young children may enjoy the experience. It's not until later in life, as they mature sexually, that these kids realize what happened to them was bad, and they begin to have problems.

"All cases result in some harmful effects," Hord says, even though problems may not show up until years or even decades after the abuse happened.

Abused kids are hurt in different ways depending on whether the abuser was a stranger or a beloved figure in the child's life, like a parent. "To treat those two children the same is just nonsense," Hord says. In cases where a parent commits sexual abuse, "We have a very confused child," he says.

Children who are molested by loved ones often feel tremendous guilt for having reported the abuse, which is not typically the case when the offender is a stranger. When abuse happens in the family, "The child is groomed into that circumstance," Siracusa says. As it goes on over time, he or she accepts it as the norm, and it becomes a matter of balance in the family. The child wants to be good and help keep the family running smoothly. Once the child realizes that the sexual relationship is wrong and tells someone about it, "They've now unsettled the balance," Siracusa says.

Often, "The family feels victimized by the child's disclosure," he says. The guilt-ridden child may then take back the statement, denying that anything ever happened. This causes even more problems for everyone involved.

Hord says that when he's dealing with these children in therapy, he tries not to focus on the abuser any more than he has to. It doesn't help the child, he says, to explain that this beloved adult is a criminal, a monster, or a sick person. "I try not to offer any more explanations than the child demands," he says. "The child will develop an answer that makes sense to the child."

In the long run, sexual abuse during childhood can lead to just about any kind of mental problem, including depression, alcohol or drug abuse, and anxiety disorders. Some, but not all abused children go on to become pedophiles themselves. Right away, abused kids may have trouble sleeping and eating. They may revert to thumb sucking and bed wetting. They may act out or withdraw. But to read a list like this can be misleading, Hord says, because all these things might be caused by something else.

According the American Psychological Association, there are clearer signs: Abused children may know more about sex than you have taught them, or they may have an "inappropriate" interest in sex for their age, which may include acting out sexually with others. (Experimenting with masturbation is normal, however.)

If a child tells you that he or she has been sexually abused -- although probably not in those words -- that's the clearest sign of all. Children rarely lie about it.

Keeping Wolves at Bay

Most kids who are molested know the perpetrator, so "don't take candy from strangers" doesn't always apply. You have to tell your kids that no adult should touch them -- or ask to be touched -- in any way that's confusing or scary. Teach children to say, "no," and to tell you immediately if it happens. You should also teach them that no adult should ever ask them to keep a touch or a kiss secret.

The Kidscape Charity for Children's Safety, in London, interviewed 91 pedophiles about their methods for choosing child victims. The researchers found that pedophiles are skilled at charming children into their trust, plying them with gifts, and taking them on fun outings. They "often target single-parent families where mothers might be especially grateful for help with looking after the children." Nearly one-half of the pedophiles the researchers spoke to met the children they molested through babysitting.

You should be suspicious of someone who seems overly interested in your kids, especially if they're always angling to be alone with them.

If you suspect that someone you know may be a pedophile, you can check your state's criminal records. The Safeguarding Our Children organization has a page of links to state sexual offender registries online: www.soc-um.org/register.html.

Despite the fact that most cases of sexual abuse involve an adult the child knows, kids are sometimes assaulted by strangers.

One thing you can tell your kids is never to get close to a car if someone stops and asks for directions, lest they be snatched. It's also important to teach them that they will not be punished for breaking a rule if someone tries to molest them while they're breaking it. According to Kidscape, "One child was walking in a park when told not to and was molested -- she was afraid to tell because she had broken the rule about being in the park."

Some pedophiles troll the Internet, so you should make sure you know what your kids are doing on the computer. Tell them never to meet privately with anyone they have met online and never to give out personal information, like where they live.

Children should also know what to do if they get lost. It's helpful to give them a prepaid calling card to use if this happens: They should memorize their phone number and address. Tell them to call the police if they can't find you or reach you on the phone, and never to accept a ride or wait alone with an adult they don't know. If you're coming to fetch them, tell them to wait in a store or restaurant -- someplace where there are plenty of people around.

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Council on Sex Offender Treatment - Treatment of Sex Offenders

Texas Department of State Health Services - July 6, 2005

http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/csot/csot_tbehaviors.shtm

Not all sex offenders exhibit all of the following characteristics, and the absence of a particular characteristic does not mean the individual is not a sex offender (English, 1996).

· Secrecy and dishonesty is a major component of sex offending behavior. Sex crimes flourish in silence and deception.

· Sex offenders typically have developed complicated and persistent psychological and social systems constructed to assist them in denying and minimizing the harm they inflict on others, and often they are very accomplished at presenting to others a façade designed to conceal the truth about themselves (English, 1996).

• Cognitive distortions allow the sex offender to justify, rationalize, and minimize the impact of their deviant behavior (i.e. "I was drunk", "We were in love", "She came on to me", "The child wanted it and I did not have the heart to say no").

• Sex offenders use thinking errors to engage in deviant sex. The following are some examples:

• Mr. Good Guy-"I wear a mask or false front". "I give the right answer".

• Poor me-"I am the victim of this unjust system". "Everyone is out to get me". Victim stance-"I am the one hurt".

• "I will convince others that I was more hurt than the victim".

• Power play-"It is my way or the highway". "I will dominate and control others".

• Entitlement- "The world owes me".

• Selfish-"I do not care for others". "I want what I want when I want it".

• Blaming- "I blame others so I can avoid responsibility for my actions".

• Minimizing- "I only fondled the child". "It wasn't intrinsically harmful".

• Hop Over-"I do not answer questions when I know the answer is unpleasant".

• Secretiveness-"I use secrecy to control others and continue being deviant"

• These three thinking errors, in combination, create the criminal triad.

· Sex offenders are highly manipulative and will triangulate/split those around them. The skills used to manipulate victims are employed to manipulate family members, friends, co-workers, supervision officers, treatment providers, and case managers.

· Grooming activities are not solely for potential victims. Offenders will groom parents to obtain access to children. Grooming is well-organized and can be short or long term.

· The longer a sex offender knows an individual the better they are at "zeroing in" their grooming ("I can read people like a book. I know what others need and I am available to help out".)

· The longer a sex offender is on supervision the higher the probability staff will lose their objectivity.

· Sex offenders are generally personable and seek to "befriend" those around them ("My smile is my entrée". "I `m like a salesman but I'm never off work".)

· Sex offenders will continually test boundaries (personal/professional space).

· Sex offenders exploit relationships and social norms to test boundaries.

· Sex offenders seek professions that allow them access to victims.

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by Ken Singer, LCSW

http://www.nomsv.org/articles/groom.html

Most offenders do not like to think or admit that they planned their offenses. The idea that you set up a situation to sexually assault a child or vulnerable adult may make you feel worse than you may already feel about yourself. However, it is vital that you recognize that the assault started in your mind before it became a reality.

The bad news about accepting that you planned or set up the assault before you carried it out may be that you have to drop the belief that "it just happened". The good news is that if you spend time thinking about assaulting before you actually do so, you have more time to stop yourself.

(A word or two here about the use of "assault", "abuse" and other terms that you may feel uncomfortable about. You may feel that what you did to your victim(s) was not "rape", "abuse", "assault" or some of the other words used in these articles. While you may believe that you were not forceful, physically hurt or threatened your victim, it is important that you not allow yourself to justify, minimize, rationalize or make excuses for what you did to someone else.

You really do not know what the impact of your behavior is on another person, especially in the long run. Offenders have described their behaviors as "loving", "gentle", "for his/her benefit", and other terms which may appear to be true on the surface, but will have detrimental consequences for the victim.

So, even if you don't believe that you "abused", "assaulted", "offended" or other terms, hold off on your need to deny the label for now.)

Setting Up or "Grooming" These terms are often used interchangeably, but they are similar. What they mean is that you had a conscious or underlying thought to become sexual with another person. If you were doing this with someone your own age, it might be called flirting. When you develop a friendship with a child, or engage him/her in physical contact that seems innocent at first, you are setting up that child for later sexual contact, abuse or assault.

Some of the ways that offenders set up their victims include:

• Paying attention to a child who appears emotionally needy

• Talking about sexual issues, showing adult magazines or films, letting the child know s/he can come to you for sexual information or concerns

• "Accidentally" or purposefully exposing yourself (coming out of the bath, wearing shorts that allow a view of the genitals, openly praising nudity as "normal", etc.)

• Giving gifts, money, taking the child places, providing alcohol or drugs

• Telling the child that you need to examine his/her body for some reason

• Physical contact such as wrestling, tickling, pats on the butt, etc.

• Intrusive questions about the child's sexual development, fantasies, masturbation habits, or giving the child more information about sex than is appropriate for the child's age or developmental level

• Bringing yourself down to the child's level of play (becoming the child's "buddy")

• Sharing inappropriate information about yourself or relationship problems, such as marital difficulties

• Not respecting the child's boundaries or privacy. This may be "rules" that bedroom or bathroom doors must be open, reading child's mail or diaries, going through their possessions, etc. It may also be verbal, such as intrusive questions about the child's activities or friends beyond what is appropriate for a parent to do. It may also be done by staring at the child or looking at his/her body in a way that makes him/her uncomfortable

There are other ways offenders "groom" a potential victim. While on the surface, these activities may seem innocent enough, they are often the prelude to a sexual contact with the child.

Since you have either crossed over the line from being a parent or friend of the child to assaulting him/her, (or are struggling to keep this from happening), it is important for you to become honest with yourself and with your therapist. Your honestly can reduce the likelihood of re-offending (or offending in the first place.) But remember, even when being honest, prevention of sexual offending requires a lot of soul-searching and hard work.

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http://www.netsafe.theoutfitgroup.co.nz/offenders/what_is_grooming.aspx

Grooming is when a person tries to `set up' and `prepare' another person to be the victim of sexual abuse. Although not all sexual-abuse is preceded by grooming, it is a very common and deceitful process, which can be used by strangers or by those known to the victim. The method can take quite a while (even months and years), and can be very subtle and sneaky. Victims of grooming often do not realise that they are being manipulated until after they have been sexually abused, and even then, some victims do not see how the grooming led to their abuse.

In the offline world, groomers use many techniques to prepare their victims, such as;

· giving inappropriate attention to children,

· giving gifts,

· manipulating a child through threats or coercion

· openly or accidentally exposing the victim to nudity and sexual material

· sexualising physical contact, such as inappropriate tickling and wrestling,

· having an inappropriate and intrusive interest into children's physical and sexual development,

· having inappropriate social boundaries (e.g., telling the potential victims about their own personal problems etc).

And other exploitative strategies the groomer can use and adapt to the individual child they have targeted.

What is online grooming?

Online grooming also involves a person trying to set up an abusive situation, however they use cyber-technologies, such as the Internet and mobile phones, to help them do this. Online groomers might find and choose their victims online, or might encourage an offline situation to go online (e.g., asking a child in a shopping centre for their email address, and then beginning to groom them online).

Click on one of the following links for further information about grooming:

• What do online groomers do?

• How do groomers find victims online?

• How is grooming different online?

• Myths and misunderstandings about online grooming.

• How to protect yourself against online grooming.

• How do you know if you are being groomed online?

• How do you know if someone is trying to groom a child online?

• What to do if you suspect that someone is trying to groom you

• What to do if you suspect that someone is trying to groom a child you know

• What to do if you think you might be grooming online

• What to do if you think someone you know might be grooming online

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By Paula Hook, Denver Post  

Denver Post - November 14, 2002

http://www.denverpost.com

Thursday, November 14, 2002 - A proposal by a local expert to treat perpetrators of sex crimes demands attention from state legislators and city officials - and, more importantly, from every parent and citizen of Colorado.

There are an estimated 3,000 registered sex offenders living in the Denver metro area who are on probation or parole. Experts who spoke recently at the Denver Public Library believe that number may be "the tip of the iceberg." They're urging that the state build a sex-offender research and containment facility to better deal with the problems of keeping such criminals from repeat offenses.

I am a survivor of chronic child sexual abuse. I became traumatized and therefore unable to do my job as an insurance adjuster after learning that three twice-convicted sex offenders had been living on our block for 13 months without anyone in the community knowing it.

I don't understand why we don't put - and keep - sex offenders in prison; or why, in Colorado, 65 percent of them are put on probation; or why, of those incarcerated, 95 percent of them are eventually paroled.

There was no parole officer there at 2:30 a.m. when I found a man peeping in my daughter's bedroom window. We filed a police report but, of course, by the time the police arrived, the offender was long gone. But from then on, I wasn't able to sleep or go to work.

According to a 1999 report published by the Colorado Sex Offender Management Board, our community had a right to know. Prior victims of sex crimes have a right to self-determination, the document says. But we were never informed that sex offenders were moving into our neighborhood.

Though I feel the legislature made a lot of progress last session on this issue, there is a long way to go before we can rest.

All sex offenders on parole are supposed to have no contact with children, but they do - and there are not enough probation officers to keep track of them.

Sex offenders who lived on our block sat in their windows and watched our children, our comings and our goings. It gave mothers the willies. Maybe we need a class-action lawsuit by victims to get the state to listen. Maybe we need to unseat some judges who just don't get it.

The true cost of child sexual abuse is currently being shouldered by the victims and by average citizens in ways they aren't aware of. This true cost shows up in disability payments, insurance premiums, job losses and poor educational performance. The U.S. Department of Justice's report, "Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look," published in 1996, estimates the cost of child sexual abuse to each victim at between $99,000 and $125,000. In 2002 dollars, that would be closer to $125,000 and $150,000. And the report had no way to calculate the costs of chronic victimization.

Sex offenders commit an average of 44 crimes per year, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections, at an estimated cost to victims of $5.5 million per offender, per year. Put 300 sex offenders in a containment facility and you could in theory save the public some $1.65 billion - minus the $10 million per year to build and run it.

And it would be a lot cheaper than a class-action lawsuit by victims. and dealing with massive health problems and legal fees.

In addition, because we know that victims of child sexual abuse are overrepresented among drug and alcohol abusers, prostitutes, those currently incarcerated and those needing excessive health care and psychiatric care, we could expect to save money over the long term on social services.

Currently, Erik Scott O'Connell, who was naked in the bed of a 9-year-old Centennial girl, may get more time in prison for burgling the house than for attempted sexual assault on a child. And he's free on bond.

The proposal for a sex-offender research and containment facility is the only reasonable solution. Protecting children from recidivist sex offenders is far more important than building convention hotels with $200 rooms and golf courses that we can't water.

Sex offenders may have to live somewhere - but that somewhere can't be next door to children whose parents aren't informed. That risks sabotaging children before they ever get a chance.

Paula Hook is the producer of "The Burning Cradle," a video on prevention of child sexual abuse.

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By LINDA VILLAROSA

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/health/psychology/03ABUS.html?pagewanted=2

I am a recovering child sexual abuser," said the lanky 71-year-old man. "For several years in the early 90's, I abused three of my granddaughters." As he spoke, the noisy room was stunned into silence. The man and his wife, from rural Vermont, were speaking in front of a group of about 100 teachers in Burlington.

"After each of the incidents, I felt guilty and hated myself," said the man, who also told of being sexually abused as a boy. "I vowed to stop, but I didn't. My stepdaughter confronting me is what finally stopped me."

The man and his wife, who do not use their real names when addressing groups in the workshops and asked that their names not be used to spare their grandchildren additional pain, are part of an unusual program sponsored by Stop It Now, a sexual abuse prevention group based in Haydenville, Mass. Instead of focusing exclusively on the victims of abuse, these programs also let abusers talk about what they did.The goal is not only to allow abusers to educate the public about sexual abuse, but also to rally adults - friends, family, neighbors, teachers, professionals and the abusers themselves - to act before abuse ever occurs. Never before, say those in the field, has a prevention program directly asked abusers to step forward. And rarely, they say, has a program asked the public at large to confront suspicious behavior in adults.

For the past two decades, nearly all-sexual abuse prevention programs have focused on children, rather than the molesters, experts say. Children, abused at a rate of 500,000 a year in this country, have been taught the difference between good touch and bad touch, instructed to say "no" if they are being violated and encouraged to get help. But the crisis in the Roman Catholic Church again highlights how difficult it is for children to come forward and confront the adults who are harming them.

"This approach marks a huge shift in the field," said Dr. Keith Kaufman, a professor and chairman of the department of psychology at Portland State University in Oregon. Dr. Kaufman is president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, a nonprofit organization based in Beaverton, Ore., that two years ago began endorsing a prevention model that focuses on offenders."We have had a 20-year history of a singular approach to prevention with a focus on relying on kids to protect themselves from adults," Dr. Kaufman said. "This doesn't even make sense logically. Why do we think it's right to give children the huge responsibility of protecting themselves from sexual offenders?"For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this fall has financed two state-based programs that focus on preventing adults from abusing children. Prevent Child Abuse Georgia, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization, has just begun a three-year pilot program that will use a public awareness campaign to identify and educate potential sexual offenders.In New England, Massachusetts Citizens for Children has created a school-based curriculum that will include teaching teenagers how to understand and identify inappropriate sexual feelings they have toward younger children.

These projects and others join the work of Stop It Now, which pioneered prevention programs like these in the early 1990's. In 1995, the organization instituted a campaign in Vermont, using print, billboard and public service announcements. For instance, one television public service announcement featured the voice of a mother who had sought treatment for her 10-year-old son after she saw him put his hands down the pants of a 5-year-old girl.Another, using actors to depict a real case, described how a sister confronted her brother, suspecting that he was having sexual feelings toward their young niece. People were encouraged to call the organization's toll-free number for information, treatment referrals or simply to talk.Comparing knowledge before and four years after the campaign, a Vermont telephone survey revealed a 40 percent increase in the number of people who could define sexual abuse, a 10 percent increase in respondents who could identify at least one warning sign and a 6 percent increase in the number who conceded that abusers were likely to live in their neighborhoods.

Since then, Stop It Now has created similar programs in Philadelphia, England and Ireland and will begin a project in seven counties in Minnesota next year.

Stop It Now's approach is modeled after other public health campaigns, like the one created by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "I thought about the shift we have seen in behaviors like drunk driving and smoking," said Fran Henry, the founder and director of Stop It Now.

"People are willing to confront and challenge people from getting behind the wheel, because they've heard the message `friends don't let friends drive drunk,' " Ms. Henry said. "That clicked for me. Why couldn't we use those principles to both understand child sexual abuse and get adults to hold other adults accountable for their inappropriate behavior?"

Ms. Henry, 53, also brought her personal experiences to her work. She was sexually abused by her father from age 12 to 16. "I tried to get my father to stop, but wasn't able to until I was older," she said. "As a young teenager, I could never disclose what was going on if I knew my father would go to jail. My goal is to try and protect kids, by getting adults to take action, so that what happened to me never happens to another child."

Among the most controversial aspects of Stop It Now's work have been the two dozen workshops that spotlight offenders like the Vermont grandfather.

Nick, a 58-year-old cook at a New England university, has taken part in six or seven Stop It Now workshops. He was arrested 13 years ago, after admitting that he had molested three of his daughters and two of their childhood friends. He spent a year in prison and many more in treatment. Nick, who uses only his first name in workshops and agreed to be interviewed on the condition that his surname be withheld, said he spoke to groups because it was his responsibility "to participate in the process that identifies and stops other perpetrators of inappropriate sexual behavior."

"If I can help offenders see that what they are doing is wrong, and that there is a way to change, then I have served as a good example," Nick said.Some find this approach ineffective, taking attention and resources away from those who have been abused and directing it toward those who have preyed on children. Stop It Now has even been accused of being an "amnesty program" for offenders.

Judy Little, executive director of Voices in Action, a nonprofit organization for victims of child sexual abuse outside Cincinnati, says that though offenders have a responsibility to prevent abuse, listening to them is difficult.

"The professional and humanitarian in me believes that if we are ever to stop this cycle, we have to help perpetrators heal and allow those that are healed to take part in prevention," said Ms. Little, who was abused as a child. "But part of me is still hurting inside from the abuse that I suffered, so I don't care what they have to say. I don't want to hear the empty excuses for their behavior."

Results from the Stop It Now telephone survey in Vermont found that only 66 percent of respondents would take direct action if they suspected abuse, and the number dropped to 43 percent if the abuser was someone they knew.

Stop It Now's help lines in Vermont and Philadelphia have taken 2,009 calls since 1995, 352 from people who identified themselves as abusers or someone at risk for abusing. Another 1,299 calls were from adults who knew an abuser or someone at risk for abusing.

Because many state laws require all professionals to report child sexual abuse to the authorities, callers generally do not leave their names. But the professionals can give them referrals and other information anonymously.

It is unclear how many abusers or family members have called to seek treatment, but most experts guess the number is few.  "Stop It Now is pushing the envelope, but it is still naïve to believe that offenders and their families will come forward in droves, given the denial around sexual abuse," said Gail Burns-Smith, executive director of Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services in East Hartford, and chairwoman of the board of the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence.

"Offenders have distorted thinking about the crimes they are committing against someone," she continued. "They don't see that they are doing harm to their victims. I'd say that, at best, this approach is only a hopeful solution."

Even Nick doubts that hearing a recovering offender speak would have stopped him from abusing or compelled him to stop. "I'm not sure if hearing someone like myself would have changed my behavior," Nick said.

"On one level I knew what I was doing was absolutely unacceptable. But while I was perpetrating, I disassociated myself. I was in denial."

"Looking back," he added, "it doesn't make sense how my daughters had become sexual objects to me. It was a force I don't fully understand. What I do know is that even as I was offending, I didn't want to be doing what I was doing."

Wayne Bowers of Lansing, Mich., who has twice been convicted of "indecent liberties with a child" for sexually abusing boys on the baseball team he coached, said that perpetrator-prevention might have helped him change.

"While I was offending I was out of control, but I was also sick and tired and looking for help," said Mr. Bowers, 57, who is the director of the Sex Abuse Treatment Alliance, an advocacy and education group.

"I was scared to death and wanted to talk to someone, but I had no idea who," Mr. Bowers said. "If there had been a help line, I would have called it. I served my time, I got treatment and I haven't victimized anyone for 20 years. I have an attraction to adolescent boys, and there isn't any way that I can totally eliminate those feelings. But I've found a way to keep myself in control. There is hope."

(Top)

By DANIEL BERGNER

New York Times - January 23, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/magazine/23PEDO.html

Not long ago, Roy became a type of monster. The transformation took a year and a half, and now, one morning each week, he sits in a room of similar cases. The windowless room is plain, with a blue industrial carpet, a circle of brown cushioned office chairs, a blackboard, a pair of unused conference tables pushed to the rear wall and a faint hum from the air ducts. To reach it from the waiting area -- on the second floor of a probation building in Connecticut -- Roy and the other men walk down a series of corridors and around a series of turns that feel like a path through a maze. The room is wedged in a back corner. ''No one,'' a probation officer said, ''likes to think about what's back there.''

Roy wonders constantly how he wound up in this place, in the circle of 10 or 12 chairs, a circle of child molesters. His story begins on the beach and ends on the Internet. It seems to him that he was, only recently, a normal man, about 40, running a crew of technicians, repairing elaborate, computerized telecommunications equipment for Wall Street trading firms and in his off hours leading a wedding band, singing Frank Sinatra and Barry White at the Plaza. For a hobby, he flew kites -- kites bigger than most living rooms, brilliantly striped, with rippling streamers and ''space socks'' trailing more than a hundred feet behind, kites that could perform ballets when he held the lines. He recalls no history of longing for young girls. He had no criminal record of any kind. But then one summer, on vacation, his second wife pointed out her 11-year-old daughter's body. Roy and his wife were standing on the sand; his stepdaughter and her best friend played several yards in front of them at the edge of the surf. ''Look at those girls,'' Roy remembers his wife saying. ''They're changing already. You can see their bodies changing.''

Roy has a soft, smooth face and an easy, engaging smile. (At his request, I've shielded his identity by using a nickname some of his former band members gave him.) Now in his mid-40's, he's round in the middle and broad in the shoulders; there's something bearish about him, but in a way that's more pandalike and cheerful than threatening. Nearby along the circle sits an elderly man with a graceful wave of white hair combed back from his forehead. There's a well-scrubbed blue-eyed man in his mid-30's, wearing a button-down shirt with a pleasant check of pale blue. Like the rest, they're here by court mandate for group counseling as part of their probation. Most, including Roy, have served time in jail or prison, from a few weeks to several years. The man with the wave of white hair touched the vagina of his grandniece; he kissed her chest and had her hold his penis. This happened repeatedly when the girl was between 7 and 9 years old. As an adult, the man in the checked shirt performed oral sex on his 11-year-old brother and later took his 6-year-old daughter to a motel room along with his brother, who was by then 16. Living out a fantasy he'd had for months, he persuaded them both to undress and urged his brother to have sex with his daughter, only desisting, only waking from the trance of his desire -- ''seconds away from something really, really bad happening,'' he has told me -- when his brother began to cry.

''What possessed me?'' Roy asks in one form or another in the group sessions that I've been observing for close to a year, in conversation with me and, it is clear, alone with himself. It's a question that seems to churn through the thinking of most of the men. The one who longed to watch his brother and daughter, and who is a published poet, has talked to me about feeling like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In group one morning, another convict made reference to ''Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Heinz.''

How does a man enter the realm of the monstrous? How broad or thin is the border between the normal and that realm? ''Could anybody end up getting into this mess?'' Roy once asked me plaintively.

Focus your awareness on your feet,'' Patrick Liddle, the group's therapist, its leader, instructs the men at the start of many sessions. They sit with their hands on their thighs, their eyes closed, as he teaches them a relaxation technique. ''Now allow your awareness to move up to the center of your chest.'' He speaks in a soothing monotone, the voice he maintains with them always no matter how disquieted their crimes make him feel. Part of his job is to give them methods to keep their lives under control, to keep themselves from molesting again. This technique is one way. ''Center your attention on the steady beating of your heart.'' He wears fashionably tailored suits and shoes polished to a low gloss. The clothes are part of the program. Liddle's boss sets the dress code for his staff, an attempt to confer value on those in treatment, men who could hardly have fallen lower. ''Picture in your mind a large open field covered in deep grass up to your waist.'' Roy and the others sit perfectly still. Their fingers curl gently. Their jaws are slack; their mouths, slightly open. They seem almost to be sleeping, and like sleeping men anywhere, they look almost like children. ''Now slowly open your eyes.''

They return from the field of tall grass to the faces of the other men. Liddle sometimes asks them for introductions, though the faces stay mostly the same. They go around the circle. ''I was convicted of two counts of sexual assault four and three counts of risk of injury to a minor and enticing a minor over the Internet,'' Roy began during a session months ago. He managed not to mumble. Facing up to what he has done, he knows, is a requirement for graduating from treatment. And this might lead, he hopes, to a judge's reducing his term of probation. The treatment theory is basic: to acknowledge both his crime and the anarchy of lust that lies within him is the first step toward his finding self-control. So the ability to confront himself -- and to be candid with Liddle about his sexual yearnings -- is a requirement, too, if he wants to do anything outside the bounds of his probation restrictions: visit his parents over the state line in New York or go to a bowling alley or a movie or a family function, anyplace where he might come in contact with children under 16. Any family gathering he attends must be adults only; he has to leave right away if kids show up. The group leaders and probation officers work in tandem, evaluating how well they can trust the men, and the therapists can be at least as wary as the probation officers. (In Connecticut, counseling is ordered for almost all sex offenders on probation, and the state-financed organization Liddle works for, the Center for the Treatment of Problem Sexual Behavior, handles nearly all of it.) Together, Liddle and Roy's probation officer set the limits on his life.

''I was sentenced,'' Roy continued with his introduction, ''to 20 years suspended after 30 days, with 35 years probation. My offense behaviors I engaged in were touching my wife's daughter and her best friend sexually, touching them through their clothing between their legs, around their waist, moving my hand into the top of their waistband. I also moved my hand under their shorts up to their panty lines. I used games that were called 'Chase' and 'Spider' to manipulate them into feeling safe with me.'' His voice quieted as he hurried on toward the end, toward the part of his story that holds echoes of recent, well-publicized cases -- like that of John Dexter, the headmaster for a quarter-century at the Trevor Day School in Manhattan, until his arrest in 2003 and guilty plea last year -- of apparently ordinary men going online to seek out sexual conversations and often to arrange to have sex with adolescents, with children.

With more detail than he gives in group, Roy has told his story as he and I have sat together at his home and at his job. He is still a supervisor at the telecommunications repair company. In a bland suburban building just off a highway, at worktables in vast, orderly rooms, he and his team lean over high-tech consoles with exposed intricate wiring and microprocessors with multicolored flashing diodes. They fix circuitry or, if he deems it necessary, redesign it. With the permission of Liddle and the probation department, Roy is allowed to work around computers as long as he never goes online outside the watch of a colleague. Everyone at his job is aware of his crime. He has made a point of answering everyone's questions. The company's owner, who has known Roy for five years, testified on his behalf at his sentencing. ''You're talking about a person I know,'' the owner said to me. ''If you told me about a stranger I would write them off, I wouldn't talk to them, I wouldn't see them -- if they did one-tenth of what he did.'' At Roy's job, the element of personal forgiveness goes beyond employment. As I drove with him to work after one of my first sessions with the group, he said that he was engaged to be married again -- to a bookkeeper at the company, a colleague since before his offense.

When Roy has spoken with me about his crime at the well-burnished kitchen table in his small, neatly kept wooden house or in an empty conference room across from the repair stations at work, he starts with the words of his stepdaughter's mother at the beach. No matter how common -- ''Look at my daughter, how pretty she's going to be when she grows up; I'm going to have problems with her when she grows up''- they have a serpentlike quality as he tries to sort out what followed. They were ''the first trigger,'' he has said. Before, he doesn't think he saw his stepdaughter in any erotic way. He had known her and her older brother from the time they were born; he had been with their mother since they were around 4 and 6. (He has no kids of his own.) The children lived with their father, an executive, a man Roy grew up with. But they spent a fair amount of time at the home Roy shared with their mother, and after that vacation at the shore, the games Roy played with his stepdaughter, and frequently with her best friend, grew sexualized -- at some level -- in his mind.

During ''Chase,'' they would turn off most of the lights. Often they plugged in a strobe light from his band equipment or a lamp that cast the shapes of moons on the walls, in blues and yellows and greens. His marriage, at that point, was falling apart. Sometimes his wife was home, having shut herself in their bedroom for the evening. Sometimes she was out on her own. He raced after the girls through the house, through the colored beams. In ''Spider,'' each player had to sit motionless; if you moved at all you got pinched. The touching occurred during the games. The confessional -- and dutiful -- introduction Roy delivers to the group implies that the touching was blatantly, consciously sexual on his part, but though he is obsessively introspective about all that took place, he can't seem to figure out whether this is true.

He remembered, with me, his anger at his wife, the fleeting thought that if she was going to leave him taking care of her kids, then he was ''going to get something out of this, too.'' Yet he recalled that there was no real sexual intent at that stage, not even any dalliance with fantasy, that often he didn't want to deal with the girls and their demands that he try to catch them; he didn't want to be bothered. ''I don't think I ever touched them in their private areas,'' he said, making a distinction between those areas and the edges of underwear. ''Grabbing them, pulling them, knocking them down. Them jumping on me. It was still just teasing and playing with them. It wasn't like I wanted to have sex with them. Is there a difference?'' How much of the touching was errant, inadvertent, amid playful mauling? To what degree do normal games of chase played with 11- or 12-year-old girls hold an erotic element? How far beyond the normal did things go, at that stage? These kinds of questions reel through his memories. He can't settle on single answers. ''But was there sexuality behind it?'' he asked once while we talked. He replied immediately, ''Yes.''

The erotic became explicit, Roy said, when they were in separate rooms, at separate computers. The layout of the house mirrored the one he owns now, many towns away. There was a series of rooms along a narrow hall. The basement was crowded with his guitars and keyboards and recording equipment. His stepdaughter was 12 -- though he doesn't face up to reality easily on this point. The first few times he came to this part of his story, he told me that she was by then 14, maybe 13. During his introductions in group, he doesn't mention how old she was; for a short while I didn't know her true age. When I read an old article from a local newspaper about the case and told him that it put her age at 12, he insisted that the article was mistaken. Only after I had asked him repeatedly did he call me one morning: he had just phoned his sister and ''found out'' that the newspaper was right.

When she was 12, then, one evening she sent him an instant message. She asked what he was doing. He was in his office; she was in her bedroom down the hall. He told her he was working on band contracts. She wrote that she was bored, that none of her friends were online. He responded that her brother had been giving their mother trouble, that she was completely different, that she was ''a really good little girl.'' According to Roy, ''she came right back to me and said: 'Roy, you don't know me. I'm not a good girl, I'm a bad girl.'''

She wouldn't tell him what she meant, but he had been smitten with what he had seen as the wild streak in her mother, back when she had left her husband for Roy, and now, right away, his imagination ran along sexual lines. ''Oh, God, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree,'' he recalls thinking; he told me, regarding the effect of that instant-message exchange with his stepdaughter: ''You couldn't have drawn me in any faster. I still remember it. Not excited as arousal excited, but excited as I gotta know more. Major adrenaline rush. I felt myself go flush. I was already overloaded. I finished the contracts I was doing, but I got off the computer right after that, and I went immediately downstairs and started playing. That's what I always do when something's really got me; I need to shut it off. I had to shut that off at that moment. I had to calm it down. Put my headphones on. Had my guitar. I have this jazz routine I like doing. I do a jazz version of 'Blue Skies.' 'Polka Dots and Moonbeams' -- it's a slow jazz tune. I have about an hour's worth of music, and I just have to concentrate on the chord changes and the progressions, and it clears my mind. The only problem is,'' he raised his voice, almost shouting to me across the kitchen table, ''it didn't help.''

Soon he loaded his computer with a software program that would allow him, because of the way his and his stepdaughter's computers were interlinked, to monitor her online conversations. That day, alone in the house, he stepped back and forth along the hall, between rooms, between PC's, making sure his system worked, that she wouldn't be able to detect his lurking. And the next time she came over and logged on and started chatting with her best friend (the same girl he had chased through the house), their words ran across his screen.

His stepdaughter's romantic explorations, confided to her friend, became his pornography. Each time he monitored her conversations (about 7 to 10 times over several months, he thinks), he would have a soda and popcorn and ''put my feet up on the desk, and I watched this thing unfold. 'Cause you have to understand, it's not something I would masturbate to while she was on the Internet. It would almost be like an aftermath of it. 'Cause it had your mind so cranked you had to have some relief. At any point I thought this girl was going to have sex with this boy. That's how intense this was.''

He didn't worry that she would walk down the hall and find him reading her words. ''Impossible, because my computer didn't face the door, and it would have taken a split second to shut it off, literally,'' he said. ''Nobody could catch me, nobody. I'm too good. I'm too good with computers, trust me. I set up that PC so that when I shut the computer off everything was erased. So there was no trackable record on those PC's. It was wrong. So wrong. I put myself in such a bad situation, and I just fell into it. I guess that's how a drug addict gets. Once you've fallen into that, and you've gone in, it's almost like that's it: now you've got it in your head, and it's not going to go away.''

The direct instant-message exchange between him and his stepdaughter continued every so often during the period of his monitoring. ''She would sign on and say something to me, and that's when the conversation started. And I would flip it. She didn't start it sexually. I always flipped it. Just so you know. She didn't do it. She was a kid.''

He would ask her to ''show me something.'' She would refuse. He asked her to have sex with him. She told him no. He wrote to her, in one of their final Internet conversations, months before her 13th birthday, that he was going to step out of his office and into the kitchen to get a soda. He wrote that if she wanted to see what he wished to do with her, she should walk into his office and click on a window that would be on his screen. She left her computer and walked to his. When the window opened, a video showed ''a man rubbing his penis on a girl's vagina that's been shaved,'' he said. A moment later, they passed in the hall. He remembers her calling him ''disgusting'' and each of them going quickly back to their own PC's. Petrified that she would report him, he begged her over the Internet to meet him on the stairs to the basement music room, promising that he would stay at the bottom. He pled his apology as she sat at the top of the stairs. Then she was gone.

Soon afterward, I learned recently from her father, she told her stepmother for the first time about Roy's ongoing solicitations. (Her father had just left on a business trip.) Her stepmother then sent her to Roy's house so that, assuming he would proposition her yet again, she could print out his words for evidence. She did. He was swiftly arrested. It had been about a year and a half since that trip to the beach. In court, he pled under the Alford Doctrine -- a legal acknowledgment that the evidence against him was sufficient to prove his guilt -- to the charges he lists each time he gives his introduction. He has been in treatment now for around 17 months. ''I'm so embarrassed,'' he said to me at the kitchen table. ''I can't believe I did this. You know, I just don't know how I got myself there, I really don't. It makes me sick.''

Roy looks that way -- ill, aghast, mortified -- whenever he finishes his account. His full cheeks appear almost gaunt, as though he has just emerged, barely, from the siege of some terrible infection. To see him like this is to feel that he would never allow himself to come anywhere close to repeating his crime. It is to understand what the owner of the telecommunications repair company -- where Roy's existence can seem so ordinary as he goes about his work -- once told me about his wife's opinion of Roy: their own children are grown, but she would have him in their house even with kids around. ''That,'' the owner said, ''is the confidence that he gives you.''

Yet to think back over Roy's shadings of his stepdaughter's age and to hear his explanation that he wasn't lying to me but somehow no longer knew that she had been 12 is to feel less confident. Whether he has tried to deceive me or himself, this is exactly the kind of evasion, the kind of diminishment of hard truth, that would worry Liddle; it's a sign that Roy may not be capable of self-confrontation and self-control. And then I discovered, in a statement his stepdaughter made to the police, that some of the troubling touches, through clothes, began when she was in second grade. To have heard his consistent denials about this, his certainty that back then there had been only innocent games, is not only to wonder if she has imposed the taint of recent events on earlier moments but also to wonder if anything Roy says can be believed. And then when I learned, from the transcript of his sentencing hearing, that he used Freekypeephole as his Internet screen name, I could see him, simply, as a dangerous creep -- except that when I asked him about this, he recited the lyrics of a disco song he wrote and recorded back in the late 70's, a song called ''Freaky People,'' about the drug use he observed at Studio 54. (His father was an alcoholic, and Roy has never been much for drugs or alcohol.) He recounted that the song got some airtime on a major radio station, that because of this he wanted ''Freaky People'' as his screen name, that it was already taken, and that his server supplied the alternative, Freekypeephole, which he accepted well before his crime as a joke. My sense of Roy shifts back and forth ceaselessly, from perceptions of basic normality to those of extreme aberrance, from guarded trust to deep unease. But one constant is the reverberation of his words: ''I just don't know how I got myself there.''

How did he get there? What are the causes of child sexual molestation, which is committed against perhaps 20 percent of girls and 5 to 10 percent of boys under the age of consent in the United States, according to David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. (Finkelhor, who has examined the studies extensively, added that the numbers range widely from 10 to 40 percent for girls and 2 to 15 percent for boys, depending on definitions and methods. The victims are preadolescents about as frequently as they are older. Most are abused by someone they know, often by a member of their family.) What parts are played by biology, by an abuser's own childhood, by aspects of isolation in his (for males make up around 90 percent of offenders) current life -- or by the powerful arrival of the Internet into the world of Eros? Calling psychiatrists and psychologists, researchers and clinicians, who have been working in the field for decades and asking about origins and explanations, I have heard in response regret and laughter. The laughter came from Dr. Martin Kafka, senior clinical associate in psychiatry at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., where he studies and treats sexual disorders. ''I'll give you a quick answer,'' he said, cutting me off at the word ''causes.'' ''We don't know.''

A much longer answer followed, his words propelled at high speed by his fascination with the subject: studies of sexually deviant brains have scarcely been done; there is ''one suggesting hypothalamus abnormality, but really, the research is in infancy.'' The data show that sexual abusers of children are more likely than the general population to have been child sexual-abuse victims themselves but ''most pedophiles have not,'' he emphasized, ''been sexually abused.'' (And here I thought of Roy talking about the men in group who were ''abused as kids something fierce, so I must be a real piece of crap, because I was never abused.'') Research indicates that ''social skills deficits'' can be a factor. Kafka's voice rushed on as he tried to construct for me some sense of coherence from what scattered scraps of knowledge exist.

''There is nothing coherent that's been established,'' Dr. Robert Prentky, a forensic psychologist at the graduate school of criminal justice at Northeastern University, told me. ''Frankly, in my opinion, there has been very, very little progress in the area of etiology.'' And Dr. Fred Berlin, associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, talked about society's discomfort with any scientific inquiry into sexuality, let alone into the causes of pedophilia. ''There is inadequate funding, too little support for this kind of research,'' he said. ''We can't get beyond the moral to the scientific. These are considered vile people. There is an aversion to studying them.''

XI asked about the Internet, whether it may bear any causal responsibility along the path toward offending. ''It's a fairly complicated issue,'' Berlin said, and one for which there appears to be, again, no solid research. ''I wouldn't go so far as to say that the Internet creates desire, but I do think it is creating significant difficulties.'' To some extent, he explained, it is merely a ''new and different vehicle'' for those who would offend against children anyway. But it ''provides temptation for some who might not otherwise have crossed the line.'' He added: ''There are three areas of concern. First, the illusion of anonymity -- an illusion because Internet use can be easily tracked -- leads to disinhibition. Second, there's a blurring of fantasy and reality. There's someone at the other end of the Internet conversation, but it's not quite a real person; there's a feeling of playing a game that can lead to actually doing what one otherwise wouldn't. Third, the easy accessibility can facilitate'' moving over boundaries.

Over the past decade, with the surge in Internet use, there has been no spike in the overall number of cases of sexual abuse against children. (There has been, it appears, a significant decrease, attributed by some to the success of harsher sentences and offender registries and by others, in part, to the possibility that those sentences and registries discourage victims, who tend to know their abusers, from reporting the crimes.) But Berlin's concern was echoed by Prentky when he described the Internet as ''a catalyst for fantasy and dangerous if the control over behavior is markedly impaired.'' And by David D'Amora,

Patrick Liddle's boss and the head of the Center for the Treatment of Problem Sexual Behavior, who has about 800 child sexual abusers under his watch in Connecticut, when he talked about the Net's abundant porn and disembodied chat-room conversation as a ''disinhibitor.'' And by Liddle himself, whose normally tempered voice nearly rose to a yell when I asked whether online porn might provide a safe outlet for otherwise destructive erotic drives: a man masturbates; the craving subsides. ''No!'' he replied. He was thinking of the men in that back room at the probation building. ''That's like an alcoholic saying I'll only have a couple of drinks, I'll only have low-alcohol beer.'' And then he was thinking of everyone when he said that pornography ''desensitizes people so extraordinarily.''

When Roy tells his story, he insists that he never visited any Web sites of child porn. He doesn't think there is much relevance in the mainstream porn that he did view -- and it doesn't seem to have had, for him, the erotic impact of his stepdaughter's conversations with her best friend. But he claims (perhaps too self-servingly) that he would never have propositioned his stepdaughter had it not been for the Internet's unique, oddly dehumanized form of communication. In the ultimate moments, he beckoned her to his computer. He beckoned her, physically, into his space. But before then, his lust gained much of its unbearable power, and found its most intense expression, screen to screen.

One day this fall, Roy sat behind a gray laptop that rested on a metal desk. Martina Kardol, one of Liddle's colleagues, stood over him in a small office in the probation building, reading aloud from a set of instructions. He would be shown 160 images on the laptop screen, she informed him. Her voice stayed level; her face, expressionless. She has long blond hair and wore a loose sweater with black stretch pants. (Not all the therapists adhere to D'Amora's dress code.) ''You will see people of varying ages.'' Roy had on a black blazer, a tie and sharply pressed khakis. From here he was headed straight to an important meeting at work. ''Imagine being sexual with the models in the slides.''

Kardol told him to score each picture for sexual interest, hitting 1 for ''disgusting'' up through 7 for ''highly sexually arousing.'' He should advance through the images by clicking the return key. He was shown a practice set. A blond woman in somewhat prim white lingerie; then a clean-cut man in a plaid shirt and khakis; then a boy, who looked to me around 12, straddling a bicycle with a book bag over his shoulder; then a girl around the same age wearing a straw hat and eating strawberries; then a pudgy little girl of maybe 4 in a blue one-piece swimsuit. Kardol asked Roy if he was ready. Sitting upright, ever compliant, he said that he was. We left him alone with the photographs.

He was taking the Abel Assessment for Sexual Interest, as all the men do at some point during their treatment. It offers a gauge of erotic preference measured not by the 1 to 7 ratings but by the length of time a man lets his eyes linger on each image. The photos are fairly demure. Legally, the test can't show pornographic images of minors, so to keep things balanced, even the adult pictures are less than revealing. And when, later, I clicked through a sampling, the distinction between age categories sometimes eluded me. The subjects in the pictures are supposed to represent four plainly separate age groups so that areas of attraction can be clearly measured. There are children of 2 to 4, children between 8 and 10, adolescents between 14 and 17 and adults at least 22. But some of the 8-to-10's looked to me almost like young adolescents. And some of the adolescents appeared more like young fresh-faced adults, with the kinds of faces and bodies you might see on billboards selling underwear, before I reminded myself about the likely ages of the models in some of those ads. Still, the Abel Assessment is widely considered a strong diagnostic tool, and when Roy came to Kardol's office door a half-hour later to say that he was finished, he looked faintly shellshocked, like a patient who had been through an arduous diagnostic exam. The information was sent down to the Abel offices in Atlanta, Ga., and Kardol soon got the results. Roy's attractions were for adult females and -- very slightly more so -- for females in the adolescent category.

This put him, Liddle explained to me, within the realm of ordinary male sexuality. The minimal preference for adolescents over adults was, he said, a cause for some worry, given Roy's crime. But in itself the strong erotic response to adolescents was entirely normal.

Along the circle, during my time with Roy's group, there have been a few whose Abel results were plainly aberrant: men drawn above all to preadolescent boys and men drawn powerfully and almost equally to disparate categories, adults and young children, boys and girls. Until his term of probation ended, there was a retired accountant who met the psychiatric definition of a ''fixated,'' or exclusive, pedophile. He had coached sports and built a clubhouse on his property in order to lure the neighborhood boys; he had spanked and groped many over a period of many years.

Yet most of the group tends to fall somewhere closer to the middle of a continuum -- a continuum on which normal occupies a broad and blurry sector. With most of the men he has worked with over the past 14 years, Liddle says, ''the difference between me and my guys is a very thin line.'' He doesn't mean that he's on the edge of doing what they have done, only that the potential may lie within all of us.

''We want there to be the clear line; we want there to be the sloped forehead,'' David D'Amora has said, summarizing society's thinking about the men in groups like Liddle's, men D'Amora has been watching over for the state since 1986. Before that, he was a therapist for adult and child victims of sexual assault.

''It just doesn't exist. We want them to be the few, the perverted, the far away. Most are not.''

What research has been done seems to back this up. Dr. Richard Green, a psychiatrist at the Imperial College School of Medicine in London and professor emeritus of psychiatry at U.C.L.A., wrote two years ago in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior about a 1989 study: the psychologists John Briere and Marsha Runtz found that ''in a sample of nearly 200 university males, 21 percent reported some sexual attraction to small children.'' Specifically, ''9 percent described sexual fantasies involving children, 5 percent admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children and 7 percent indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught. Briere and Runtz remarked that 'given the probable social undesirability of such admissions, we may hypothesize that the actual rates were even higher.''' Green wrote as well of the work done in 1970 by the researchers Kurt Freund and R. Costell. Forty-eight Czech soldiers were hooked to a ''penile responsivity'' meter known as a plethysmograph. Viewing a series of slides, ''28 of 48 showed penile response to the female children age 4-10.'' And to count Web sites or consider legal history is to sense that the results of these studies may represent an unspeakable reality. Type in ''preteen porn'' on AOL's search engine and the list of sites covers thousands of pages. Until the late 19th century in England, the legal age of sexual consent was 10.

''They are not monsters,'' Joan Tabachnick told me. ''They are us.'' Tabachnick is the director of public education for Stop It Now!, which was founded by a sexual-abuse survivor and which is among the most prominent national organizations devoted to the prevention of child sexual abuse. ''It's so much easier,'' she said about the prevailing public vision, ''to think only of the most sadistic, most dangerous pedophile,'' the predator who kidnaps and abuses and kills. ''It's very comfortable. We can say, They're not who we are.'' But they're also not, she pointed out, the typical offender. They are the rare extreme. ''It's very uncomfortable,'' she went on, ''to say, I know what it means to look at my child as a sexual being -- I know what it means to want to touch my child.'' She was not excusing molestation; she was calling for a complex understanding of a widespread and often devastating crime, because without it, she said, efforts at prevention are crippled. She drew a comparison with adults' acknowledging their wish to hit their children in moments of rage -- mere acknowledgment can make the impulse easier to quell, and those drawn hard to such violence can seek help. ''It's far more difficult to be candid about sexual urges,'' she said, and so it's far more difficult for those on the edge of offending -- those for whom cultural taboos, legal prohibitions and empathy for the child aren't powerful enough to keep desire deeply submerged or to choke it off if it rises to the surface -- to find a way to stop themselves.

After the relaxation exercise and after the introductions on days when they are given, the men lift their loose-leaf binders from the floor beside their chairs. The books are filled with the homework they've done and the handouts they've been given, with ''feelings journals'' and instructional sheets on methods like ''Thought Broadcasting'': ''If you get a deviant thought, imagine that your thought is being broadcast from your mind over a loudspeaker system.''

Roy's binder is the thickest of all. He tries to think of treatment like ''a normal college class,'' as if to convince himself that diligence will guarantee graduation. Not only does he have a jumbo white plastic binder with labeled dividers that he brings to group; he has another that he keeps at home. He throws away nothing. His homework and ''action plans'' -- his applications to do what his basic restrictions don't allow -- are composed at length and always neatly typed out. But lately, for Roy, things have not been going well.

The counseling takes what is known as a cognitive-behavioral approach. Back in the early to mid-1970's, D'Amora has recounted to me, when the field of child-molester treatment was just developing, the typical strategy was more psychoanalytic and individualized -- profound insight into the disinterred past was supposed to change behavior and reduce recidivism. It didn't, and by the early 80's, therapy shifted toward behavior modification, with offenders instructed to inhale noxious odors during deviant fantasies. Here there were signs of ''fair success,'' D'Amora said, followed by signs that the effect was often short-lived. The method has mostly faded from the field. Meanwhile, the cognitive-behavioral model began to be used more and more -- Liddle's sessions can seem as much like classes in coping skills as anything that might be called treatment. With a creased, stoic face and a manner that is habitually restrained, he keeps the fluorescently lighted room sedate. He asks the men to open their binders to a handout on ''dynamic risk factors,'' and they go over a list, from ''victim access'' to ''intimacy deficits,'' of things they need to avoid or try to overcome. Or he asks what deviant thoughts they've had over the previous week. To Liddle's question, I have never heard the men speak more than a very few words about children. Roy has told me that he's fantasized about his stepdaughter a good deal since his arrest, but he has never brought it up in group. (By court order, he hasn't seen her since then.) One man has said to me, ''If we talked in there about what was really going through our minds, we'd all be wearing ankle bracelets.'' Liddle takes what modest fantasies the men are willing to mention -- one morning, it's about a young-looking gas-station attendant someone has glimpsed -- and he reviews ''Thought Broadcasting.''

Liddle never presses hard toward the darkest truths. His approach is full of paradox. He explained to me that he aims to elicit candor -- but candor that is delicately calibrated. Detailed and wrenching confessions of illegal acts or illicit desire could destroy the composure and dignity he wants to instill in the men, partly through the air of unbreachable calm in the room. (Too much communal honesty could also stoke their fantasies. For this reason, the men are forbidden to talk with one another outside the meetings.) Liddle hopes to ''build up their sense of decency.'' He wants them to leave the program, which they usually do after about three years, believing in their own capacity for restraint.

This kind of treatment may work. The recidivism rate for child molesters is around 17 percent, according to Dr. Karl Hanson, a psychologist with the Office of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in Canada and a leading researcher in the field. Already far lower than the public tends to think, the rate may drop by as much as seven points with the completion of a cognitive-behavioral program like D'Amora's. Yet Liddle knows enough to feel uneasy, almost always, as the men move on.

He is uneasy about Roy -- and Roy is nowhere close to moving on. For a time, all looked positive. Roy's diligence seemed to signify honesty and control. The privileges he applied for were steadily granted. He could drive over the state line to visit his parents; he could fly his kites on his town beach. He was told that he might eventually be allowed to play music at a local bar. But not long ago Roy and his new bride, the bookkeeper from work, put in a request with Liddle that she be allowed to take a special training course the next time it is offered and that she then be appointed an ancillary, probation-approved supervisor so that the couple could have more freedom. Yet it turned out that Roy and his wife haven't told her parents about his crime. And Roy didn't make this clear to Liddle. Hiding his past from his in-laws may be entirely understandable: should he be expected to tell them? Have any of us constructed our lives without concealing portions of ourselves? But his not coming clean about this to Liddle is considered unacceptable. If Roy's wife wants to be in a supervisory role, her first concern has to be with keeping him away from trouble, like family situations that might involve contact with girls; to do that she needs to tell her parents the truth. When his in-laws' ignorance emerged, indirectly, during a later discussion in group, Liddle started to worry about the way Roy had deceived him.

Then Roy took a polygraph test, as the men generally do twice a year. One of the most powerful parts comes not when the machine is running but, beforehand, when the nervous offender fills out a wide-ranging questionnaire. Here Roy admitted, for the first time to anyone in the program, that he fantasized about his stepdaughter. Earlier, telling me about these erotic thoughts, which he seemed desperate to exorcise, he said that his treatment prevented him from putting them in the past. The thoughts were ''burned'' into his mind because he had to sit every week in that circle, and he could not bring himself to confess them in the carefully subdued atmosphere of the back room. Liddle, he said, ''asks for deviant fantasy but he doesn't really want it.''

Liddle didn't see it that way. He saw a man in denial, a man trying to deflect responsibility for the force of his lust, a man who should have delivered, in group, a simple acknowledgment of his desires, just as he should have been clear about his in-laws. Other deceptions glimmered. In the evasion of truth Liddle saw the threat of chaos. He saw a man unable to confront himself or ask for help, a man who might unravel and repeat the past, if for example, his marriage were to deteriorate, if he were to have access to girls.

In mid-January, he moved Roy to a newly created group for higher-risk offenders. He had already taken away all Roy's privileges -- the kite flying, the visits to his parents. Roy has to start from scratch. Except for work, he is more or less housebound.

At his house, one recent evening, I met the woman who has married him. She is a few years older than Roy, but young-looking and trim, with brown bangs and a kind of Caroline Kennedy smile. This is her first marriage; she has no children. She and Roy sat side by side on a new couch with matching end tables. Outside, there were cute wooden shutters on the windows. She wore white socks on her shoeless feet. They had just finished their ritual Friday-night meal of pizza and eggplant sandwiches. In certain ways, the domestic scene couldn't have been more unremarkable.

They started dating a few months after his arrest but before his plea; probation's rules hadn't yet defined what he could and could not do. They went to the movies and bowled and flew his gigantic kites. He confided in her about his crime. ''In my heart I didn't think he was this monster that he was portrayed as in the paper,'' she told me, referring to the articles in the small newspaper of his suburban town at the time of his arrest. ''I didn't know what to believe.''

On the couch, they reminisced about the purple-and-aqua stunt kite that she flew and couldn't manage on their first date. They laughed about the way it tugged her down the beach. He remembered her once saying to him, ''When we go out flying, it's like an entire new day.'' She recalled, ''One of the nicest things he ever said to me was that when he met me, God was giving him a second chance.'' Her voice was sweet yet scarcely gave way to emotion. She could seem keenly realistic, as if she had thought everything through. But Roy had spoken in group about the meeting the two of them had with her family priest, who was about to marry them. They told the priest about his crime. When the priest asked her whether she was really prepared for a life with a convicted child molester serving 35 years probation, suddenly ''she cried hysterically.''

''I think,'' she said on the couch, ''I know Roy well enough'' to be sure that he won't ever do again what he did. ''I think with Roy things just got out of hand.'' She talked of hoping still to take the course for family members who wish to act as supervisors, so she could learn how to be on guard, how to save him. ''People can stumble,'' she said. ''I want to be able to recognize the signs, to know what to look for.''

Then, for a few seconds, her voice sharpened severely. ''To this day'' -- she spoke partly to me but partly to her husband -- ''I can't understand how he could write crap like that to a little girl.'' She said she told him this frequently. ''She does,'' he mumbled, looking stricken.

One night, shortly before his privileges were taken away, Roy and his wife launched a vast, luminous gold-and-red kite at the town beach. Usually after dusk the beach was empty. But a group of kids came running toward them, boys and girls who looked, in his eyes, to be between 4 and 12. By his agreement with Liddle and the probation department, he was simply supposed to tell the kids to keep their distance, to tell them they might get tangled in the heavy lines. The mere presence of minors didn't mean he had to leave the waterfront. But he panicked, and whether fleeing some imagined legal transgression or terrified by something within himself, he left the unwieldy lines to his wife. He raced away.

He rushed for the waist-high fence that divides the sand from the parking lot. He couldn't get his bearlike body over it cleanly; he wound up stuck, sitting on it and crushing it. Sometime later he showed me the place of his flight, where the fence remained bent. It wasn't hard for me to picture him caught there, between the safe and the terrifying.

Daniel Bergner is the author of ''In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa.'' His last article for the magazine was about cannibalism during the civil war in the Congo.

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By Amy Reinink

The Gainesville Sun - June 14, 2005

State probation officers Michelle Plourde and Alan R. Katz leave the Gainesville residence of a registered sex offender after a contact interview heir offenses range from rape with a deadly weapon to a 24-year-old man having consensual sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend.

Among Alachua County's 330 registered sex offenders, nearly every offense is represented. The offenders vary greatly in age, include both women and men, and they live almost everywhere.

There's a 57-year-old sexual predator in northeast Gainesville who said he once fled the state to escape his second sex-offense charge.

In southwest Gainesville, a 60-year-old offender molested his girlfriend's daughter, and says he's still with the same girlfriend.

And, in Micanopy, there's a 40-year-old offender who was found guilty of lewd or lascivious molestation of a victim between the ages of 12 and 15.

Experts who deal with sex offenders - including counselors, probation officers and prosecutors - acknowledge that there's a range of severity in sex offenses, and say that not all offenders are violent predators.

But, several area sex offenders interviewed said that, to the general public, there is no such thing as an "excusable" sexual offense or a sexual predator worthy of sympathy. A sexual offender or predator is someone to be feared and vilified, they say, no matter what their explanation might be.

"I understand everyone's fears," said Bill, 37, an Alachua County sex offender who served about two years in prison for 66 counts of child pornography. "There are some dangerous people out there. I've been in jail with them, in therapy with them.

"But I'd say 90 percent of the (sex offenders) I've met are just normal people who made a bad decision. They got high, they got drunk and they made the wrong choice. They're trying to start their lives over again, but how can there be rehabilitation when it's like this?

"People need to either accept us as part of society or do away with us altogether."

Different cases

Overwhelmingly, Alachua County's sex offenders are older white men, but there are many on the registry who don't fit that description.

Jason Brown, 24, looks more like a college student than a child molester on probation.

He's served four years in prison and spent four and a half years on probation after being charged as an adult for molesting an 8-year-old girl.

Brown said there's more to his story than the offense implies. Brown was 13 when he molested the girl while baby-sitting her, an offense that followed years of being abused himself, he said.

Brown said he understands the fear that's seized Floridians in the wake of the deaths of Jessica Lunsford, 9, and Sarah Lunde, 13, who were both killed earlier this year, allegedly by registered sex offenders. But he - along with some experts who deal with sex offenders - say those cases are the exception, not the rule.

"I do not work with anyone who's killed a victim," said Ellen Young, a licensed clinical social worker for the ITM Group in Gainesville, who's done inpatient and outpatient counseling for sex offenders in the region since the 1980s. "The media is portraying all sex offenders as homicidal maniacs, and that's just not the reality."

Jeanne Singer, chief assistant state attorney for the six-county judicial circuit that includes Alachua County, said while the district has seen violent sex offenses, those cases are few and far between.

"I think you're going to find that the most violent offenders are serving life sentences," Singer said. "If you do see any out in the community, on supervision, it's because they've done 30 years (in prison) already."

Even among nonviolent offenders, the charges can vary.

"We see offenders whose victims were adults and offenders whose victims were minors, familial offenses and nonfamilial offenses," said Michelle Plourde, a state probation officer who works in Gainesville. "So yeah, I guess we see just about everything."

Finding homes, jobs

Though state data shows that the majority of Alachua County's sex offenders cluster in poor neighborhoods in northeast Gainesville and in rural areas in outlying parts of the county, Alan R. Katz, a state probation officer who works in Gainesville, said they live almost everywhere.

"Every case is unique," Katz said. "You normally think of them living in poorer areas, but really, there's not one socioeconomic status to group them in, and there are really no statistics that link them together."

Sex offenders convicted today are not allowed to live within 1,000 feet of a church, a day care center, a park, a playground, a school or a school bus stop while they're on probation.

Bill, 37, whose 66 child pornography charges landed him on the sex offender registry, said he chose his remote location in Alachua County for a reason.

"I don't want to draw any attention to myself," Bill said. "I'm terrified all the time. My girlfriend lives in constant fear. With everything that's going on, I just wonder, if people found out, what would they do? I don't want to hurt anyone. I just want a quiet little existence."

Brown said when he was still living in his hometown in Madison County, he had to move six times in one year, being approved by probation officers based on distance from schools and bus stops and then denied based on new information. "If a swing set in someone's backyard is large enough, it can qualify as a playground, and that means I can't live there," Brown said.

Financial troubles from sparse job options limit where offenders can live, too.

"I can barely make a living," Bill said. "Even manual labor jobs, half of them will not even consider me. As soon as I have to state my charge, it's over. I had a temp service turn me away in Gainesville. I'm working for family now. If not for that, I can't see how I could live at all."

Brown is a cook at a restaurant. He moved to Gainesville about a year and a half ago, when the manager of the restaurant where he worked in Madison County, who knew about the sex charge, was transferred to a Gainesville restaurant in the same national chain and asked Brown if he wanted to move for a higher-paying job.

But Brown said he has been declined for several other jobs based on his sex offense, even after employers knew about and OK'd a felony on his record. He once spent six months packing watermelons because he couldn't find any other job.

"The felony part really doesn't give you any kind of hindrance, but the sex offender part?" Brown said. "When I go on an interview, I wait and see if I'm hired, wait until they give me my schedule, and then say, 'Wait, by the way, that felony I have . . .' Then I know if I'm not hired, it's simply because I'm a sex offender. It's not my qualifications or anything like that - it's simply because I'm a sex offender. And I can deal with that. If they don't want to give me a chance, fine."

The stigma

Ricky, 52, is off probation now, after years in prison and supervision following his 1987 offense - molesting his two young children and three of his brother-in-law's kids.

His wife of nine years said she quickly learned to look beyond her husband's past.

"It was hard," she said, "but I looked at his heart."

Still, almost 20 years after his offense, in a new life that Ricky says leaves no chance for re-offending, the social stigma hangs with him, and he said very few people are willing to look beyond his past the way his wife was. "People need to realize you made a mistake," Ricky said. "I've done my time. I regret the things I've done wrong. I learned from my mistake. I want to live again."

No matter what the charge, offenders say, the stigma of being a sex offender stretches to every aspect of a person's life. And even when probation is through, they say the punishment never ends.

"Sex offenders are not another race of creatures," Bill said. "Offenders are people with goals and dreams like everyone else. But the way we're treated, they might as well build an island and lock us all in on it."

Brown said he knows his case is bad, and said he deeply regrets the offense. But he said when he's able to fully explain the situation - that he was abused growing up, that he was young himself when he committed the crime - they usually don't judge him too harshly.

He said though he wishes everyone would judge sex offenders based on their individual circumstances rather than their charges, he understands the other side, too.

"Mine isn't as bad as some," Brown said. "But I don't know that they can really look at it that way. I want my little sister to be safe, and maybe this is the way it has to be. So if I have to suffer for it, you know, whatever."

Amy Reinink can be reached at (352) 374-5088 or reinina@gvillesun.com.

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Series on Sex Offenders

Kidnapped by a pedophile: the Shasta Groene tragedy; discussion of child predators and how we as a nation can get child predators off the streets

SHOW: The Oprah Winfrey Show 4:00 AM EST BNO

October 4, 2005 Tuesday

HOST: Oprah Winfrey

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Ellen Rakieten

KIDNAPPED BY A PEDOPHILE: THE SHASTA GROENE TRAGEDY

OPRAH WINFREY: Tell them I'm coming down.

Unidentified Man #1: Oprah's on the way.

Unidentified Man #2: Ready music.

Unidentified Woman #1: ...four, three, two, one.

Unidentified Man #2: Roll tape, music back. Bring it up.

WINFREY: A murderous rampage: two small children missing. Weeks later, Shasta Groene is found alive with a convicted sex offender.

He should have been behind bars the first time. So sick of it!

Her father speaks out with the latest. Plus, we need to capture these criminals. Details on our $100,000 reward, next.

Today I stand before you to say, in no uncertain terms--as a matter of fact, in terms that I hope are very certain--that I have had enough. With every breath in my body, whatever it takes and, most importantly, with your support, we are going to move heaven and earth to stop a sickness, a darkness, that I believe is the definition of evil that's been going on for far too long. The children of this nation, the United States of America, are being stolen, raped, tortured and killed by sexual predators who are walking right into your homes. How many times does it have to happen, and how many children have to be sacrificed? What price are we, as a society, willing to continue to pay before we rise up and take to the street and say `Enough, enough, enough'?

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: People in Petaluma, California, still remember when their small town became the setting for a national nightmare. That was when 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped from a slumber party. After six long weeks of searching, a tragic conclusion. Police found Polly's broken body in a field. Her killer, Richard Allen Davis, had an 11-page rap sheet filled with violent acts against women. Twice, Davis escaped from mental hospitals, but after serving only eight years in prison, Davis was released early on good behavior.

Just months later, another child, another brutal crime. This man, Jesse Timmendequas, lured seven-year-old Megan Kanka. He raped her, he strangled her and dumped her body in a park. Megan's killer lived across the street. Nobody in this quiet neighborhood knew he was a twice convicted sex offender.

Nine-year-old Amber Haggerman was snatched from a parking lot where she loved to ride her bicycle.

Unidentified Woman #2: I want my baby back, so, please, if you have my baby, please, I beg you.

WINFREY: Amber's body was found days later in this dirty creek. Her killer is still at large.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Polly, Megan, Amber--three beautiful little girls, each innocent face a symbol for this sickening wave of crimes that continues to spread like a deadly virus in our country with too many victims to count. Take a look: This is America's wall of shame.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: Little Samantha Runnion, just five years old, nabbed while playing with a friend, sexually abused, suffocated, her body left naked and exposed on a hilltop.

(Excerpt from audiotape)

Unidentified Woman #3: Was it an adult body?

Unidentified Man #3: No. It's a baby. I think it might even be the little girl on the news.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Her killer, Alejandro Avila, had twice before been charged with molesting little girls.

Police say Lydia Rupp was stolen from her home by her mother's boyfriend and taken to Mexico. No one knew Fernando Aguero's shady past as a sex offender. Aguero awaits trial in Mexico.

A car wash security camera captured these haunting images of Carlie Bruscha's kidnapping, and again, we heard the same sad echo.

Unidentified Man #4: The body of a beautiful 11-year-old girl, Carlie Bruscha, has been found.

WINFREY: Joseph P. Smith, a repeat offender, had recently violated his parole. Yet, he walked the streets a free man the day police say he grabbed Carlie. His trial is pending.

Sarah Lunde was 13 when she was found dead, half-clothed, in a fish pond. David Onstott faces trial for Sarah's murder. He has a disturbing history of sexual deviance, drug use, stalking, assault and rape. A month before Sarah disappeared, he was arrested, but was released the next day on $1,000 bail.

And just this past February, Jessica Lunsford was taken in the night from her bedroom.

Mr. MARK LUNSFORD (Daughter Jessica Was Kidnapped And Murdered): I really need as much help as I can get right now. I just--I want my daughter home.

WINFREY: Search teams canvassed western Florida looking for Jessica, while just 150 yards from her home, police say John Couey, a man with a history of violence and sex crimes, kept Jessica alive for days, sexually assaulting the nine-year-old before burying her alive in his back yard. Couey faces the death penalty in his upcoming trial.

The bitter truth is Jessica's face is just one among thousands. We've seen them on billboards and fliers and newscasts, but maybe, just maybe, this will be the young face that makes us all say `Enough, enough already.'

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: This is the face of Shasta Groene. She's a little girl whose heart-wrenching story is simply, I think, the last straw.

(Excerpt from audiotape)

Unidentified Man #5: There's blood all over the door.

Unidentified Woman #4: Oh?

Unidentified Man #5: Nobody comes to the door.

(End of excerpt)

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: On May 16th, sheriffs arrived at a sinister crime scene in Couer d'Alene, Idaho. There, they discovered the bludgeoned bodies of Brenda Groene, her boyfriend Mark McKenzie and her 13-year-old son Slade. Just a few miles away, Brenda's mother receives a chilling phone call.

Ms. DARLENE TORRES (Shasta Groene's Grandmother): She says, `Look at that tape going across the TV,' so I did and, of course, I just started falling on my knees, panicking, praying. I'm sorry. That--the way they described the house, there's only one there, and that was my daughter's.

WINFREY: The horror is magnified as Brenda's ex-husband Steve is hit with more gut-wrenching news. His youngest children, nine-year-old Dylan and eight-year-old Shasta are missing.

Mr. STEVE GROENE (Shasta Groene's Father): The only thing that really kept me going was just, you know, thinking that the two kids had to be out there alive.

WINFREY: Within hours, a nationwide search is under way for Shasta, her brother Dylan and the depraved predator who killed their family.

Mr. GROENE: Please, please, release my children safely. They had nothing to do with any of this.

WINFREY: Six agonizing weeks later, a surveillance camera captures Shasta in a convenience store with this man. His name is Joseph Duncan, a wanted pedophile. Late that night, Duncan enters a Denny's restaurant with Shasta just miles from her home.

Unidentified Man #6: I ran into a waitress and I told her, you know, `I think it's Shasta. I'm 90 percent sure it is. Will you go in and, you know, check it out and tell your manager?'

Unidentified Woman #5: I first saw Shasta when I came back from my break and looked for the missing children's poster, wasn't there. When I went to the tables, when I really was sure that it was her.

(From phone call) I've got a little girl here with a tall gentleman and she looks so much like that Shasta.

WINFREY: The manager calls 911. Within minutes, police descend upon the restaurant and capture Joseph Duncan. The first thing Shasta says to police is, `Please let me see my dad.' But where is Shasta's brother Dylan?

Ms. TORRES: We were thrilled to hear that Shasta was OK, but within an hour or so, we went through a lot of sorrow because we also found out that Dylan was gone.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Two days later, detectives found young Dylan's charred remains at this remote Montana campsite. They also learned that Joseph Duncan has an appalling record of violent sexual crimes against children. Police suspect that he stalked this family using night vision goggles, peering through their windows before he attacked. Steve Groene never imagined that this would happen to his children. Now his two sons, Slade and Dylan, are dead, and his only daughter Shasta is a survivor, but she will never be the same. We'll be right back.

Next, we'll find out how Shasta's doing when we come back.

(Announcements)

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: Police say Dylan and Shasta Groene were taken from their Idaho home by convicted sex offender Joseph Duncan, their family murdered in cold blood. A nationwide manhunt lasted for weeks. Dylan's burned body would eventually be found at a remote Montana campsite. But until a tip led to Duncan's capture, little Shasta endured a horrific 48 days in captivity before being reunited with her father Steve.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Have you-all talked about, in any way, what happened? Did the therapist tell you not to talk about it or wait until she talks about it?

Mr. GROENE: We've been kind of asked not to really ask her questions. We've been instructed, if she talks about them on her own, to definitely listen to her and let her talk about it.

WINFREY: Where was she during those six dreadful weeks?

Mr. GROENE: Well, it's our understanding that she was at a couple different campsites, which they're not really like designated camping areas, just out in the wilderness.

WINFREY: With Duncan.

Mr. GROENE: With Duncan

WINFREY: The whole time.

Mr. GROENE: The whole time.

WINFREY: Steve says that the police report of Shasta's ordeal is apparent living hell. As you listen, picture your own little eight-year-old daughter going through this. Shasta told police that she was in bed when her mother woke her up and told her to come to the living room where Duncan was waiting. Her mother, mother's boyfriend and 13-year-old brother Slade were bound with zip ties and duct tape while Shasta watched. Then she and Dylan were tied up outside near a swing set. She told police that she could hear screams from inside the house as the three were bludgeoned to death. Shasta says that she was taken to a remote campsite in the mountains and that Duncan bragged to her about the killings and showed her the hammer that he had used to bludgeon her family.

Is it true that after Shasta finished telling police all of this that had happened to her, they had to sedate her because it was so overwhelming for her to have to go back to that space?

Mr. GROENE: That might have been part of it, but being that she was sexually abused, they had to do some examinations also, and I believe that that's a part of why she was sedated, so that they would be able to do those examinations without further traumatizing her.

WINFREY: You sat in the same courtroom with Joseph Duncan.

Mr. GROENE: Yes.

WINFREY: Yeah. When he pleaded not guilty, what was that like?

Mr. GROENE: The thing that bothered me the most is that he didn't speak at all. He stared forward pretty much the whole time.

WINFREY: Did he ever look at you?

Mr. GROENE: Yes.

WINFREY: And did you look at him?

Mr. GROENE: Yes. No, I glared at him.

WINFREY: Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Joseph Duncan. Is that what you want?

Mr. GROENE: I believe that's what's deserved in this case, and I believe if you take somebody's life, you should give yours up in return. This guy took four lives, and unfortunately, we can only kill him once.

WINFREY: On top of all the tragedy that you've endured recently, I heard you got more bad news.

Mr. GROENE: Yes. I was recently diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. I will have to have radiation.

WINFREY: Will you get your voice back eventually, you hope?

Mr. GROENE: That's unknown. It--there have been cases where people's voices return to normal, cases where obviously people's voices varied a little bit, and cases where people lost their voices totally from it, so...

WINFREY: Next, why was a dangerous predator like Joseph Duncan out of prison? That's what I want to know.

Mr. GROENE: Me, too.

WINFREY: And could someone just like him be living in your neighborhood? You will be screaming at the TV. Stay tuned.

And coming up, a little girl who endured days of torture tells her terrifying story.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Shasta Groene and her brother Dylan were missing for six weeks this summer after repeat sex offender Joseph Duncan allegedly broke into their home. He had been observing them for some time, killed their mother, killed her boyfriend and their brother. Miraculously, Shasta was spotted with Joseph Duncan at a Denny's restaurant near her home and was rescued six weeks later. Dylan's charred body was found a few days later.

Shasta's grandmother, Darlene, said she heard about this nightmare on television and nobody can even imagine what that's like until it happens to you, and everybody thinks it will not happen to them.

Ms. TORRES: It will never happen to you, yes.

WINFREY: Yes. You were the first to have to tell Steve what happened. What was that like?

Ms. TORRES: I just--it was hard, and, of course, I went into shock right away and then we tried--Steve tried to call the authorities and, of course, they wouldn't give us much information at all, and then the--you know, there was five people in there. There was only three to be found, and so where were the other two? And it just...

Mr. GROENE: Right.

WINFREY: And as weeks passed, do you still hold out the hope, Brandy, as Shasta's aunt?

BRANDY (Shasta Groene's Aunt): You have to.

WINFREY: You know, so I have been doing shows like this for so long, and I have shed a lot of tears about children who have been raped and stolen and children who are murdered. I'm tired of crying about it.

Ms. TORRES: Yes.

WINFREY: I'm really tired of crying about it. Tired of crying about it. I am so angry, so I can't even imagine if you actually have somebody who's been through this. I am so angry. I'm angry at the system, and I'm angry at us. I'm angry that we are a people that says we love and we care about children, but what we really love and care about are our own children, and I'm angry because we don't see that Shasta is your daughter, that Amber and Polly and Megan and all of the children whose names we heard, they're your daughters and sons, and until we rise up in the streets and change the laws in this country, it will continue to happen, and every time, it will be more heinous than the next. So when it happened to Polly Klaas--and that was the first time in this nation we'd ever heard of anybody going into somebody's home and taking their chi--everybody's like, `Oh, my God, that's so terrible.'

And now it's not one child, it's an entire family shot up and taking the child and held the child and killed the son. It gets more and more heinous, and the reason that keeps happening in front of our faces is because we close our eyes and we shut down to it, and we say, `Oh, isn't that a shame for them, but this could never happen to me.' And until we rise up in the streets and have the laws changed, we, the people, are the government, and we can change the laws so that when in this country a child is molested the first time, that person is put behind bars and is never let out! Is never let out!

I'm so sick of it. I'm so sick of it. I'm so sick of it. I am sick of it. I am sick of it, and I know you're sick of it. I'm sick of our short-term memory. I'm sick of us remembering it for a time and then it passes and then you have to wait till the next most heinous thing happens and you said, `Oh, Lord, it shouldn't happen, it shouldn't happen.' We have got to change it, and only we can. It only continues to happen and it continues to get worse because it's the universe saying, `How bad does it have to get, and do you really care? Do you really care or do you only really care about yourself?' Because when you hear about this Joseph Duncan, he should have been behind bars the first time! The first time!

Who was this sick man that destroyed this family? This is the part that I'm hoping will make you scream. This was not Joseph Duncan's first attack. Oh, no, because he has a long record of sex crimes against children dating back 25 years. And yet, he was out walking the streets, because we, as a country, aren't really sure how we feel about sex offenders. We're not really sure, and that's why they are allowed to walk the streets. When we get sure, when we decide that when you molest a child the first time--I don't care whose son you are, whose uncle, whose father you are--when you do it the first time, we will put you behind bars for life so you cannot walk the streets again. That's the only way it's going to change. We can't decide how we feel about it.

We can't decide how we feel about it. Well, tell me how you feel about this.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: Joseph Duncan's story begins here in Tacoma, Washington, where he first showed signs of disturbing deviant behavior. At 16, Duncan raped a younger boy at gunpoint, beat him, burned him with a cigarette. Duncan was caught and convicted, sent to a mental hospital for treatment, but refused to cooperate, so Duncan was put away, sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in jail, but he only served 12 of them. Then he was released on parole.

Duncan was classified a Level III sex offender, the most dangerous and likely to reoffend. At first, he followed the rules, reporting regularly to his parole officer, but after two years, he slipped from sight. For months, he lived on the run, bouncing from state to state. Authorities now believe that during this time, he may have killed two other girls in Seattle and raped and murdered a 10-year-old boy in California. But when police finally caught up with the fugitive in Missouri, they knew nothing of those killings. They threw him back in jail for violating parole. Four years later, he was out again. Duncan settled in Fargo, North Dakota, registering as a sex offender as Megan's Law requires. Soon, Duncan began writing an online diary, posting photos of himself and his bizarre ramblings.

Then Duncan's life took another sinister turn. At a school playground in Minnesota, a man matching Duncan's description molested two young boys. `The boogeyman will get ya' he writes online, `so I've been accused of molesting little boys. How could I?' Police tied Duncan to the playground incident. He was arrested and appeared before Judge Thomas Schroeder. Despite Duncan's chilling record of sexual violence against children and his history of violating parole, Judge Schroeder set bail at just $15,000. The judge claims he never knew the full extent of Duncan's sadistic past.

Judge THOMAS SCHROEDER: (From KSTP-TV, Minneapolis-St. Paul) You don't have a crystal ball. Like any case where a person springs and does something bad, hindsight's always 20/20, and this is about the worst scenario that could possibly happen.

WINFREY: Duncan wrote a personal check and walked out of jail a free man. His online journal began to read like postcards from hell. He wrote, `It is a battle between me and my demons. I'm afraid, very afraid. If they win, then a lot of people will be badly hurt.'

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Later, when we come back, I'm going to take you inside the detailed diary of one of the worst pedophiles on record. It's called the "Molester's Manual." So you get to see how these guys think, so you know there is no rehabilitation. We'll be right back.

Later, stay tuned. It's your chance to capture a child predator on the run.

(Announcements)

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: These are just some of America's most wanted sex offender, child molesters who are not only walking our streets, but many, experts say, most likely to strike again. The FBI wants William George Barney, charged with molesting a 12-year-old boy for six years. Barney failed to show up in court and has been on the lam now for almost five years. Officials say he considers himself a survivalist. And he may be hiding in a rural area.

And look out for this man, Walter Edward Myer. As the recreational director of an Alabama school, Myer allegedly befriended his students and took them to his home for weekends and holidays, where he sodomized and raped them. He's also charged with producing pornography. Myer's been on the run since 1997.

Richard Steve Goldberg is considered one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted fugitives. Goldberg's prey of choice: girls under the age of 10. Federal agents say they found pornographic pictures of his victims on Goldberg's computer. He has ties to New Jersey, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and Georgia.

The hunt continues for Wayne Arthur Silsbee, a former school bus driver accused of sexually abusing young girls. When he wasn't driving a school bus filled with children, he worked as a baby-sitter. Silsbee has been on the loose for almost 10 years.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: So the men you're looking at right now are an absolute danger to your children. Before one more child lands in the headlines, we need to capture these criminals and put them away for good. And today, we are beginning a child predator watch, and I'm calling on the millions of you who are tuned in right now to do your part. If you have any information about these men, go to your phone right now and call your local FBI.

And here is my pledge. It's not a lot. I know there isn't a lot any of us can do as one person, but as a group, there's a lot we can do. But as one person, I plan to work with law enforcement officials, and if they tell me that one of you turned in one of these fugitives that we are exposing today and that information leads to the capture and arrest of one of these men, I will personally l give a $100,000 cash reward, and we're going to be posting the faces of these men and others on oprah.com every Friday, so that you can go to oprah.com, and maybe you know them. Maybe you don't. Maybe you see them, look in their eyes, maybe it's something about the way you saw them move, something.

Just months ago, Jessica Lunsford, who we came to know as the adorable girl in the pretty pink hat, was yet another victim to this evil sickness. Her grieving father, Mark Lunsford, took us inside Jessica's bedroom. It has remained virtually untouched since the day she was kidnapped.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: This room is filled with memories.

Mr. LUNSFORD: It's hard to come in here.

WINFREY: Memories of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford.

Mr. LUNSFORD: I still look for her. I still look for her to come home.

WINFREY: In February, Jessica was taken from her bedroom, raped and then buried alive just steps away from her home.

Mr. LUNSFORD: Maybe 150 yards, that white trailer there.

WINFREY: The alleged killer, convicted sex offender John Couey, was living right across the street. Jessica's heartbroken father Mark will never forget the day he won that hat for her.

Mr. LUNSFORD: We were at the fair the Sunday before, and she seen all these hats, and she wanted one. I don't want the hat. I don't want this stuff. I just--I want my daughter.

WINFREY: He also won a stuffed dolphin for Jessica, the one she clung to as her young life ended.

Mr. LUNSFORD: And it was purple and it had a white belly, and when he took her out of here, she--he let her take her dolphin with her, and when they found her, he buried her alive and she was holding onto her dolphin.

WINFREY: Left with only memories, this grieving father has made it his life's mission to never let another child suffer.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: You believe that John Couey stalked your daughter, watching her for weeks, before he snatched her from her bedroom.

Mr. LUNSFORD: I think he did, because he worked at the school

WINFREY: He worked at the school. And so when the search was on, was his place searched in the beginning?

Mr. LUNSFORD: No.

WINFREY: No, it was not. One week after Jessica was kidnapped and murdered, John Couey was videotaped at a local bar, laughing and drinking.

What do you--I don't even know. What do you feel when you hear that, see that footage?

Mr. LUNSFORD: It's hard to swallow.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mr. LUNSFORD: About like it is now.

WINFREY: About like it is now. And so I say for all of these children whose lives really were sacrificed, I believe, so that we could, in some way, see what's going on and make a change, and I know that you don't want your daughter's life to have been in vain.

Mr. LUNSFORD: Right.

WINFREY: You created Jessica's Law. Tell us what that is.

Mr. LUNSFORD: The Jessica Lunsford Act is a minimum of 25 years to life with lifetime supervision if you get out before life, and you'll wear a tracking device for the rest of your life.

WINFREY: And the law has been passed in Florida.

Mr. LUNSFORD: It--yes, it has.

WINFREY: Thank you, Mark.

Mr. LUNSFORD: Thank you.

WINFREY: Coming up, I can't wait to meet a heroic little girl who suffered the unthinkable but somehow was able to outsmart the vicious child molester who had held her captive. We'll be right back. I know.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: To give you a glimpse inside the mind of a child molester, authorities shared with us a perverse journal written by a sex offender in prison. The author uses his time behind bars not to be rehabilitated, but to meticulously map out his future attacks on children once he's out of jail. Parents, I want you to pay attention to the manipulative, calculating details of how and where and when this child hunter and other child hunters plan to catch their prey. No place, not even a hospital emergency room, is off-limits. Listen to this.

(Excerpt from videotape)

Unidentified Man #7: Park in hospital parking lot. Look for families with girls.

WINFREY: You're now inside the mind of a dangerous child predator, getting a first-hand look at what police are calling his "Molester Manual." Authorities in Louisiana found this chilling journal inside the convicted sex offender's jail cell. Page by page, he spelled out each sinister step. First, he fantasizes about finding his prey in a hospital emergency room.

Unidentified Man #7: Be sure family is small, not too many adults. Be sure children see you. Stand near counter, as if speaking with parents.

WINFREY: Now listen to the twisted conversation he imagines having with a little girl, who might be there with an injured sibling.

Unidentified Man #7: Tell her, `You need to be strong,' walk the girl to her car. Say, `We're going to eat. Remember, we must get some food for your parents, too.'

WINFREY: Here's how the predator envisions stalking vulnerable children at a shopping mall.

Unidentified Man #7: Walking around, looking for girls, homely-looking, poor. Make sure parents are elsewhere. Ask if parents ever buy them good quality clothes.

WINFREY: The neighborhood grocery store is his next imaginary stalking ground. Posing as a friend of the family is how he plans to prey upon a child shopping alone.

Unidentified Man #7: `Your mother said to pick up a box of tea bags. If you don't have enough money, I'll pay the difference.' Go get in the car. Wave at child coming out from the store. Let her come to car. Put bags in back seat. Have tape and tie-downs ready to use. Say, `If you don't do as I say, my friend will kill your mother.'

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Andy Kahan is a former probation officer for sex offenders and knows how their devious minds work. He's the director of Houston's crime victims unit, and stopping child predators is his passion. Well, the reason why I wanted to run the tape is because I wanted people to understand how calculating it is.

Mr. ANDY KAHAN (Director of Houston's Crime Victims Department): They're extremely calculating. They're devious. They're cunning. They're secretive. They're diabolical. They know how to play the game.

WINFREY: And you say that this is a national public health crisis.

Mr. KAHAN: Absolutely. The reality is most sex offenders are either on probation or they do a very short prison term, they're released on parole. Of the 500,000 sex offenders in this nation currently on the streets, about 25 percent--that's roughly 100,000 sex offenders right now are currently not in compliance with the rules and conditions of parole, probation and registry. That is a national public safety health crisis. And it's time that the nation realized that we have a war on sexual assault. We have an epidemic and we need--instead of yelling and screaming about the injustices of the world, just exactly what you're doing here today, we need to do something about it. We need to demand tougher sentences.

WINFREY: Absolutely, absolutely. Coming up, a brave little girl who endured days of a molester's torture tells her terrifying story. I'm with ya. I'm with ya 100 percent.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Jennette Tamayo said many prayers for Shasta, Dylan and Jessica when they were missing, because she knew their terror firsthand.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: Jennette Tamayo never knew she was being watched as she walked home alone from her school bus stop. Her final moments of freedom were captured by a neighbor's surveillance camera. Watch as the nine-year-old innocently walks right past her waiting attacker.

JENNETTE TAMAYO: I just got home from school. A few minutes later, someone knocked on my door. There was a man that I had never seen before. He asked me a couple of questions, and then a bit later, I started closing the door, and he pushed his way in and I got scared, and then he pulled me into my brother's room. He hurt me.

WINFREY: Jennette was raped.

TAMAYO: I was crying and then he handcuffed me and he took me to the garage. He tied my feet with some string. He put me in a box.

WINFREY: Just then, Jennette's mom and brother arrived home. The attacker brutally beat them both. The surveillance camera then shows the car speeding away from her house. Jennette was tied up in the back seat.

TAMAYO: I thought that he had killed my mom and my brother. I thought that he was going to kill me. I started screaming and crying to get people's attention, and he turns around and he starts stabbing me with a screwdriver in my neck, and blood started squirting out.

WINFREY: Jennette was taken to her attacker's home and held captive.

TAMAYO: I started to cry and then he came over with a knife and said that if I yelled or did something, he was going to kill me.

Unidentified Reporter: Nine-year-old Jennette Tamayo...

WINFREY: While Amber Alerts were issued, her family prayed and pleaded. Jennette endured repeated rapes and terrifying torture.

TAMAYO: He handcuffed me to the faucets of the shower with the water running. I was afraid to go to sleep. Every time that I would move, trying to get comfortable, he would say, `I'm going to hurt you if you move again.'

WINFREY: The dreadful ordeal went on day after day.

TAMAYO: I was on the couch, and all of a sudden, he grabs a pillow and he starts smothering me with it. I couldn't breathe, and the only thing that I can hear was my heart, and I was crying because I was telling him, `I don't want to die, I want to go my parents. I want to live. I want to graduate.'

I was praying to God, and then I said, `This is the end. I'm never going to go home.'

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Astonishingly, somehow this little nine-year-old girl at the time made a brave decision to outsmart her attack, David Montiel Cruz.

(Excerpt from videotape)

TAMAYO: I was determined to live. I didn't want him to hurt another child the same way he hurt me. I was trying to get his trust so I can get some evidence.

WINFREY: Jennette decided she needed to collect fingerprints.

TAMAYO: I still had my handcuffs on but I found a way to take them off. So I grabbed some evidence and then put my handcuffs back on.

WINFREY: Then she told Cruz, her captor, she was going to die.

TAMAYO: I told him that I had asthma and a disease that you can catch. I started making asthma noises. He said, `Come on, let's go.' He says, `If you tell anyone anything about me or something, I'm going to come back and kill your family and then kill you.'

WINFREY: Cruz dropped her off at a market. Detectives were stunned that she got away and had what they needed to catch her abductor. Jennette led investigators to her rapist's front door.

TAMAYO: And I told them, `You go left, then right, left, then right, now straight,' and there was the house.

Unidentified Man #8: I have never seen such a courageous little girl.

WINFREY: While knowing she prevailed over Cruz empowers here, frightening memories still haunt this very special hero three years later.

TAMAYO: I like to surround myself with guardian angels, because I feel like they protect me. I write in my diary in invisible ink because I don't want anybody to read what happened. When I see those stories in the news about other missing children, I start to cry. I prayed for Jessica and Shasta...

And let them find her safe and sound. Amen.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Come on out, Jennette. Oh. Thank you so much for your courage. I don't know how many other children you might have saved by putting him behind bars. Thank you so much. And I know for the fathers and aunts and grandmothers here, this was a victory, and it also has to be hard, in some ways, because you know your daughter, your granddaughter didn't get away, but this is one that got away. The judge called this one of the most horrific crimes he had ever seen and sentenced David Montiel Cruz to more than 100 years in prison.

Thank you. We'll be right back.

Next, we're going to expose four more of the most wanted child molesters in America. It's your chance to do something.

(Announcements)

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: There is an estimated 100,000 sex offenders in this country who are living as fugitives. Please help us find them before they harm one more child. The FBI wants you to be on the lookout for this man, William C. Davis. After serving a short sentence for molesting children, Davis was released from prison. Now he's charged with performing deviant sex acts with an Indiana child.

Gary Lee St. John is charged with sexual assault on a six-year-old girl, but St. John skipped his trial. He's now on the run. He was last seen in Reno, Nevada.

This man is charged with sexual battery and fondling a child, but Edward Eugene Harper never showed up in court. He has eluded police for more than 10 years. The FBI believes he may be working on a ranch in Montana or Wyoming.

In 2002, Niles Scott was accused of raping a little girl in Ohio. He posted bond and has not been seen since. This former military man has strong ties to Cleveland, Ohio, and Jacksonville, Florida. And authorities warn he will likely strike again.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: If you think you have seen any of the men you are looking at right now, I want you to go to your phone and call your local FBI, because we have to get the sex offenders off of our streets and away from our children, and we have to change the laws.

Every week on oprah.com, we're going to feature the FBI's most wanted child predators. Log on every Friday. Memorize their faces because you could be the one. It just took one person to save Shasta, and you could be the one to save the next child. And here again is my pledge. I plan to work with law enforcement officials. If they tell me that you turned in one of these fugitives or were instrumental in helping them get one of these fugitives we are exposing today or on our oprah.com child predator watch list, and that information leads to the capture and arrest of one of these men, I will personally give a $100,000 reward. We'll be right back.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Take a good look at these pictures and remember it is time. It's time to stand together and cry no more, but do something about it. Thank you, everybody.

(Top)

THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW

The Oprah Winfrey Show - October 11, 2005 Tuesday

HOST: Oprah Winfrey

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Ellen Rakieten

OPRAH WINFREY: Tell them I'm coming down.

Unidentified Man #1: Oprah's on the way.

Unidentified Man #2: Ready music.

Unidentified Woman #1: Four, three, two, one.

Unidentified Man #2: Roll tape. Music back. Play it up.

Announcer: An all-new OPRAH. Breaking news: Two accused child molesters caught. The tip, the big break, the capture. All the details. Oprah posted their mug shots. Viewers just like you turned them in. How you can claim the next $100,000 reward next.

WINFREY: Today is an historic day. Just one week ago, we launched our Child Predator Watch. I was furious, just like so many of you, and I was fed up. And I turned to you all for help.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: We called it America's wall of shame: a sea of young faces, each of them an innocent victim.

(From October 4, 2005) The children of this nation, the United States of America, are being stolen, raped, tortured and killed by sexual predators, who are walking right into your homes. I am so angry. I'm angry at the system, and I'm angry at us. I'm so sick of it. I'm so sick of it. I'm so sick of it.

Then we showed the world some new faces, the faces of fugitives accused of sex offenses against children: William C. Davis, Niles Scott. I asked all of you to take note, to study their faces on oprah.com and to call your local FBI if you recognized any of them. Then we took our Predator Watch one step further.

(From October 4, 2005) And here is my pledge. I plan to work with law enforcement officials, and if they tell me that one of you turned in one of these fugitives that we are exposing today and that information leads to the capture and arrest of one of these men, I will personally give a $100,000 cash reward.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: So I am gratified--thanks. I'm gratified to announce that in just 48 hours, two of those wanted men were captured. Viewer Jeanne Rosenthal was watching our show in her living room near Fargo, North Dakota, and she saw something that she says sent a chill up her spine.

(Excerpt from videotape)

Ms. JEANNE ROSENTHAL (Helped Capture William C. Davis): I was watching the show, and she showed a bunch of pictures at the end. And I know that guy. I know that guy.

WINFREY: Jeanne recognized William C. Davis as Mark Davis.? He had been the maintenance man when Jeanne lived at this apartment building. He now lived in this duplex above one of her best friends, Karie Miller, the mother of three young children. Jeanne knew she had to act fast.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: I got to listen to Oprah. I got to do something. So I called up Karie.

Mrs. KARIE MILLER (Helped FBI Capture William C. Davis): She says, `There's this man on there who looks just like Mark, that we need to get to a Web site. You need to see if this is him.' Sure enough, his picture popped up, and I shook so bad, I dropped the coffee and went, `Oh, my God.'

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Not only was the man Karie had befriended a wanted child molester, but he was living upstairs right above her children.

(Excerpt from videotape)

Mrs. MILLER: I just couldn't imagine--I still can't--letting a man like that get so close to my family and my children.

WINFREY: Davis was around so much, he knew the family's schedule.

Mr. LARRY MILLER (Wife Helped Catch A Fugitive): My wife fed him dinner and did his laundry. I mean, he was around every day.

WINFREY: But there was something around him that made the Millers suspicious.

Mr. MILLER: He just looked weird. He acted weird around children. You could tell something was wrong with him.

WINFREY: Once she went to oprah.com and learned who he really was, Karie immediately called the FBI.

Mrs. MILLER: I said, `This man lives upstairs from me. He's above my children right now. You need to get over there. It's him. I know it's him.' I was shaking. I prayed to God that nothing has happened to my children.

WINFREY: But Karie didn't even have time to call her husband, who arrived home from work to find FBI agents in his yard.

Mr. MILLER: And then they wanted to know if I would call the gentleman upstairs to see if you can get him to unlock the door. So I called up there and told him, `There was three men here that were interested in buying the house. Could you come down and unlock the door?' And they went in and got him.

Mrs. MILLER: What a moment. What a moment. This is a relief. It was a, yes, we got him. We got him off the streets.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Please welcome the two viewers who turned William C. Davis in to the FBI, Jeanne Rosenthal and Karie Miller.

OK. So, Karie, after you realized who Davis was, did you have any contact with him before he was captured?

Mrs. MILLER: Five minutes after I found out who the man was, I had his picture folded up that I had printed off the Web site in my pocket. I got home from my sister's immediately. As I was walking up the steps, he's coming out his door. `Going somewhere?'

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: `No.'

WINFREY: He said to you or you said to him?

Mrs. MILLER: I said to him...

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: ...`Are you going somewhere?' because I thought, oh, he's going to run now. I was just scared he would...

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: ...he'd figure out somehow, read my mind. But he followed me into my house.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: Sat down on my couch, ate macaroni and cheese with my daughter and I, sat in my home for about two hours, and then he went to work and...

WINFREY: When did you call the FBI?

Mrs. MILLER: At 11:30 in the morning.

WINFREY: Eleven-thirty in the morning.

Mrs. MILLER: It was noon when I got home. Half an hour after I found out who he was.

WINFREY: OK. So when you're sitting in your house eating macaroni and cheese, you had already gone to the Web site.

Mrs. MILLER: Yes.

WINFREY: Right. Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: I knew who he was. I had his picture in my pocket.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: And I was trying my best to keep my composure. `I know who you are, you sick...'

WINFREY: Yeah. So--and I also heard that he called you after--because this all happened in a mo--matter of...

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Yeah.

WINFREY: ...Jeanne, you called her after watching the show...

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Right, right.

WINFREY: ...while you were still watching the show, after the show's over? Yeah.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Well, after the show's over because it's still going in my mind, is this the guy? Is this the guy?

WINFREY: This is what's so amazing that I want to applaud you both for, because I can't recognize a model in a magazine from one page to the next. If she does not have the same hair and the same outfit, I'm, like, is that the same person? So the fact that, you know, his head is now shaven, he doesn't look exactly like that, how did you know? What was it about--see, I would not--that is really good. I think that's really good. Don't you, audience? I think that's really good.

Mrs. MILLER: See...

WINFREY: When is it--when you saw that picture and you said, `I know him,' right, what was it?

Ms. ROSENTHAL: His glasses, his--I know how fugitives will try to change their identity so, you know, in the picture, he had longer hair.

WINFREY: Really?

Ms. ROSENTHAL: But just something just clicked, turned over in me, I gotta do something.

WINFREY: Yeah. Plus, had you had contact with him before?

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Yes.

WINFREY: Yes.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Yeah.

WINFREY: A lot of contact?

Ms. ROSENTHAL: He was the maintenance man at the apartment building...

WINFREY: Where you worked, yeah.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: ...where we all met one another.

WINFREY: Yeah. What were you saying, Karie?

Mrs. MILLER: I was going to say this picture--he didn't look like this until the day he was arrested. I recognized him immediately because he still has that same innocent childish soft look in this one.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: The nice man.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: The sweet guy.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: And until the day he was arrested, he still looked like that.

WINFREY: Really?

Mrs. MILLER: You know, shorter hair.

WINFREY: Shorter hair.

Mrs. MILLER: That's not Mark. That's not the...

WINFREY: So you knew him as Mark. You knew him...

Mrs. MILLER: Yes.

WINFREY: ...as Mark Davis.

Mrs. MILLER: Yes.

WINFREY: So--and I understand that he called you from jail after his arrest, correct?

Mrs. MILLER: Yes, I was at work waiting for the FBI to contact me. It was about four hours afterwards. My husband and the FBI agent came in, they were talking to me. And about the same time, he called me--I was probably the first call that he made.

WINFREY: From jail?

Mrs. MILLER: And he said, `I can't believe you guys helped them bring me down.' He said, `I thought we were friends.' I said, `You were on national television. You're a wanted child predator and you've watched my children.' `But I--you know, I've never hurt your children.' And he started crying. I said, `You know, that's probably'--I was thinking that's probably the same thing that you have said to those other mothers: I would never hurt your children.

WINFREY: Yeah. Well, this is one of the things that everybody needs to see and know and understand, is that child molesters, accused ones, child predators--he's been convicted already of molesting a child back in 1992 and wanted in Indiana, accused and wanted in Indiana of three other children. But the truth of the matter is they don't wear signs.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: Yeah.

WINFREY: This is what I really want people to know. Child molesters, people who are after your children, are nice people on the outside. Because you would have to be nice to seduce you. It's about seduction and then molestation and rape and all the other things. But you have to be seduced first. This is what the country has got to understand. They don't come in with knives and guns...

Mrs. MILLER: Right.

WINFREY: ...most of them, pointing, you know, guns and knives to your children. You've got to lure them in. And at some point, you were, like, cooking for him. Is that not true?

Mrs. MILLER: Oh, he was doing a good job of luring us. He walked right into our family's home. Yeah, I cooked for him, cleaned for him. He had broken his leg a couple weeks ago, and since living up--you know, he lived upstairs, it was hard for him to get up and down the steps, so I can't see somebody suffering like that, so, you know, I helped as much as I could.

WINFREY: As--OK.

Mrs. MILLER: I...

WINFREY: When we come back, we'll meet an Indiana mom who has been praying for this day. She says that Davis molested her sons. We'll be right back.

Coming up, our first Predator Watch $100,000 reward when we come back.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Child molesters on the run, we're coming after you. Today OPRAH show viewers are rising up to make America a safer place for children. This is the start. Just 48 hours after we launched our Child Predator Watch, two fugitives were captured and put behind bars. Viewers Jeanne and Karie made the call that led the FBI to arrest William C. Davis. He's a man who had been living upstairs from Karie and her husband and their three young children. Her children are how old? Eleven...

Mrs. MILLER: Eleven, four and two.

WINFREY: Eleven, four and two.

(Excerpt from videotape)

CASSIE MILLER (Karie's Daughter): I thought he was, like, really creepy because he acted weird around me and my brother and my sister.

WINFREY: Eleven-year-old Cassie Miller says she felt especially uncomfortable one day this summer when she was playing on her trampoline.

MILLER: I remember that he was going like this to me (holds hands around chest) and I wa--I just kept telling him, `You need to hold me more, like, right here,' and he's, like, `No, I know how to do this.'

WINFREY: Larry Miller recently found Davis with his children, a little too close for comfort.

Mr. MILLER: My kids were swimming in the pool, it's just a little kid's pool. And I looked out the kitchen window and he was sitting in the pool with my boy on his lap. And I thought it was strange and I made my boy get off his lap.

WINFREY: Davis even went shopping with the family, once while Karie Miller was buying her daughter new clothes.

Mrs. MILLER: He got down on his knees in this bin of underwear, little girls' underwear, and he's looking at all the sizes. He held it up to her and said, `Looks like those would fit.'

MILLER: And I looked at my mom, I was like, `Mom, like, get me away from him.'

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: I hear he was also once alone with your two-year-old, correct?

Mrs. MILLER: Yes.

WINFREY: What were you saying to me during commercial break, that you feel guilty because?

Mrs. MILLER: I feel guilty. I feel bad because I didn't trust my gut. I didn't trust my heart. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but something told me in the very beginning, instinct told me there's something wrong with this man. Stay away from him. Do not ever let him around your children. But after a while, you know, a few months, I came to trust him, you know, and I feel bad...

WINFREY: Do you see how you were seduced now?

Mrs. MILLER: Yes, yes.

WINFREY: This is what I mean by seduction. Do you see how you were lured?

Mrs. MILLER: Yeah.

WINFREY: Because these guys...

Mrs. MILLER: He was the sweetest guy, he'd do anything for you.

WINFREY: These guys are good at their job. And their job is to fool you into thinking that they are nice people, and they were good at it. But now do you see--and the reason why I wanted you to say what you said to me during commercial break is because there are thousands of people right now--I don't even know the number--who are listening to you and they've had that little feeling.

Mrs. MILLER: Listen to it.

WINFREY: They've had that little feeling...

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Right.

Mrs. MILLER: Listen to it.

WINFREY: ...and you try to give the feeling the benefit of the doubt. And child molesters don't deserve the benefit of your doubt. That's our point. They don't deserve the benefit of your doubt.

So--and, Larry, you must have felt this, too. Larry is Karie's husband. You said when you saw him in the pool--see, this is my point, people. It's just a little feeling. Just a thing that goes, hmmm.

Mr. MILLER: Yeah.

Mrs. MILLER: Something's wrong with that.

WINFREY: Something's wrong with that.

Mr. MILLER: Yeah.

WINFREY: That is what your instinct is. Did you not feel that...

Mr. MILLER: Yeah, I felt that.

WINFREY: ...when you saw the man in the little pool with the children?

Mr. MILLER: Yeah, it was not right. Something was wrong there.

WINFREY: Yeah. And then you approach him and you say something, and they're like, `Oh, no, I wasn't doing anything.'

Mr. MILLER: Yeah, exactly.

WINFREY: And then you feel like, God, I'm overreacting. You never...

Mr. MILLER: Yeah.

WINFREY: That's what you're given. Yeah.

Mr. MILLER: Yeah.

WINFREY: The benefit of the doubt.

Mr. MILLER: Yep.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mr. MILLER: I don't like him. I have bad feelings about him now, and, uh-uh.

WINFREY: Yeah, you had bad feelings. OK, now I get to keep my promise and nothing thrills me more than what you people have done, what you two women did. You did a great, great, great thing. A great, great, great thing.

Stand up. So I am doing this for parents across America watching, this right now. They are grateful to you, I know, because you are our very first. And we're going to catch everyone on that list. We're going to catch everyone.

So I said I would personally give $100,000. Here's a $50,000 cashier's check to you, a $50,000 cashier's check to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Listen, this is the truth. Best money I ever spent. I know that the money will come in handy for whomever, whatever you want to use it for. But the bottom line is this: I know you didn't do it for the money.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: No.

Mrs. MILLER: No, absolutely not.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Not at all.

WINFREY: I know you didn't do it for the money. Jeanne and Karie will never know how many children they have saved and families they've helped by making just one phone call, by making one phone call. It takes courage to do that. It takes courage to do that. And I know a lot of people will see it and you'll think, `Should I? I don't know. I don't want to get involved.' This was so easy, so easy. Today they get to meet one of those families, an Indiana family who was praying for this day to come.

(Excerpt from videotape)

Ms. SHARRY FRAY: All they did was put his picture up on the TV, and I said, `My God, my God, he's been caught,' and my grandson woke up, and I hugged him. And I said, `You're safe now. He's been caught.'

WINFREY: Grandma Sharry Fray's nightmare is now over. It began a year ago when a man they knew as Bill Davis deceptively pried his way into their lives and their home.

Ms. MACHELLE YOTT (Sons Allegedly Molested By William C. Davis): He did volunteer work in the community, shelters, clothing banks, anything that had to do with social services. So I trusted him to be with my children.

WINFREY: Machelle Yott, Sharry's daughter, is a single mother of four, struggling to get by. She spends her days caring for her two mentally delayed boys, and last year volunteered at the Youth Service Bureau and Crisis Line. That's where she met Bill. Soon, he was offering to help her out around the house.

Ms. YOTT: Bill started becoming friendly with my boys. He would take them on walks, fishing, bike rides. It was very nice for him to give me a break that I needed.

WINFREY: But Machelle started to notice a disturbing difference in her 12-year-old son.

Ms. YOTT: I noticed my son's behavior changing, withdrawal-ness, depressed, not eating, not playing with any of his friends, just not talking. Then my son broke down. My son told me that he touched him on his penis orally and the rectum area. And then I called the police.

WINFREY: Police uncovered the tragic details. Bill Davis had allegedly molested both Machelle's 12-year-old and seven-year-old sons in his RV and even in this house where Machelle used to live.

Ms. YOTT: The molestation happened here in this house, in my bedroom. I haven't been here ever since the incident a year ago. For me to be back here, it's really emotional. And I'm sorry.

When I found out that Bill fled, we were scared for our lives.

Ms. FRAY: My one wish was that he would be caught, and I prayed every day that he would.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Sharry and Machelle, come on out and meet the women who answered your prayers.

Ms. FRAY: Oh!

WINFREY: We'll talk to Machelle and Sharry when we come back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

Jeanne made the first phone call.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Machelle is a mom from Indiana who has been living in fear of William C. Davis, who has been accused of molesting two of her sons. Sharry is their grandmother. Machelle and Sharry, I know you just had an emotional meeting here with Karie and Jeanne. What do you really want to say to them?

Ms. FRAY: I want to say if it wasn't for you two, he wouldn't have never been captured. And we thank...

Ms. YOTT: We'd still be living in fear.

WINFREY: And how were you living in fear? Tell me, were you afraid to leave the house? You were afraid that he was still out there? You were afraid that he would find you?

Ms. YOTT: We was always afraid to leave the house...

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms YOTT: ...and wondered if he was in behind us and just stalking us or anything.

WINFREY: Now earlier, I don't know if you heard me, when Karie was talking about she was feeling guilty because her instinct told her something was off and Larry said he saw him and instinct said something's off, something doesn't feel right about him. Did you ever sense that with him and your boys?

Ms. YOTT: No. Not at first. Not at first, I did not. Until the end, I noticed some behavior from my son...

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. YOTT: ...the changes, the not eating, not drinking, just depressed, withdrawn, not wanting to go to school or anything.

WINFREY: Yes. And you believe because your boys have told you...

Ms. YOTT: Right. They have told me.

WINFREY: ...that he raped them.

Ms. YOTT: Yes.

WINFREY: He sodomized them.

Ms. YOTT: Yes, he did.

WINFREY: And so I want to just be very clear, he has not gone to trial. He fled Indiana because of these accusations. And we want him to go to trial.

Unidentified Panelist: Yes.

Unidentified Panelist: Yeah.

WINFREY: And we want him to have a fair and just trial...

Unidentified Panelist: Yes.

WINFREY: ...do we not? And we want to be there when he goes to trial.

Ms. YOTT: Yes.

Ms. FRAY: Yes.

Ms. YOTT: Oh, yes. I want to be there.

WINFREY: What did you hope will happen to him? What do you want to happen?

Ms. YOTT: I want him to be put in prison for the rest of his life. I do not want him to get out without any parole, and I'm going to keep pushing that, fighting that to make sure he stays in there.

WINFREY: Yeah. Machelle's sons were not his first victims. Davis has a long history of sex crimes against children. Watch.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: William Davis' criminal record starts here in southern Indiana, where he was first convicted of molesting children back in 1992. Sentenced to 10 years in prison, he only served 28 months and was then a free man. During this time, Davis worked as a handyman and a youth counselor. He lived in an RV beside his parents' home in Wadesville, Indiana. That's where he allegedly raped at least one other young victim.

There is a clear pattern to the type of families Davis continued to target: single mothers with young children, some of them mentally challenged. Kids knew him as the rubber band man, for making toys out of rubber bands. Prosecutors say he used those toys to lure his victims. Then last year, children started coming forward. Three boys claimed he had molested them. One said he had been raped repeatedly.

Once Davis learned police were looking for him, he fled to Fargo, North Dakota. He shaved his head and began using an alias, his brother's name, Mark. And like so many others, he failed to register as a sex offender. Davis befriended neighbors with children, families who had no idea about his sinister past.

Mrs. MILLER: I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He acted like an innocent big kid.

WINFREY: Just days ago, our Predator Watch finally brought Davis' trail of terror to an end with his arrest. He left behind disturbing signs of his secret life. In his garage and van, we found a stash of toys, children's bikes, teddy bears, dolls, and kids' books, all raising a chilling question: How many other children have suffered under Davis' torture?

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Chris Swecker is the assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division. Welcome to the show.

Mr. CHRIS SWECKER (Assistant Director of The FBI's Criminal Investigative Division): Thank you.

WINFREY: Did you have any idea that he was in Fargo?

Mr. SWECKER: No. Actually, the trail had gone cold. We had some very good investigators and detectives and agents on the case, and we had no good leads. So when they got an opportunity to put him on the show, they jumped at it.

WINFREY: Did you--were you surprised that he was caught so quickly?

Mr. SWECKER: We knew you have a worldwide audience, but it even surprised us that he would...

WINFREY: That it happened, yeah, yeah. And where is Davis now, Chris?

Mr. SWECKER: He's in Fargo in the county jail awaiting extradition back to Indiana.

WINFREY: And what is going to--what's going to happen to him? What is going to happen to him?

Mr. SWECKER: It'll take a little while to go through the extradition process, and then he'll go back to Indiana and face charges, the original charges back in Indiana, in Evansville, Posey County and Vanderburgh County. He's charged in both counties.

WINFREY: In both counties.

Mr. SWECKER: Yes.

WINFREY: And so, will he be allowed to post bail and then be out?

Mr. SWECKER: He'll have a bail hearing...

WINFREY: Yeah.

Mr. SWECKER: ...and the judge will have to decide. But he takes all the facts and circumstances into consideration, and he makes the ultimate decision. But I think in this case, the prosecutors are recommending no bond.

WINFREY: Recommending no bond. Because, as I was saying, you know, I feel very gratified that everybody has responded so beautifully and that we caught two. But thi--really, this is just the beginning. I woke up Saturday morning after hearing that we caught two and there's a third one the FBI is working on, I hear, which I'm not allowed to say anything about it. But the truth is this: I know that this is what I'm supposed to do in my life. I know this. This is a full-circle moment for me. For me to have been raped at nine years old and molested until the time I was four years old by various people, this is so big and so gratifying that I now get to put people behind bars who did to me what they've been doing to other children. This is this is it. And so I am going to spend my own resources, and I am going to work with law enforcement, and I'm going to change, with your help, the laws in this country, state by state by state by state. Thank you.

When we come back--and it's going to be a long haul, and I know it's going to be, you know, a lot of involvement on the part of a lot of people. But that is what I'm going to do. I heard the call. It was as clear to me as if God himself spoke. I think it was God. That this is what I'm supposed to do with your help, America. We're going to change these laws. We are not going to be a country that talks the talk about how we care about children and then we let these people back out on the street. It's Joseph Duncan all over again. We have got to let Shasta Groene and all the others, Megan and all the others, be the last children. Let their lives not have been in vain. Let's stand up and change laws. Let's change the laws.

Next, another fugitive caught. How OPRAH show viewers tracked down this accused child rapist in another country. We'll be back.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: So when we announced our Child Predator Watch last week, our viewers helped capture two wanted fugitives in just 48 hours. Here is how the second bust went down in a foreign country. Take a look.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: Belize is a small underdeveloped country on the east coast of Central America. The people of Belize City had no idea that one of America's most wanted fugitives, Niles Scott, was literally taking people for a ride, making his living as a cab driver. Scott used the alias James Berry.

Unidentified Man #3: He was running a cab and he was hustling tourists.

WINFREY: Less than 48 hours after our broadcast, Scott was captured at this boarding house in this room.

Unidentified Woman #2: I always talk to him. He talked to me. Before he start really working at the tourist village, he went with one of my friends.

WINFREY: This former naval Reservist was bold enough just to live down the street from the US Embassy where American agents hunting fugitives are based. Scott was extradited back to Ohio to face his alleged crimes against a child.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: So our cameras were there when Niles Scott, shackled and handcuffed, was returned to American soil. Take a look.

(Excerpt from videotape)

Unidentified Reporter: Why were you hiding in Belize?

Mr. NILES SCOTT: I was not hiding. A fair trial is hard to get sometimes, especially in Ohio.

WINFREY: Niles Scott is now back in Ohio to face charges the FBI says he's been dodging for more than two years.

Mr. SCOTT WILSON (FBI Special Agent): We considered Mr. Scott a dangerous fugitive. He was wanted for rape and kidnapping and for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

WINFREY: This house on the east side of Cleveland is where police suspect Niles Scott began raping his own 10-year-old niece. At 13, she broke down and told her aunt, Scott's wife. Police arrested him and charged him with four counts of rape and four counts of kidnapping. Scott posted $10,000 bail. And on the day of his trial in May of 2003, he vanished.

Mr. JOSEPH MARCHE (Detective On Scott Case): The system failed by leaving him out on such a low bond. He's not only a flight risk, but he's a danger wherever he is.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: So he is accused of molesting his niece. He has yet to stand trial. Sheila, you've been married to Niles Scott for 30 years.

SHEILA: We've been together since we were 15.

WINFREY: Since you were 15.

SHEILA: Yes. And we were together 30...

WINFREY: How long ago did he disappear?

SHEILA: Two years.

WINFREY: Two years ago.

SHEILA: Mm-hmm.

WINFREY: And as Niles Scott's case unfolds, we will talk to Sheila in the coming months because we want him to be able to have a fair trial. Chris Swecker is with the FBI. Where is he now?

Mr. SWECKER: He's back in Cleveland. He'll be facing his charges there. I think he has his first court appearance today.

WINFREY: Yeah. Today?

Mr. SWECKER: Today or--yes, I think it's today or tomorrow.

WINFREY: OK. Today or tomorrow. The FBI is working with local police in Belize to help sort out who will receive the reward money. By now, everybody's going, `It was me, it was me, it was me.' It may be split between several people, but whomever, we thank you for making the phone call to the FBI. We will keep you posted.

Coming up, your chance to claim a $100,000 reward. Thank you.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Millions of you watching right now may be the only chance America's children and children in other places as we've just seen in Belize have--fugitive child predators are living in your towns, your cities, your states. And I can show you who they are, but I need your help to turn them in. Here's a look at eight wanted fugitives that we still need to capture. Take a good look like Jeanne and Karie did. Maybe one's living near you.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: The FBI wants William George Barney, charged with molesting a 12-year-old boy for six years. Barney failed to show up in court and has been on the lam now for almost five years. Officials say he considers himself a survivalist, and he may be hiding in a rural area.

And look out for this man, Walter Edward Myer. As the recreational director of an Alabama school, Myer allegedly befriended his students and took them to his home for weekends and holidays where he sodomized and raped them. He's also charged with producing pornography. Myer's been on the run since 1997.

Richard Steve Goldberg is considered one of the FBI's 10 most wanted fugitives. Goldberg's prey of choice: girls under the age of 10. Federal agents say they found pornographic pictures of his victims on Goldberg's computer. He has ties to New Jersey, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and Georgia.

The hunt continues for Wayne Arthur Silsbee, a former school bus driver accused of sexually abusing young girls. When he wasn't driving a school bus filled with children, he worked as a baby-sitter. Silsbee has been on the loose for almost 10 years.

Gary Lee St. John is charged with sexual assault on a six-year-old girl, but St. John skipped his trial and he's now on the run. He was last seen in Reno, Nevada.

This man was charged with sexual battery and fondling a child. But Edward Eugene Harper never showed up in court. He has eluded police for more than 10 years. The FBI believes he may be working on a ranch in Montana or Wyoming.

Elby J. Hars has a history of hideous crimes against children that started more than 20 years ago. That's when he was convicted of sexually abusing his own daughter. A South Carolina judge gave Hars a slap on the wrist with a sentence of probation. A few years later, this predator was sentenced to 10 years in prison for assaulting a 13-year-old child. Shortly after his release, police say he used his own daughter to lure and molest his next young victim. He's been on the lam now for five years.

And this missing fugitive is a former police officer from the Baltimore, Maryland, force. Edward C. Reisch is charged with sodomizing a child on Thanksgiving Day in 1999. The FBI says with his background and training, Reisch should be considered armed and dangerous.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: So again, if you think you've seen any of the men that you're looking at right now, go to your phone, call your local FBI, just like Jeanne did, and again, my pledge is this: The FBI tells me that you turned in one of these fugitives we're exposing today and that information leads to the capture and arrest of one of these men, I will personally give you a check, a $100,000 reward. It may be split like it was today between Jeanne and Karie who both played key roles in the capture and arrested William Davis. We will be posting the faces of these men and of others on oprah.com every Friday. And there will also be information about how to contact your local FBI.

Were you scared when you did it, when you made the phone call?

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Yeah.

WINFREY: What were you scared of?

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Is it the right person?

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: You know, I don't want to send the FBI to somebody's house if they're not...

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: ...you know, obviously.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: But I just had to take the chance.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: And I wish more people would take the chance, even if they're wrong.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Because...

WINFREY: Because if it's wrong, then it's wrong. Yeah, then the FBI won't put you in jail if it's wrong.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Right.

WINFREY: Well--and this is why I say you were so courageous, because you know what courage is? It's being scared but doing it anyway.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: Yep.

WINFREY: Yeah. There is no courage unless there's fear.

We'll be right back.

(Announcements)

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: It may look like an ordinary suburban home. But the man living inside was anything but. Investigators say 64-year-old Dean Schwartzmiller is one of the most prolific child predators of our time. During a recent raid at his house, California police made a horrifying discovery: seven shocking notebooks stuffed with almost 37,000 handwritten entries, each detailing his illicit sexual exploits with young boys. The notebooks date back 35 years and chronicle the pedophile's conquests. His twisted categories include boys who just cried and cute boys.

Even more despicable is Schwartzmiller's long history of convictions for sex crimes spanning four decades. Despite being arrested on more than 80 counts of child molestation in five states, he's spent most of his life a free man. Schwartzmiller worked as a football coach and a home contractor in order to gain the trust of his victims and their parents. His roommate was also a convicted sex offender.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: So Schwartzmiller has recently entered a not guilty plea. He's being held without bail in California, but there could be more men like him still roaming the streets. That's the reason we're doing this show, to prevent your children, your family, from coming into contact with somebody like that man. But there are thousands of them, are there not?

Mr. SWECKER: There are.

WINFREY: There are thousands of these guys out there, and that is why I say we, as a country, have got to take the time, the energy and effort to change the laws so that a record like that, you should have been put under the jailhouse. You should have been put under the jail, never to roam the streets. You should not be allowed to go from state to state to state to state to re-molest and get more victims. Is that not true?

Unidentified Man #4: I agree. I agree.

WINFREY: OK. Well, we've been looking at FBI fugitives today, asking you for your help in finding them. I also wanted to ask you to look at a few more faces we need to find.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: Every single day in the United States of America, more than 2,000 children are reported missing. Here are just a few of those innocent faces. The last time Richard Holland's family saw him, he was wearing a gray shirt and red pajama bottoms. That was at 9:30 PM on July 1st at his home in Williamston, Michigan. The blond-haired, blue-eyed boy is seven years old.

Bianca Piper went out for a walk in her hometown of Moley, Missouri. That was on March 10th this year. The 13-year-old hasn't been seen since. Her nickname is Bee.

Fifteen-year-old Kimberly Merrill disappeared on February 23rd. She was last seen in Baltimore, Maryland, wearing a burgundy jacket and a book bag.

It's been nearly two years since Heaven LaShae Ross left her house in Northport, Alabama and headed for the bus stop. She never got there. The 13-year-old goes by the nickname Shae. She has red hair and brown eyes.

Fifteen-year-old Bethany Markowski's father dropped her off at a shopping mall in Jackson, Tennessee. That was more than four years ago. He hasn't seen her since.

At 2:30 in the morning on Valentine's Day in the year 2000, Asha Degree's father checked on her. She was sound asleep in her bed. But by dawn, her parents couldn't find her anywhere in the house. Her black book bag and a pocketbook with Tweety Bird on it were also missing from her room. The book bag and pocketbook were found months later. Asha was not.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: They come into your home and take your children. We'll be right back to show you one more look at our wanted fugitives you can help us catch.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: I want you to take another careful look at these men, and if any one of them seems familiar, like you get that feeling of, hmmm, go to your phone, call your local FBI now, and you can find more information about them on oprah.com. You just might get the next $100,000 reward. Although I know for these families here, it's not about the money. But the money's nice. We'll be right back.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: I want to again say to you, Jeanne, thank you so much, for having the courage...

Ms. ROSENTHAL: You're more than welcome.

WINFREY: ...for taking the risk to make the phone call. And, Karie, thank you.

Ms. ROSENTHAL: You guys are welcome.

WINFREY: Our--my prayer is that nothing has already happened to your children, OK? We're going to follow up on the Niles Scott case in the following months, everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you, Machelle.

(Top)

THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW

The Oprah Winfrey Show - January 13, 2006 Friday

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Ellen Rakieten

HEADLINE: The day I found out my husband was a child molester; women discuss finding out their children were being molested by the men they loved

Unidentified Man #1: Six, five, four...

Unidentified Man #2: Ready tape, ready music.

Unidentified Man #1: ...cue Oprah.

OPRAH WINFREY: The manhunt for a notorious child rapist ended in her living room.

Who was the eight-year-old girl that got your husband caught?

Ms. LEANNA PERRY (Ex-wife Of Serial Rapist): My daughter.

WINFREY: You didn't have a clue.

Married to a monster.

MARILYN (Stayed Married To Her Sons' Molester): He raped my son.

WINFREY: You did stay married, right?

She loved him until she walked in on him.

Ms. JODY LYNN BOWMAN (Killed Boyfriend Who Molested Her Daughter): I opened the door and I just couldn't believe my eyes.

WINFREY: What did you see? You shot him.

Ms. BOWMAN: I shot him.

WINFREY: Dead.

Ms. BOWMAN: Dead.

WINFREY: Next.

I have one intention behind this show today and that is that somebody of the millions of you who watch will see something that snaps you into reality. What you're about to hear is going to make you sick, but I urge you just to keep listening. This is a real recording of a serial pedophile. Fifty-seven-year-old Wayne Chapman is said to have molested over 50 children, so listen as he fantasizes while studying potential young victims.

Mr. WAYNE CHAPMAN (Pedophile): (From audiotape) School bus just passed me with a load of kids in it. I wonder if there's any boys in there. Here comes two boys now. One of them look pretty good there. Ooh, boy, would I love to get into his back end! Some of them scream, `It hurts, it hurts,' others, `It feels all right.' You know what that means then they say it feels all right, it feels all right, man.

WINFREY: Police say that Wayne Chapman recorded his own twisted thoughts so that he could relive his sick fantasies over and over again. More than once Chapman was arrested and sent to prison. He has served his latest sentence and is being considered now for release, and he's going to be living in someone's neighborhood, make no mistake.

Child molesters are cunning and they are coming after your children. What would you do if you walked in on someone you loved molesting your child? This is Jody's story.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: After two failed marriages, Jody wanted to make a new life for herself and her two daughters.

Ms. BOWMAN: I had moved a thousand miles away for a fresh start. I had just bought a home. I was raising two beautiful children, and I was happy. I met a man named Jeorgie, and I just fell totally in love with him. I felt that God had sent him to me, that he was my soul mate.

WINFREY: Jody admits that her new relationship was far from perfect. She was aware that Jeorgie had a criminal record, sentenced to nine years in prison for battery, armed robbery and drug convictions.

Ms. BOWMAN: When I first met Jeorgie, like the first night that we went out, he offered me cocaine, and I knew right then in my mind, I was like, `Run as fast as you can and get away from this guy.' But he swept me off my feet and he would take care of me and the kids.

WINFREY: Then one day, Jody's three-year-old daughter told her about a special game she played with Jeorgie.

Ms. BOWMAN: She mentioned a bear game. She had these stuffed animals. She said that Jeorgie daddy was the daddy bear and that she was the mommy bear and that they had two baby bears. She said that, `We lay on them.' I said, `Well, you know, what did you do besides lay on the bear?' And she said, `Daddy would touch me.' There was no way possible that I would think or could imagine that he would be capable of that. I took it to him the next day and confronted him about it. He convinced me that she was mistaken and I believed him.

WINFREY: One week later, Jody says she witnessed the horrible truth.

Ms. BOWMAN: I was doing my household chores, and my daughter was in the next room, and when I went to check on her, she wasn't there. I panicked. I got just such a sick feeling in me. I looked around. She wasn't there, and I went to the bedroom door that Jeorgie was in and it was locked. So I go back to the kitchen and get my keys to the bedroom and I open the door, and I just couldn't believe my eyes. I couldn't believe what I seen.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: What did you see?

Ms. BOWMAN: I walked in, and Jeorgie was in my thong underwear masturbating on the bed watching porno with my baby next to him naked, where she was naked.

WINFREY: Did you see your baby? She's three, right?

Ms. BOWMAN: Yes.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. BOWMAN: She was three.

WINFREY: Did she look at you?

Ms. BOWMAN: She looked at me when I walked in the door, and I just remember seeing this blank like--just this emptiness in her eyes.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And what happened next?

Ms. BOWMAN: I grabbed her, and I ran out of the room with her, and I took her out of the house, and I was--as I was running out, he was yelling at me, telling me that I better not tell nobody, that nobody would believe me, that he would kill me, that he would pour acid down my vagina. And he was saying all these things to me as I was running out of the house. And I got outside of the house, and the first thing that I seen was a tent that the kids had been camping in over the weekend, and I went and I put her in the tent...

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. And you said, `Stay here. Stay here.'

Ms. BOWMAN: ...to stay--and I told her to stay there until I came back for her, and then I went back into the house.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. And then what happened?

Ms. BOWMAN: I grabbed a gun before I got to the bedroom to protect myself.

WINFREY: Because you thought he would hurt you?

Ms. BOWMAN: I knew he would. I knew I wouldn't able to leave that house. And I went back in there to get answers and to ask him why and, `How could you do this to our baby?' And he just started laughing at me and told me I was crazy and that nobody would believe me, and just cursing at me and just saying real degrading things. And I was standing there with the gun and he was like, `Put the gun down,' and just saying all kinds of bad things to me, and then he came after me, and when he came after me, I just started firing the gun.

WINFREY: How many times did you shoot?

Ms. BOWMAN: It was four shots.

WINFREY: And you shot him.

Ms. BOWMAN: I shot him.

WINFREY: Dead.

Ms. BOWMAN: Dead.

WINFREY: And what did you do after you shot him?

Ms. BOWMAN: I was in shock. I was scared. I was--I didn't know what to do. I just--the reality of what I had done--I knew I was probably going to be going to prison for the rest of my life. I was scared.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. And your baby's still in the tent.

Ms. BOWMAN: Well, yeah. After the shooting--she must have heard the shots, and as I was going out of the bedroom, she was coming in out of the back of the house, and I just remember grabbing her and dropping to the floor and just telling her that no one would ever hurt her again and that he would never hurt her again.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. I understand you left to go get your other daughter?

Ms. BOWMAN: Yeah.

WINFREY: You, like, got in a car and drove?

Ms. BOWMAN: I don't know how I did it.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. Where was your older daughter?

Ms. BOWMAN: She had stayed at a friend's house the night before, and they had went to the movies, and I was the parent to pick up. I was in shock, but I just knew that I had to get her.

WINFREY: And you, your youngest daughter and your oldest daughter came home.

Ms. BOWMAN: We came home.

WINFREY: Did you tell your older daughter what had happened?

Ms. BOWMAN: No.

WINFREY: No.

Ms. BOWMAN: I was just in a state of panic and shock and scared, you know. I just didn't know what to do.

WINFREY: So then you went upstairs and you all...

Ms. BOWMAN: We went to sleep in my daughter's bed, the three of us.

WINFREY: Where was the dead body?

Ms. BOWMAN: Downstairs on the main level locked behind a door in our master bedroom.

WINFREY: And still in the room.

Ms. BOWMAN: Yeah.

WINFREY: Coming up, Jody goes on trial for murder. That's next.

(Announcements)

(Excerpt from courtroom proceedings)

Unidentified Man #3: That's the gun you shot him with, is that correct?

Ms. BOWMAN: Yes. It happened so quick. I was, `How could you do this?' He's like, `Put the gun down. I'll take it away from you. I'm gonna (censored) kill you.' And he came after me.

Unidentified Man #3: All right.

What happens when you shoot him the first time?

Ms. BOWMAN: I kept firing the gun.

Unidentified Man #3: Ms. Bowman, you knew what you were doing, and you understood that when you shot another human being with a handgun, that they would die, didn't you?

Ms. BOWMAN: I knew it was possible, yes.

Unidentified Man #3: Did you think it was possible that he would die when you shot him a second time? How about when you shot him a third time? Did you think it was possible he'd die?

Ms. BOWMAN: There was not a conscious thought process going through my mind like that.

Unidentified Man #3: Ms. Bowman, you just caught this man molesting your child. Isn't that what you told me?

Ms. BOWMAN: But I didn't go in there to kill him.

Unidentified Man #3: You wanted him to die.

Ms. BOWMAN: No, I didn't.

Unidentified Man #3: You didn't want him to die? That's why you got the gun, right?

Ms. BOWMAN: No, I did not...

Unidentified Man #3: You just wanted to chat with him, right?

Ms. BOWMAN: It was to protect myself.

Unidentified Man #3: Why didn't you get in the car and protect yourself? Why didn't you leave?

Ms. BOWMAN: I wish I would have.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Thanks to Court TV for that footage from Jody's trial. Thank you, Court TV.

When Jody Lynn Bowman walked in on her boyfriend, Jeorgie, sexually molesting her three-year-old daughter--she said he was wearing her thong and the baby was on the bed and he was masturbating--she fired four shots and killed him, and Jody was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. She spent 15 months in jail awaiting trial, facing the possibility of life in prison, and on April 8th, 2004, the jury returned the verdict. OK. That moment when the jury walks into the room...

Ms. BOWMAN: Everything was just in slow motion, and I just knew that they had come back with a guilty verdict.

WINFREY: And that you were going to now...

Ms. BOWMAN: And that I was gonna never see my children again, that I would spend the rest of my life in prison.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. On April 8, 2004, the jury returned the verdict.

(Excerpt from courtroom proceedings)

Unidentified Woman: In the Circuit Court of the 18th Judicial Circuit in and for Brevard County, Florida, State of Florida vs. Jody Lynn Bowman, case number 037812CFA, we, the jury, find as follows as to the defendant in this case: The defendant is not guilty.

Unidentified Judge: Ms. Bowman, the jury having returned a verdict of not guilty in this regard, you are therefore adjudicated not guilty with regard to this offense. You are discharged and free to go.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: Whoa! So looking back, you know, as I said in the beginning of the show, I have one intention, and that is for other women to see the signs that those of you who have lived so closely to molesters didn't see.

Ms. BOWMAN: There were so many signs.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. BOWMAN: For instance, she would get angry--you know, she just started getting really angry about just different things. And she would tell me that she would be scared to go to bed at night, telling me that the boogeyman was coming in her room. And we had just moved into a new home, so I was dismissing that as she's just scared or...

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. Well, let me just say, I'm not here to try to make you feel more guilty. I'm just here to get other people to have a reality check themselves. But you can't get more blatant than the teddy bear game.

Ms. BOWMAN: Yeah, and that was the...

WINFREY: Yeah. And this is what I want you to tell me.

Ms. BOWMAN: OK.

WINFREY: Your daughter told you about the teddy bear game, and all your signals, your flags went up, right?

Ms. BOWMAN: Yes.

WINFREY: And she said, `He plays with me or touches me.'

Ms. BOWMAN: `Touches my girlfriend.'

WINFREY: `He touches my girlfriend,' which is what she calls her vagina?

Ms. BOWMAN: Right.

WINFREY: Everybody has a name. `Touches my girlfriend.' So she says--when your three-year-old says to you, `He touches my girlfriend'--this is the thing I want you to really think before you answer--what does he then have to say to convince you that that was not true? You said, `I confronted him.'

Ms. BOWMAN: The next day I confronted him. He got angry, and he got mad, and then he started crying, and he said, `Jody, there's no way I could ever do this. I love her.'

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. And you believed him.

Ms. BOWMAN: And I believed him.

WINFREY: And so what do you then tell yourself, that--why your little girl told you that?

Ms. BOWMAN: At that point...

WINFREY: How do you justify that--the bear game? How do you justify that?

Ms. BOWMAN: I--Oprah, I felt deep in my mind, in my gut that it was him.

WINFREY: Yeah. You felt it was true.

Ms. BOWMAN: I felt it was true.

WINFREY: But you didn't want to believe him.

Ms. BOWMAN: I didn't want to--I didn't want to believe it was true, and I...

WINFREY: Because to believe it was true would mean you would have to do something, right?

Ms. BOWMAN: That's it.

WINFREY: OK.

Ms. BOWMAN: Yeah.

WINFREY: That's the bottom line.

Ms. BOWMAN: It is.

WINFREY: You would have to do something...

Ms. BOWMAN: And the...

WINFREY: ...meaning put him out of the house.

Ms. BOWMAN: Yeah.

WINFREY: Right. And then you would be alone, right?

Ms. BOWMAN: Yeah.

WINFREY: Now I'm just--this is all I'm trying to get you to answer so that other mothers who have been in this position, and there are millions of them...

Ms. BOWMAN: Yes.

WINFREY: ...especially women with boyfriends who--the desire to have the man, the desire to be able to say, `I have a man,' or whatever that is, is so strong, that they overlook all the signals even when the child tells you.

Ms. BOWMAN: Right.

WINFREY: So what did you tell yourself about what your daughter said?

Ms. BOWMAN: I knew that something had happened to her possibly, but I thought that she was just confused.

WINFREY: You did.

Ms. BOWMAN: Yes, and that's how I rationalized it in my mind.

WINFREY: Did you think she was confused or did you want to think that she was confused because that...

Ms. BOWMAN: I wanted to think that she was confused.

WINFREY: Because that would let you off the hook from having to do what you needed to do.

Ms. BOWMAN: Yeah.

WINFREY: This is what Jody said. She said, `I let this guy suck me in.' True?

Ms. BOWMAN: I allowed him to do that.

WINFREY: It was too good to be true.

Ms. BOWMAN: It was.

WINFREY: That's the big sign, everybody. Anyone who sees something and it's too good to be true, it is. OK. You say, `I look back and realize that I was the perfect profile for a pedophile. I had two small children and a single mom.' And you started using drugs a little bit with him. That you--because you told us that first time you go out with him, he offers you cocaine.

Ms. BOWMAN: Yeah.

WINFREY: You got sense enough to know this is a bad sign.

Ms. BOWMAN: Know--and then he also knew that I had came from an abusive relationship, so I was vulnerable...

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. BOWMAN: ...to that.

WINFREY: But at what point do you take responsibility for your choices?

Ms. BOWMAN: The day that she told me and that I just did not pick that baby up and walk out of that house, that's where I went wrong. I had just lost myself. I had just lost myself.

WINFREY: And when you lose yourself, you also lose your ability to see the reality.

Ms. BOWMAN: And to make, you know, good judgments. That's...

WINFREY: Now this is the thing. This is the question I wanted to ask you. When you were saying, `No way. I didn't believe there was any way that he would do a thing like this.' Why?

Ms. BOWMAN: If a friend of ours...

WINFREY: Why?

Ms. BOWMAN: Why? Because of the person that I thought he was. I just felt that this guy, that he was not capable, that he would not be capable of that. He loved kids. He was, you know, just...

WINFREY: Most pedophiles do.

Ms. BOWMAN: I know that.

WINFREY: OK. I really do thank you for sharing your story. And I know that there'll be a mother out there who will look more closely.

Ms. BOWMAN: I hope so.

WINFREY: And I thank you, Jody. Thank you.

Coming up, when a mother chooses the molester over her child. That's next.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: OK. I'll let you answer that. This is Marilyn. She admits staying married to the man who molested her two sons. And you were just--you were just saying you--I don't know. Do you take offense to me saying you chose the molester?

MARILYN: Yeah.

WINFREY: Yeah.

MARILYN: I know that my choices, a lot of people will question them. But they weren't in my shoes.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. Well, I'm gonna let you explain it, because we have no right to judge you--you're right--because we're not in your shoes. The only reason I'm doing this is for all the women who are in your shoes, who are there, who choose to believe when their spouses, their boyfriends--when they see the signs or have found out that their children are being molested, and they stay in the relationship because they believe that the molester can be cured. That's why I'm doing this, because I believe that there are millions of women out there, particularly women with boyfriends, who end up choosing the boyfriends. I mean, it's not a pleasant thing to say, but in that instance, you just--were you watching the rest of the show?

MARILYN: Yes.

WINFREY: In that instance when her daughter told her and she went and listened to what Jeorgie had to say and believed Jeorgie, she chose Jeorgie over her daughter. I don't care how callous that sounds. She chose Jeorgie over her daughter.

MARILYN: I know.

WINFREY: So the fact is that after finding out that your husband, you--for you--had been molesting your two sons, you did stay married, right?

MARILYN: Well, the children didn't tell me. I had just felt something was wrong in my home.

WINFREY: OK.

MARILYN: And I confronted my husband, and he confessed to it. I then called the police, called child services. Detectives came and interviewed the children, and when they questioned them, since they had been molested while they were sleeping, they had no idea that anything had happened to them.

WINFREY: But again...

MARILYN: At that time, Luis was five, Roy was seven. And the reason I stayed was he said he would immediately go into a sex offender program, which he did. I was six months pregnant with my daughter, and, yes, perhaps they are just excuses when I think back. I had just married him. We were only married six months when I found this out, and...

WINFREY: So these were his stepsons.

MARILYN: These were his stepsons.

WINFREY: When you confronted him, you said...

MARILYN: After I got through screaming and just going through all the emotions that any mother would have finding something out--because, I don't know, maybe a part of me expected denial. But for him to say, `Yeah, I did this and I need help'--that was his thing, `I need help. I can't control myself. I need help.' And so he was very willing to go into the sex offender program. And so I decided, `Well, I'm just gonna have to keep an eagle eye on him while he's in treatment to see whether this is really gonna work.' So I'm six months pregnant, and at night I would sleep on the floor of our bedroom right in front of the door to make sure he wouldn't get out. And I'd question the children at least on a weekly basis, very subtly, whether anything had happened. At that point, I guess I rationalized it that they didn't know that they were being hurt, and now it's stopped, and I can keep it from happening again. This is what I thought.

WINFREY: Yeah. The image of you--I want you--don't be nervous. But the image of you putting yourself in front of the door--OK, this is what I want every person watching to know. Molestation doesn't just happen at nighttime. She was doing the laundry in the middle of the day and the--she thinks her daughter's playing in the other room and he's got the door locked. That's a fallacy to believe that it only happens late at night sometimes.

MARILYN: Yeah.

WINFREY: Yeah.

MARILYN: 'Cause I later found out differently.

WINFREY: Yeah. And you believed him when he said that it's only at night and it's when they're sleeping.

MARILYN: Yeah.

WINFREY: OK. So you stayed with him for seven years, and that's how you lived?

MARILYN: Well...

WINFREY: That's how you lived, every week checking with the boys saying...

MARILYN: I was like the house police without--you know, and I--my little girl, I grew up teaching her as soon as she could talk what her body parts were, and, `Only Mommy can give you a bath. Daddy's not allowed to do that.'

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. So what happened after the seven years?

MARILYN: We moved to another state, and then I guess about a year, maybe less, unbeknownst to me, he began abusing Luis. He raped my son.

WINFREY: How old was Luis at the time?

MARILYN: I think it began before his 11th birthday.

WINFREY: And this is after he had had the treatment?

MARILYN: Mm-hmm. And I began to see changes in Luis. He gained weight. He started doing badly in school. He was just having a lot of, like, stomach pains, and we were constantly taking him to the doctor because this--he was always complaining that his stomach was hurting.

WINFREY: Were you still asking them on a weekly basis? Were you still doing that?

MARILYN: Oh, yeah. When I finally started to connect things, to ask him, you know, `Is your stepdad touching you in a place where he shouldn't?' and he denied it, I was desperate. I thought I was going crazy, because I'm seeing these signs and I'm thinking, `Well, maybe it's because of what happened so many years ago and I'm just, you know, making things up in my head.' And so I confronted both of them separately. With my son, I asked him, you know, `Luis, if anything is happening to you, I want to take care of you. We'll go away.' You know, and when I confronted my ex-husband, he totally denied it.

And it was perhaps about a year later; one night Luis started crying uncontrollably and I went into his room and I asked, `What's wrong, honey? What's wrong?' And he wouldn't tell me. And I asked, `Did your dad touch you in your private parts, on your penis?' and he said, `Yes.' And we just sat there on his bed and we cried together.

WINFREY: We will talk to Marilyn's son, Luis, when we come back.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: So, Luis, want to join us up here? This is Luis, everybody. Welcome Luis to the show.

How old are you now?

LUIS (Molested By His Stepfather): Twenty-two.

WINFREY: Twenty-two. So Luis is now 22 years old. And this abuse--how often was your stepfather abusing you?

LUIS: It was pretty consistently. It was almost on a daily basis.

WINFREY: On a daily basis. Uh-huh. And why, when your mother first asked you about it that first time--were you 11 at the time? Eleven?

LUIS: I was--I--she had, you know, thrown signs here and there. I knew, you know--I've always been really close to my mom, so, you know, she'd ask me and I'd be like, `No, he's not doing anything. He's not doing--don't worry. Don't worry, Mom. He's--no, Mom,' you know.

WINFREY: Why would you say that? Every parent watching right now wants to know why you said that. Don't you?

LUIS: I...

WINFREY: You want to know. Because you think, you know--your mother's thinking, `I'm here. I'm asking you. Tell me.' Was it a safety issue for you? Did you think if you told...

LUIS: I knew that he wouldn't--I wasn't scared of him.

WINFREY: Were you trying to protect your mother?

LUIS: I was--I was trying to protect our family. I wasn't dumb when I was that age. I knew how it was living when it was just my brother and I, you know, being so poor and being whatever. And, you know, he had come into our lives and, you know, we had a big home and we had food on the table and we had this and we had that. And at that age, I was like, `You know, if I tell, what's my mom gonna do with three kids and no job and'--you know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.

MARILYN: He had told me that he had read in school that kids that are abused are taken out of the home, and that he didn't want to get taken away from me and from his brother and sister and...

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. Did you think that could happen to you?

LUIS: I thought it was a possibility at that time. I didn't want to go into foster care. I didn't want them to see my mom as an unfit mother, because that's never how I saw her. I mean, that's not how it was, you know. And I didn't want--I mean, that would be just the most horrible thing ever, if, you know, my mom was gone, and my sister and my brother, and all of a sudden I'm alone in a--foster care. You know, I wanted--I somehow in my head thought that if I could just wait until I was, you know, 16, I could just run away. You know, I could get out of there and, you know, steal everybody away and everything would be OK because then we could make it, you know.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Did you not tell my producer that you were resentful at times that your mother stayed?

LUIS: After he got taken away, he moved into his own place, and I think at times I was--I was hurt.

WINFREY: That she kept seeing him after he moved out.

LUIS: Yeah.

WINFREY: Of course you would be hurt.

LUIS: Oh, yeah.

WINFREY: Why did you still want to be with him even after he moved out?

MARILYN: I thought that--I guess a part of me thought that he could get help, and for a long time, I did think that. And then from talking to him, from spending time with him, I saw that a lot of his basic thinking was not changing, you know. He wasn't abusing, but...

WINFREY: That you know of.

MARILYN: That I know of, right. I--since he wasn't at home, I knew 100 percent my kids were no longer...

WINFREY: You knew your kids were, but what about other people's kids? Did you ever think about that? Did you ever think about that? And did he abuse other people's kids or just his own kids?

LUIS: You know what? I firmly believe that I would never put my child anywhere close to him. I would never, ever, ever, ever. And with him--with him, I don't know if it was much the molesting, but I think that he was--he felt powerless. I think it gave him power to do that, to take control, and even if it was over a little 10-year-old, I think it made him feel the power that he wanted to.

WINFREY: Yeah, of course, they do. They do.

LUIS: You know?

MARILYN: Well, yeah. And the control he had over me that--you know, he would manipulate me. He'd pick fights over so many little things to take my mind away from what might be happening with the kids to what's happening over here. And he controlled the money. He controlled everything.

WINFREY: What--you know, I don't know him and I don't know--but just--if you were just to look at the track record of a pedophile, nobody molests one child. Nobody does. Nobody does. Nobody does. So the fact that you were, as his stepson, convenient, just was that. You were convenient. If there were other children available, then you could just about bet on it that he was abusing other people's children, too.

LUIS: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

WINFREY: It's so interesting listening to you still, because it feels like in many ways you still do. You're a good son. You want to protect your mother...

LUIS: I do.

WINFREY: ...just as you did when you were a little boy. All right. I really thank you. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Really good. Really.

Coming up, her husband of eight years was one of the worst child rapists the police had ever seen, and she had no clue. Her chilling story next.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Child molesters are cunning and they are coming after your children. They are in your neighborhoods, their schools, their churches--yes--and, as you'll see, maybe even sleeping in your bed.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: When Leanna graduated from high school, she was a single mother looking for love and security. Then she met James Perry.

Ms. PERRY: It happened very quickly. You know, the fall in love and making you feel good and wanting to take care of me and my daughter. And I was 19. It was absolutely wonderful.

WINFREY: The two married and had a baby girl together. Life seemed good.

Ms. PERRY: He was an awesome dad. I mean we--you know, we had our birthday parties. We had--you know, that we had for the kids. We'd go swimming. It was great.

WINFREY: But as years passed, the marriage grew rocky. James was often out of the house and Leanna suspected he was having an affair. When he was at home, he was locked in a room with his computer.

Ms. PERRY: I knew that he started looking at, you know, pornography. And I just--I didn't understand it. I didn't get it. I didn't understand the purpose. You know, now that I look back, he always made time for the kids. It was a good thing then, until you find out why.

WINFREY: Leanna says James was also growing violent.

Ms. PERRY: He always knew how to hit. Jamie would always hit in the temple. You know, he'd punch in the temple. It doesn't leave a bruise. He'd spit at me. He'd spit food in my face. He'd throw plates at me.

WINFREY: Then on the night of February 13th, 2004, Leanna awoke to the shock of her life.

Ms. PERRY: I come out into the living room and there's 15, 17 FBI agents with their guns searching the house. You know, and I remember whispering to him, `What's going on?' And he just said, `I don't know.'

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: The 17 FBI agents and police officers in Leanna's living room were there to arrest her husband, James Perry. James had videotaped himself having sex with an eight-year-old girl and sold it on the Internet to make money.

First of all, when all these FBI come into your house and there's--they handcuff you and handcuffed him, and you say, `What's going on?' and he says, `I don't know.'

Ms. PERRY: Right.

WINFREY: And then as he's being carried out, he whispered...

Ms. PERRY: He had yelled out, `I love you,' and I said it back.

WINFREY: And you said it back.

Ms. PERRY: I said it back.

WINFREY: `I love you.' What did you think was going on?

Ms. PERRY: I had absolutely no idea. He liked to smoke marijuana, so that was the first thing that went through my mind is that they're all here for that.

WINFREY: OK, 17 FBI agents and handcuffs. OK.

Ms. PERRY: Right. Right, exactly.

WINFREY: And so then what happened?

Ms. PERRY: I was handcuffed for about 15 minutes, and then, oh, heavy questioning, probably five, six hours.

WINFREY: What did they--then when did they tell you?

Ms. PERRY: Right away. They took me aside and sat me down. They told me that they have pictures of Jamie with my daughter and one of their friends.

WINFREY: What did you think when the police told you that he was a child molester?

Ms. PERRY: I thought they had the wrong person, wrong house.

WINFREY: OK.

Ms. PERRY: Wrong person.

WINFREY: And who was the eight-year-old girl on the videotape that got your husband caught?

Ms. PERRY: My daughter.

WINFREY: Was your daughter.

Ms. PERRY: Mm-hmm. That girl was my daughter.

WINFREY: Mm-hmm. So for Leanna, the nightmare was just beginning as her husband's secret life was then exposed. How long had you been married at the time?

Ms. PERRY: Eight years.

WINFREY: Eight years. His layers of lies began to unravel. Here's what police told her about the man she once loved.

(Excerpt from videotape)

WINFREY: James Perry is a notorious sexual predator who for years eluded the Wisconsin police.

Ms. MAUREEN WALL (Detective): We really had a good idea of the kind of person we were looking for, but we couldn't get anybody to call up and say, `Hey, it's this person, James Perry.'

WINFREY: When the FBI finally found their man, he was an ordinary father of two who was leading an incomprehensible double life. Evidence showed that Perry was videotaping himself having sex with his young victims. Hidden in a safe under his house, police found the tapes, pornographic CD-ROMs and hundreds of pictures of the little girls he stalked. He also had a collection of lingerie in children's sizes.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: And you didn't have a clue.

Ms. PERRY: Didn't have a clue.

WINFREY: Leanna's ex-husband, James Perry--the now-infamous Mall Rapist is what he was referred to--confessed to 40 sexual assaults on children, and he was given 375 years in prison, the longest sentence for sex crimes in Wisconsin's history.

I hear that when you asked the authorities, you said to them, `You know, how bad is he?' What did they tell you?

Ms. PERRY: Oh, it's the worst that they've ever seen.

WINFREY: The worst that they'd ever seen.

Ms. PERRY: The worst that they'd ever seen.

WINFREY: And so then is your head reeling?

Ms. PERRY: Shock. Absolute shock.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. PERRY: Trying to find some reason, trying to rationalize it, trying to understand it.

WINFREY: We'll be right back.

Coming up, the warning signs Leanna missed that every mother should be looking for. That's next.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Now that you're looking back--because I know that one of the reasons you agreed to do this is you wanted to help other women...

Ms. PERRY: True.

WINFREY: ...to see the signs. What were they?

Ms. PERRY: True. There was a lot of time spent on the computer. I think that lured him in. I think that got him into it.

WINFREY: And there are a lot of women who are watching right now, their husbands are into pornography, and into pornography in a way that they probably don't know.

Ms. PERRY: Exactly.

WINFREY: So do you see that as a clear sign?

Ms. PERRY: Yeah.

WINFREY: Yeah?

Ms. PERRY: Yeah. I do. I mean, that was a lot of time, and it just got worse.

WINFREY: What did you think he was doing?

Ms. PERRY: Oh, he would just--you know, there was games. He liked to play chess. He liked to install...

WINFREY: And you believed that.

Ms. PERRY: I did.

WINFREY: You believed he was in there playing chess.

Ms. PERRY: Not all the time.

WINFREY: No, you didn't. No, you didn't. No, you didn't.

Ms. PERRY: Not all the time. I tried to make myself believe it.

WINFREY: OK.

Ms. PERRY: I mean, he wanted to lock the doors. He wanted to spend all of his time there. He wouldn't go to work anymore. It's not acceptable. It's not OK. That's not how any type of...

WINFREY: OK. So why did you accept it?

Ms. PERRY: I was afraid.

WINFREY: Afraid of...

Ms. PERRY: Of him.

WINFREY: Afraid that--What?--he would hurt you?

Ms. PERRY: Oh, sure.

WINFREY: Because he was abusive with you.

Ms. PERRY: Yes, he was. Yes.

WINFREY: OK. So you'd resigned yourself to whatever he wants?

Ms. PERRY: I'd still try to--no, I'd still try to fight, and that's what always got me in trouble. I'd still try to change things and make them the way that they were supposed to be, but that didn't work.

WINFREY: OK. Would you agree--because I've seen this with so many women, and really that's really the reason why I'm doing this, because it's just maddening to me that women put--allow their children to be placed--when women--and I'm sure you'd be one of those women who'd say, `I'd do anything for my children.'

Ms. PERRY: Mm-hmm.

WINFREY: `I'd do anything for my children.' And yet so often for the love of a man, or love of somebody, affection of a man, you would put your children in jeopardizing situations. Would you say you did that?

Ms. PERRY: I did, because I should have left. I should have left him the moment that he hit me.

WINFREY: What was your sex life like with him?

Ms. PERRY: In the beginning, it was great. And then that was another thing that I really started to question is there was just no interest. He had no interest for me whatsoever.

WINFREY: After what?

Ms. PERRY: Oh, I would say four years.

WINFREY: After four years.

Ms. PERRY: After halfway through, yeah.

WINFREY: And so is there a discussion about that or something?

Ms. PERRY: Oh, sure, sure.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. PERRY: You bet.

WINFREY: And he'd say what?

Ms. PERRY: It was me.

WINFREY: So tell me what--so he's going out and he's raping young girls and one of them--raping young girls and having sex with children, your own daughter being one of them.

Ms. PERRY: Mm-hmm.

WINFREY: And you--your daughter showed no signs that this was going on.

Ms. PERRY: Absolutely not.

WINFREY: Yeah.

Ms. PERRY: People like Jamie will terrify children to where they won't talk. And when there's a threat for four years of her life of, `I'm going to kill your mother and your sister if you share our secret,' she's not going to tell.

WINFREY: Yeah. We'll be right back.

Coming up, Leanna's ex-husband, a convicted rapist, faces his victims in court, next.

(Announcements)

(Excerpt from courtroom proceedings)

(Graphic on screen)

James Perry's Sentencing Hearing

Unidentified Man #4: Do you remember when you had the gun to my daughter's head? You were telling her that if she screamed you would blow her blanking brains out all over the wall.

Unidentified Girl: I want to let you know that you may have taken all of us for 10 minutes for our bodies, but you never took a damn one of our souls.

Mr. JAMES PERRY: I'm sorry with all my heart. I would do anything, OK, anything. I just--I mean, I would sell my soul to Satan if I had to, to take it back.

(End of excerpt)

WINFREY: It's already sold. That was James Perry reacting to the cries of his victims on the day of his sentencing. Perry's ex-wife, Leanna, is here. For 10 years she says she loved a man she never guessed was a vicious sexual predator.

As a mother, do you share any kind of responsibility for not noticing what was going on with your child?

Ms. PERRY: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And...

WINFREY: And how long had the abuse of her been going on by him?

Ms. PERRY: They said with her interviews, kindergarten, since five or six.

WINFREY: Since kindergarten.

Ms. PERRY: Mm-hmm.

WINFREY: Uh-huh.

Ms. PERRY: Yeah. And that's a big secret, and it comes out when she's eight. That's a very big secret.

WINFREY: OK. Thank you so much. Thank you, Leanna.

(Announcements)

WINFREY: Well, again, thank you to all my guests. I hope that my intention was fulfilled, that somebody watching today heard something, saw something, felt something that will make you look at your reality different in terms of your children and what's going on in your house, because I think what most people think is that molesters are the boogeyman. No. Most children are molested by people that they know, and that's why it is one out of four children--the statistics are so strong--that we hear one out of four children are molested, and they're molested by people that they know and trust and many times even love. Thanks for watching.

(Top)

By MICHAEL COOPER and DANNY HAKIM

New York Times - March 1, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/nyregion/01civil.html?fta=y

ALBANY, March 1 — New York is poised to join more than a dozen states that continue to detain sex offenders after they have finished serving their prison sentences, under an agreement reached this week by Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the State Legislature.

The agreement, which officials said announced today, will bring an end to several years of agonizing debates that pitted victims' rights groups that argued that such laws were needed to protect the public from sex offenders against civil libertarians who were troubled that the state could confine people after their sentences were served.

"We must do all we can to protect society from individuals who prey upon innocents," Mr. Spitzer said in a statement. "This legislation will improve our ability to identify and properly confine the most dangerous sexual predators, while also expanding supervision and treatment of all sex offenders."

The new legislation will call for having mental health experts identify sex offenders in prison who they believe pose a risk of committing new crimes upon their release, state officials said. Those offenders would be tried before a jury, and if the jury decided that they posed a threat, a judge would sentence them to further confinement or would release them under strict supervision.

"This legislation will save lives, protect our children and keep our communities safe by making sure dangerous sexual predators are kept off the streets and get the treatment they so desperately need," the Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, said in a statement. "I commend Senator Dale Volker, who has led the fight in the Senate to get civil commitment enacted for almost two decades. The most important responsibility of government is to protect the people, and this legislation will ensure that all New Yorkers, particularly the most vulnerable — our children — are protected from dangerous sexual offenders."

Civil confinement legislation was long championed by the Republican-led Senate and by the former governor, George E. Pataki, a Republican, but it met with resistance in the Democratic-led Assembly, which raised concerns about civil liberties.

For several years, it became a hot-button political issue, with the Republicans accusing the Democrats who opposed it of being soft on crime. Governor Pataki, who failed to get a civil confinement bill passed, started using the state's mental hygiene laws to detain sex offenders in psychiatric hospitals after their prison terms ended, a practice that the Court of Appeals struck down in November.

"Real, effective protection from the threat of sexual crimes has always been the Assembly's goal," Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said in a statement. "This bill contains tough new penalties, eliminates parole for Article 130 sex offenses, mandates long periods of supervision and provides for indefinite civil confinement of dangerous predators. This comprehensive measure ensures viable options for civil confinement while mandating treatment for all offenders."

The mechanics of instituting civil confinement were complex. Some mental health professionals, who would be asked to screen sex offenders and supervise them in confinement, complained that it was a waste of scarce resources to combat mental illness. They warned that some states with similar laws almost never released offenders once they were civilly confined, raising questions about their rehabilitation efforts.

Governor Spitzer, a Democrat who campaigned in support of such legislation, helped persuade the Assembly to reach an agreement, several officials said.

Governor Spitzer made the bill a priority, calling for it recently in his first annual address to the Legislature. And his budget proposal called for the addition of 335 state workers to handle civil confinement efforts, the largest staff increase he has proposed.

The agreement calls for the creation of a new state office of sex offender management, an official briefed on the agreement said. It calls for greater supervision of sex offenders once they are paroled, and would create a new class of crime, a sexually motivated felony, in which prosecutors could try to prove that someone intended to commit a sex crime, even if such a crime was not actually committed, the official said.

Some groups worry about the passage of the new law.

"I think it's a poor piece of public policy, and won't make things better in terms of crime prevention," JoAnne Page, the chief executive of the Fortune Society, an advocacy group that promotes rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration, said on Wednesday. She questioned the ability of a state to predict who will commit a new crime.

But the agreement was hailed as a breakthrough in the Capitol.

Assemblyman Ron Canestrari, the Democratic majority leader, said he was pleased that the governor, the Assembly and the Senate were continuing to reach agreements on new bills even as they battled one another politically.

"I'm pleased with the outcome, and it's another success of this legislative session," he said.

Asked if the agreement was closer to the version proposed by the Assembly or the version proposed by the Senate, he said: "It's a mix. Maybe the fact that we're all not totally satisfied with it is proof that it's a real compromise."

(Top)

By MONICA DAVEY and ABBY GOODNOUGH

New York Times - March 4, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/us/04civil.html

The decision by New York to confine sex offenders beyond their prison terms places the state at the forefront of a growing national movement that is popular with politicians and voters. But such programs have almost never met a stated purpose of treating the worst criminals until they no longer pose a threat.

About 2,700 pedophiles, rapists and other sexual offenders are already being held indefinitely, mostly in special treatment centers, under so-called civil commitment programs in 19 states, which on average cost taxpayers four times more than keeping the offenders in prison.

In announcing a deal with legislative leaders on Thursday, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, suggested that New York's proposed civil commitment law would "become a national model" and go well beyond confining the most violent predators to also include mental health treatment and intensive supervised release for offenders.

"No one has a bill like this, nobody," said State Senator Dale M. Volker, a Republican from western New York and a leading proponent in the Legislature of civil confinement.

But in state after state, such expectations have fallen short. The United States Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the laws in part because their aim is to furnish treatment if possible, not punish someone twice for the same crime. Yet only a small fraction of committed offenders have ever completed treatment to the point where they could be released free and clear.

Leroy Hendricks, a convicted child molester in Kansas, finished his prison term 13 years ago, but he remains locked up at a cost to taxpayers in that state of $185,000 a year — more than eight times the cost of keeping someone in prison there.

Mr. Hendricks, who is 72 and unsuccessfully challenged his confinement in the Supreme Court, spends most days in a wheelchair or leaning on a cane, because of diabetes, circulation ailments and the effects of a stroke. He may not live long enough to "graduate" from treatment.

Few ever make such progress: Nationwide, of the 250 offenders released unconditionally since the first law was passed in 1990, about half of them were let go on legal or technical grounds unrelated to treatment.

Still, political leaders, like those in New York, are vastly expanding such programs to keep large numbers of rapists and pedophiles off the streets after their prison terms in a response to public fury over grisly sex crimes.

In Coalinga, Calif., a $388 million facility will allow the state to greatly expand the offenders it holds to 1,500. Florida, Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia and Wisconsin are also adding beds.

At the federal level, President Bush has signed a law offering money to states that commit sex offenders beyond their prison terms, and the Justice Department is creating a civil commitment program for federal prisoners.

Even with the enthusiasm among politicians, an examination by The New York Times of the existing programs found they have failed in a number of areas:

¶Sex offenders selected for commitment are not always the most violent; some exhibitionists are chosen, for example, while rapists are passed over. And some are past the age at which some scientists consider them most dangerous. In Wisconsin, a 102-year-old who wears a sport coat to dinner cannot participate in treatment because of memory lapses and poor hearing.

¶The treatment regimens are expensive and largely unproven, and there is no way to compel patients to participate. Many simply do not show up for sessions on their lawyers' advice — treatment often requires them to recount crimes, even those not known to law enforcement — and spend their time instead gardening, watching television or playing video games.

¶The cost of the programs is virtually unchecked and growing, with states spending nearly $450 million on them this year. The annual price of housing a committed sex offender averages more than $100,000, compared with about $26,000 a year for keeping someone in prison, because of the higher costs for programs, treatment and supervised freedoms.

¶Unlike prisons and other institutions, civil commitment centers receive little standard, independent oversight or monitoring; sex among offenders is sometimes rampant, and, in at least one facility, sex has been reported between offenders and staff members.

¶Successful treatment is often not a factor in determining the relatively few offenders who are released; in Iowa, of the nine men let go unconditionally, none had completed treatment or earned the center's recommendation for release.

¶Few states have figured out what to do when they do have graduates ready for supervised release. In California, the state made 269 attempts to find a home for one released pedophile. In Milwaukee, the authorities started searching in 2003 for a neighborhood for a 77-year-old offender, but have yet to find one.

Supporters of the laws offer no apologies for their shortcomings, insisting that the money is well spent. Born out of the anguish that followed a handful of high-profile sex crimes in the 1980s, the laws are proven and potent vote-getters that have withstood constitutional challenges.

"There has to be a process in place that prevents someone from rejoining society if they're still dangerous," said Jeffrey Klein, a Democratic member of the New York State Senate who has pushed for civil confinement there.

Martin Andrews, 47, of Woodbridge, Va., who was abducted, buried in a box and repeatedly sexually assaulted for a week when he was 13, also supports the laws.

"If they can't control themselves," Mr. Andrews said, "we need to do it for them."

But the myriad problems have concerned some advocates for victims of sexual abuse, who suggest the money is being wasted and that other options for dealing with dangerous sex offenders — such as giving them longer prison terms, preventing sentencing deals with prosecutors and mandating treatment during incarceration — would be more effective.

"Civil commitment is a huge, huge assignment of resources," said Anne Liske, the former executive director of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, a victims' advocacy group. "This wholesale warehousing — without using the proper assessment tools and with throwing treatment in when they are not people who can be treated — has already proven not to be working, so why would we do it more?"

A Series of Convictions

Leroy Hendricks was a likely candidate for commitment as he prepared to leave a Kansas prison in 1994.

Mr. Hendricks's most recent crime, for which he had been convicted a decade earlier, had been "indecent liberties" with two 13-year-old boys in an electronics shop where he worked. All told, his convictions left a painful trail reaching back to 1955: exposing himself to young girls; molesting 7- and 8-year-old boys at a carnival where he was the ride foreman; molesting a 7-year-old girl; playing strip poker with a 14-year-old girl; preying on his own family members, including a boy with cerebral palsy.

Like Mr. Hendricks was, thousands of soon-to-be-released prisoners are screened for commitment each year by state corrections departments, prosecutors and panels. The process varies widely from state to state, as do standards for the evaluators, but in most states, those recommended for commitment have trials before judges or juries.

Mr. Hendricks may have sealed his own fate when he testified in 1994 that he could not "control the urge" to molest when he got "stressed out." He said his mother, Violet, had wanted a girl when he was born and had dressed him as one when he was growing up.

"I sure don't want to hurt anybody again," he told the court, but then conceded that he could not ensure the safety of children in his presence. "The only way to guarantee that is to die," he said.

More often, these cases come down to contentious duels between psychologists over how best to analyze an offender's history and likelihood of repeating crimes. In most states, commitment is for an indefinite period, but offenders are allowed to have their cases reviewed by a court periodically.

The results of the screening process are inconsistent. Some offenders are passed up for civil confinement, only to commit vicious crimes again; others' physical ailments alone make them unlikely repeat predators.

Even though Minnesota prison officials had classified Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a convicted rapist, in a category of sex offenders most at risk to commit more crimes, Mr. Rodriguez went home when his term ended in May 2003. That November, he kidnapped and killed Dru Sjodin, a North Dakota college student who was beaten and raped.

Likewise, Jerry Buck Inman was charged with raping and strangling a college student in South Carolina last June, nine months after his release from a Florida prison after serving 17 years for rape and other crimes. The authorities in Florida looked at his records but decided not to seek commitment.

Meanwhile, some prosecutors seek commitment for others convicted of noncontact crimes like public exposure. In Florida, prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to civilly commit a man who was imprisoned for driving drunk even though his last sex arrest was decades earlier.

"The population that is being detained is a very, very mixed group," said Richard Wollert, a psychologist in Portland, Ore., who evaluates civilly committed offenders. "There are cases that are appalling in terms of being kept in custody at the taxpayers' expense when there are probably alternative placements for them."

Predicting who is likely to commit future sex crimes has become more of a science over the last decade, but many still find the methods questionable.

Actuarial formulas — akin to the tables used for life insurance — play a central role in deciding who is dangerous enough to be committed. They calculate someone's risk of offending again by looking at factors such as the number of prior sex offenses and the sex of the victims. Men with male victims are graded as higher risk, for example, because statistics show they are more often repeat offenders.

"The danger is that these numbers will blind people," said Eric Janus, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul who has challenged Minnesota's civil commitment law in court.

Politics and emotion also factor heavily into who gets committed, with decisions made by elected judges or juries who may be more affected by the raw facts of someone's offense history or the public spectacle over their crimes than the dry science of risk prediction.

"It's so emotional for them," said Stephen Watson, an assistant public defender who represented an offender in Florida. "They don't even want to hear the research."

New Laws Follow Publicized Cases

Earlier in the 20th century, many states had sexual psychopath laws that allowed them to hospitalize offenders deemed too sick for prison. But by the 1980s most such laws had been repealed or fallen into disuse.

But a handful of horrific and highly publicized cases in the 1980s and '90s spurred lawmakers to act again. Washington State adopted the first civil commitment law in 1990 after men with predatory histories killed a young woman in Seattle and sexually mutilated a boy in Tacoma.

After state courts upheld Washington's law, Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin passed versions in 1994, followed by California in 1996.

Then, in a 5-to-4 decision in 1997, the United States Supreme Court found civil commitment to be constitutional in Kansas v. Hendricks, the same Mr. Hendricks still confined in Kansas.

In the ruling, the justices found that a "mental abnormality" like pedophilia was enough to meet a standard to qualify someone for commitment, not the different standard of "mental illness" that had been traditionally used. The court also rejected the notion that civil commitment amounted to double jeopardy (a second criminal punishment for a single crime) or an ex post facto law (a new punishment for a past crime), noting that Kansas's statute was not meant to punish committed men but, like other acceptable civil commitment statutes, intended "both to incapacitate and to treat" them therapeutically.

"We have never held that the Constitution prevents a state from civilly detaining those for whom no treatment is available, but who nevertheless pose a danger to others," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, later adding, "By furnishing such treatment, the Kansas Legislature has indicated that treatment, if possible, is at least an ancillary goal of the act, which easily satisfies any test for determining that the act is not punitive."

Since then, state officials, civil liberties advocates and lawyers have wrestled with exactly what that treatment requirement means.

"There's no question about it," Professor Janus of William Mitchell College said, "it's a very murky area of the law."

Since the Hendricks ruling, the courts have indicated that states have "wide latitude" when it comes to treatment for the civilly confined, meaning that unsuccessful treatment alone or an untreatable patient would not be enough to undo the laws.

In 2001, the Supreme Court, in Seling v. Young, decided the case of Andre Brigham Young, a committed man in Washington State who argued that the conditions he was being held under were so punitive and the treatment so inadequate as to amount to a second criminal sentence. The court ruled against Mr. Young.

A year later, in 2002, the Supreme Court made clear the limits of who may be committed by states, saying the authorities must prove not just that an offender is still dangerous and likely to commit more crimes but also that he or she has a "serious difficulty in controlling behavior."

Some civil libertarians and prisoner advocates, who still object to the laws, have not given up on finding a challenge that the Supreme Court might view favorably. Despite the court rulings, these groups insist civil commitment amounts to a second sentence for a crime.

Even the look of commitment centers reflects the dichotomy at the core of their stated reason for being — to lock away dangerous men (only three women are civilly committed) but also to treat them.

Most of the centers tend to look and feel like prisons, with clanking double doors, guard stations, fluorescent lighting, cinder-block walls, overcrowded conditions and tall fences with razor wire around the perimeters.

Bedroom doors are often locked at night, and mail is searched by the staff for pornography or retail catalogs with pictures of women or children. Most states put their centers in isolated areas.

Washington State's is on an island three miles offshore in Puget Sound.

Yet soothing artwork hangs at some centers, and cheerful fliers announce movie nights and other activities. The residents can wander the grounds and often spend their time as they please in an effort to encourage their cooperation, including sunbathing in courtyards and sometimes even ordering pizza for delivery. The new center in California will have a 20,000-book library, badminton courts and room for music and art therapy.

Diseases like hepatitis and diabetes are common among the committed, and severe mental illness — beyond the mental "abnormalities" described by the Supreme Court — a scourge. A survey in 2002 found that 12 percent of committed sex offenders suffered from serious psychiatric problems like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Most severely mentally ill men cannot participate in sex offender treatment and receive few services besides medication. Verwayne Alexander, a self-described paranoid schizophrenic who has been detained at the Florida Civil Commitment Center since 2003, has sliced himself so many times with razor blades that a guard often watches him around the clock, lawyers said. Mr. Alexander has sought unsuccessfully to be moved to a psychiatric hospital.

Those who choose to participate in sex offender treatment spend an average of less than 10 hours a week doing so, but the hours differ vastly from state to state. The structure of therapy, too, varies widely, a reflection, perhaps, of the central question still looming in the field: Can treatment ever really work for these offenders?

Admitting to previous crimes is a crucial piece of a broad band of treatment, known as relapse prevention, that is used in at least 15 states and has been the most widely accepted model for about 20 years.

Some of the institutions, too, devote time to other therapies and activities that seem to have little bearing on sexual offending. In Pennsylvania, young residents take classes to improve their health and social habits called "Athlete's Foot," "Lactose Intolerance," "Male Pattern Baldness," "Flatulence" and "Proper Table Manners."

In California, they can join a Brazilian drum ensemble or classes like "Anger Management Through Art Therapy" and "Interpersonal Skills Through Mural Making."

But many of those committed get no treatment at all for sex offending, mainly by their own choice. In California, three-quarters of civilly committed sex offenders do not attend therapy. Many say their lawyers tell them to avoid it because admission of past misdeeds during therapy could make getting out impossible, or worse, lead to new criminal charges.

For those who decline treatment — sometimes including hundreds of "detainees" awaiting commitment trials — boredom, resentment and hostility to those in treatment lead to trouble. Some sneak in drugs, alcohol and cellphones, sometimes with the help of staff members, or beat up other residents, sometimes coercing them into having sex.

"There's rampant sexuality going on in there," said Natalie Novick Brown, a psychologist who has evaluated 250 men at Florida's center.

The people who run civil commitment centers say that a constant, nagging question hangs over them: How to keep order while not treating argumentative, sometimes violent offenders like prisoners? The low-level staff members are not prison guards and tend to be poorly educated, trained and paid. Their job titles — in Illinois, security therapy aide — reflect the awkward balance they must achieve between security and therapy.

Because civil commitment centers are neither prisons nor traditional mental health programs, no specialized oversight body exists. None has been created, in part because its base of financial support, the 19 civil commitment programs around the country, would be too small, several experts who study the programs said. But the need, they said, is urgent.

"They ought to be reviewed by an independent entity with the highest possible standards," said Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in Baltimore.

Few Signs of Progress

Around the country, relatively few committed sex offenders finish treatment and are released.

"Every year I go to his hearing, and every year there's no progress in his case," said Armand R. Cingolani III, a lawyer with a client in Pennsylvania who was committed in 2004 after being adjudicated as a juvenile for sexual assault on two different minors. "It doesn't seem that anyone gets better."

Nearly 3,000 sex offenders have been committed since the first law passed in 1990. In 18 of the 19 states, about 50 have been released completely from commitment because clinicians or state-appointed evaluators deemed them ready. Some 115 other people have been sent home because of legal technicalities, court rulings, terminal illness or old age.

In discharging offenders, Arizona, the remaining state, has been the exception. That state has fully discharged 81 people; there, the facility's director said records were not available to indicate the reason for those discharges.

An additional 189 people have been released with supervision or conditions (excluding Texas, where there is no commitment center and those committed are treated only as outpatients). And an additional 68 (including 58 in Arizona) are in a higher, "transitional" phase of the program, but still technically committed and often living on state land.

The backlogs have led to an aging population. Inside many facilities, wheelchairs, walkers, high blood pressure and senility are increasingly expensive concerns. Florida's center filled 229 prescriptions for arthritis medication one recent month, and 300 for blood pressure and other heart problems.

More than 400 of the men in civil commitment are 60 or older, and a number of studies indicate a significant drop in the recidivism rate for this group, many of whom have health problems after years in prison. David Thornton, treatment director of Wisconsin's center and an expert on recidivism rates, said the decline was increasingly well-documented.

The growth of the committed population has become a political quagmire. No legislator wants to insist on the release of sex offenders, but few are able to swallow the mounting costs of civil commitment. The costs of aging and sick offenders, such as Mr. Hendricks in Kansas, are especially high in part because of their special needs and physical ailments.

From 2001 to 2005, the price of civil commitment in Kansas leapt to nearly $6.9 million from $1.2 million, a state audit there found. "Unless Kansas is willing to accept a higher level of risk and release more sexual predators from the program," the audit said, "few options exist to curb the growth of the program."

But as more states consider granting some offenders supervised release, the cost is turning out to be nearly as prohibitive.

For $1.7 million, Washington converted a warehouse in Seattle into a home for men on conditional release. It has 26 cameras monitoring residents, a dozen workers, a surveillance booth overseeing the living area and a 1,700-pound magnetic door.

Two men live there so far.

With the logjams and frustrations mounting, many states have lengthened prison sentences for sex offenders. Virginia last year increased the minimum sentence for certain sexual acts against children to 25 years, from 10, though it also sharply expanded the number of crimes that qualify an offender for civil commitment.

Ida Ballasiotes, whose daughter's rape and murder in 1988 helped spur the first civil commitment law, in Washington State, said that no sexual predator should walk free and that longer prison sentences should "absolutely" be considered.

"I don't believe they can be treated, period," Ms. Ballasiotes said.

After Release, Objections

Even for those sex offenders considered safe enough to be released, going home is no simple process. Kansas authorities decided two years ago that Mr. Hendricks, who was the first person that state committed under its law and who after a decade had progressed to one of the highest phases of treatment, should be moved from Larned State Hospital to a group home in a community where he would be watched around the clock.

Mr. Hendricks would not be allowed onto the home's porch or patio without an escort, according to court documents. Besides, his medical problems, including poor hearing and eyesight, meant he could not walk down the 40-yard gravel driveway outside the house without falling, the documents said.

But as with many men with his history, the community balked. In California, so many towns object to men leaving civil commitment that some of those released have to live in trailers outside prisons.

"You can't just sneak them in," said John Rodriguez, a recently retired deputy director in the California Department of Mental Health. "You've got hearings, the court announces it, it's all over the press."

In Mr. Hendricks's case, residents of Lawrence, where he was initially to be moved, collected petitions. "You can tell me that he's old, but as long as he can move his hands and his arms, he can hurt another child," said Missi Pfeifer, 37, a mother of three who led the petition drive with her two sisters and mother.

Then officials in Leavenworth County, picked as an alternative, said the choice violated county zoning laws. Mr. Hendricks lasted two days there, in a house off a road not far from a pasture of horses, before a judge ordered him removed.

State officials said they had no choice but to move Mr. Hendricks back to a facility on the grounds of a different state hospital, where he still is.

Through a spokeswoman for the state Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, Mr. Hendricks declined to speak to The New York Times.

Two years ago, he told The Lawrence Journal-World that he would be living in a group home "if somebody hadn't opened their damn mouth," adding, "I'm stuck here till something happens, and I don't know when that will be."

Next: Inside the troubled center for sex offenders in Florida.

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By Abby Goodnough and Monica Davey

New York Times - March 6, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/us/06civil.html?em&ex=1173330000&en=cb72675099ea59e2&ei=5087%0A

ATASCADERO, Calif. — During five years of psychotherapy at a treatment center here for sex offenders who have finished their prison terms, Bill Price, a pedophile who admits to 21 victims as young as 3, has constructed a painstaking plan for staying straight.

A requirement of his treatment, the plan catalogs on five single-spaced pages the tactics Mr. Price has learned to stop molesting.

There are 42 so far, including avoiding places where children congregate, abstaining from alcohol, shunning the Internet and sniffing ammonia whenever he has a deviant thought.

"It was just like a hunt for me," Mr. Price, 59, a former Sunday school teacher, said of his sexual crimes. "I kept choosing children because they were easier prey; they were easier to deal with than women."

Treatment plans like Mr. Price's, known as relapse prevention, have been a cornerstone of efforts to reform sex offenders for the past 20 years. Yet there is no convincing evidence that the approach works, or that others do either.

Similar to aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous, relapse prevention has sex offenders own up to wrongdoing and resign themselves to a lifelong day-to-day struggle with temptation. But one of the few authoritative studies of the method, conducted in California from 1985 to 2001, found that those who entered relapse prevention treatment were slightly more likely to offend again than those who got no therapy at all.

Clinicians who work with sex offenders cling to relapse prevention nonetheless, and its durability speaks volumes about the troubled, politically fraught science of treating sex offenders. Not only is relapse prevention of questionable value, but so are the tests to gauge whether sex offenders in treatment still get inappropriately aroused, the drugs used for so-called chemical castration and the methods of predicting risk of reoffending.

Treatment methods have become particularly topical as thousands of sex offenders are confined or restricted beyond their prison terms under civil commitment laws on the books in 19 states. The laws have been found constitutional in part because they aim to provide treatment if possible; New York legislators announced last week that the state would soon allow civil confinement.

On average, the civil commitment programs cost four times more than keeping sex offenders in prison. But too little research has been conducted into how to treat sex offenders, experts say, putting psychotherapists and others working in civil commitment centers at a distinct disadvantage.

"It has never been regarded as a legitimate and recognized topic for research by psychologists," said Robert A. Prentky, director of research at the Justice Research Institute in Boston. "There is a very strong undercurrent of disrespect for this area of research and perhaps even skepticism, frankly."

As recently as the 1970s, research on treating sex offenders was practically nonexistent. Barbara Schwartz, a psychologist with New England Forensic Associates in Arlington, Mass., said that when she wrote her first paper on rehabilitating sex offenders in 1971, "I read everything there was to read, and I had a half of one page of references."

That is partly because sex offenders present major challenges as research subjects. There are far fewer convicted sex offenders than most other kinds of criminals, so sample groups are unreliably small. And sex offenders tend to be so secretive that "it's really hard to get information from them that you can have confidence in," said Ted Shaw, a forensic psychologist in Gainesville, Fla., who has treated offenders since 1982.

Even now, in an advanced phase of California's treatment program for the most persistent sex offenders, Mr. Price says he questions his ability to keep his urges in check. His relapse prevention plan says that if let out, he will seek more treatment at Pure Life Ministries in Kentucky, whose Web site says its goal is "leading Christians to victory over sexual sin."

"I'm very afraid of just being out there," Mr. Price said, sitting near the nasturtiums and petunias he had grown in a courtyard of the Atascadero State Hospital here, which includes a wing for civilly committed offenders. "I'm less dangerous than I was, but I'm definitely in touch with my dangerousness."

Treatment in Phases

During one therapy session, Mr. Price and five other men aggressively tested one another's ability to stay straight, while two social workers moderated. Sitting in a circle in a locked conference room, briefly sealed off from the loud, grim bustle of the hospital halls, they fell into an argument over whether to protect a young new arrival from predatory older residents.

"If I can save this kid from being hustled or taken advantage of," said Paul George, a convicted pedophile who has admitted roughly 100 offenses, "I'm going to at least try to make that effort."

But another man pointed out that Mr. George had habitually groomed child victims by acting as their protector, asking him, "How was that different from this situation?"

At most civil commitment centers around the nation, offenders young and old meet several times a week for group therapy rooted in relapse prevention as well as what are known as cognitive-behavioral techniques. While the former is meant to curb sex offending in particular, the latter are intended to change broader destructive patterns of thinking and reacting, and are commonly used in treating other ailments like anxiety.

Civilly confined men move from one phase of treatment to the next, learning to recognize which situations, thoughts and behaviors have led them to offend, developing skills to avoid them, and applying those skills to their daily lives. They try to learn empathy by writing detailed letters to their victims and even essays in their voices.

"It's a slow business," said David Thornton, the treatment director at Wisconsin's civil commitment center. "You're talking about years of work, two steps forward, one step back."

Dr. Thornton said relapse prevention forced sex offenders to focus too heavily on a concrete list of high-risk situations — sometimes as long as 50 pages — that could overwhelm them and lead to failure. Wisconsin's program rejects relapse prevention and sticks to cognitive-behavioral techniques in an effort to change deep-rooted traits and behaviors.

"It's much less dependent on the guy having some conscious, deliberate self-control plan in his head," Dr. Thornton said. "You're trying to change how he automatically functions."

Instead of helping a sex offender compile a list of specific situations to avoid, therapists in Wisconsin might seize on the fact that he reacts impulsively when something upsets him, teaching him self-regulation skills. Instead of having the offender recount every last detail of his crimes, they might help him correct long-held misperceptions about children (that they enjoy sex), power (that it is best attained by raping or molesting) and so forth.

Some who represent offenders in Wisconsin, though, say that even the new program there has not answered offenders' frustrations about their ability to progress in it and to demonstrate that progress.

"The program has gotten larger, more involved and progressively longer," said Robert W. Peterson, a lawyer in Wisconsin who has worked on such cases since 1998 and says he has seen the state's program shift repeatedly in design and focus.

"Regardless of the structure of the treatment program, the duration of the treatment program, the nature of the treatment program," Mr. Peterson said, "what we basically have is living experiments."

Research Is Sparse

Reliable studies on the treatment of civilly committed offenders do not exist, since so few have been set free. Much of the research into the treatment of sex offenders has come out of Canada, where national criminal history records are easily accessible.

Canadian psychologists have studied not only treatment outcomes but also risk assessment, or determining who is likely to reoffend.

Combining findings from hundreds of smaller studies, R. Karl Hanson, senior research officer for the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in Canada, has found that roughly 15 percent of convicted sex offenders are caught reoffending after five years and that those driven by deviant sexual interests, like pedophiles and exhibitionists, are the likeliest to do so.

Dr. Hanson's research has also suggested that even lifelong offenders tend to stop, for the most part, by the time they reach their 70s.

He said various studies had shown that "most treatments don't work very well," but that, over all, treatment had a modest beneficial effect. One analysis that he published in 2002 found that 12 percent of offenders who got treatment were caught committing new sex crimes, compared with 17 percent of untreated offenders.

Researchers have found that chemical castration, or using hormonal drugs to curb sexual appetite, can be problematic, too.

Doctors have experimented for decades with antiandrogens, which block the effects of sex hormones like testosterone and are most commonly used to treat advanced prostate cancer. But while some consider antiandrogens crucial for the most predatory offenders, the drugs remain controversial, not least because they are expensive and can cause weight gain, osteoporosis and breast development. It is also hard to ensure that released offenders keep taking the drugs.

More than half of states with civil commitment programs say they allow voluntary antiandrogen treatment, but as of last fall, only California, Illinois, Washington and Wisconsin had more than one offender taking the drugs, which can cost several hundred dollars a month. Dr. Fred S. Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in Baltimore and a longtime critic of civil commitment, said he was troubled by the scant use of antiandrogens.

"I get letters from men around the country, in prison or sometimes civil commitment, asking if I can help them in their efforts to have it made available," Dr. Berlin said, "because the administrations in their facilities are not even willing to discuss it with them."

Here in California, where about 40 civilly committed men took antiandrogens several years ago but only four do now, Jesus Padilla, a clinical psychologist at Atascadero State Hospital, said the drugs did not address the underlying emotional problems that lead to offending, nor even necessarily eliminate sex drive.

"I've had numerous situations where they say they are working just fine," Dr. Padilla said of civilly committed men on antiandrogens, "only to catch them having sex with each other or engaging in deviant sexual fantasies even though their testosterone level was down to zero."

Some doctors see more potential in antidepressant drugs, which can dampen sexual desire while also curbing compulsive behaviors like chronic masturbation, which can preclude offenders from participating in treatment. Some civil commitment programs prescribe antidepressants sparingly or not at all, while others, including South Carolina's and Wisconsin's, have dozens of men taking them.

One approach that civil commitment centers have avoided is surgical castration, though at least one state, California, allows it if the offender pays for the procedure himself.

In Virginia, the General Assembly considered a proposal last year to allow voluntary surgical castration as an alternative to civil commitment, but took no action. One pedophile in Virginia castrated himself in a jail shower with a shoelace and a razor blade as his civil commitment trial approached.

Douglas Carlin, a convicted rapist who completed treatment and was released a year ago from the commitment center in Florida, said he thought a lot of offenders there were deceiving their therapists.

"Most of those guys, they are just faking it to make it," Mr. Carlin said. "They're just waiting to get released so they can go right back to what they were doing."

Tools of Assessment

Therapists can gauge the success of various treatments by observing offenders' behavior, interviewing them and using two instruments. All have serious shortcomings.

One instrument, the polygraph, is routinely used to determine if people continue to offend once conditionally released or have deviant thoughts in the course of treatment. Civil commitment centers also use polygraphs to make sure an offender has admitted all his crimes, a requirement for progressing past the early stage of relapse prevention treatment.

"Usually they will give up lots of information soon after failing a polygraph test," Dr. Thornton, the Wisconsin treatment director, said.

But polygraphy, which measures blood pressure, breathing rate and perspiration while a series of questions is asked, is generally considered so unreliable that its results are inadmissible as proof in court. Some offenders, especially psychopaths who feel no anxiety when lying, can beat it, experts said.

"Polygraph on its own isn't the answer to anything," said Dr. Don Grubin, a forensic psychiatrist at Newcastle University in Britain who has studied the tests. "As part of a bigger package it seemed to have an effect — to help reduce the risk of reoffending."

The other device routinely used at civil commitment facilities is the penile plethysmograph, which measures changes in the circumference of the penis while the offender is shown sexually suggestive pictures of men, women or children.

Some clinicians and offenders say it is easy, particularly in a laboratory, to stifle arousal and thus cheat on a plethysmograph test.

Mr. Carlin, the Florida rapist, said that during one plethysmograph test, "I just stared at a shelf of cleaning products and read the labels."

The field of risk assessment, or determining which sex offenders are likely to repeat their crimes once released, has been equally slow to evolve, even as judges and juries are keeping more men locked up after their prison sentences in the belief that they will be dangerous on the outside.

A cottage industry of professionals who diagnose sexually violent predators has developed in the last two decades, and several hundred psychologists, often with little or no background treating sex offenders, make a lucrative business of recommending who should be committed.

During a recent commitment trial in St. Augustine, Fla., one psychologist with hardly any experience treating sex offenders told a jury he had evaluated 350 candidates for civil commitment and testified in dozens of commitment trials since 2000.

Some in the field question why professional organizations like the American Psychological Association have not set ethical and training standards for the many psychologists entering the civil commitment field.

"I don't think, in my personal experience, that the vast majority of the examiners I've come across have sufficient working knowledge of the empirical literature," said Dr. Prentky of the Justice Research Institute.

But that literature is still of limited use. Most actuarial tools used to predict someone's risk of recidivism consider only unchanging factors, like their number of past offenses and the sex of their victims. Some scientists say that so-called dynamic factors — how much treatment an offender gets, for example, and how old he has grown — should factor heavily into actuarial risk assessment, too.

"Science hasn't gotten there yet," said Eric Janus, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., who opposes civil commitment.

Professor Janus said he hoped for "an explosion of knowledge" about how to prevent sexual violence before it happened, which he said would prevent far more sex crimes than civilly committing offenders.

That sort of research is unlikely to happen in the United States, Dr. Berlin and other experts said, because so many Americans believe that the only investment in sex offenders should be punitive.

"People need to recognize that these are not just criminal justice problems but also public health problems," Dr. Berlin said, "and the surgeon general as well as the attorney general ought to be supporting research in this area."

Earlier efforts to rehabilitate sex offenders, like Freudian psychoanalysis and electric shocks to the skin, failed definitively decades ago. A recent case in Orange Park, Fla., offered more evidence that relapse prevention treatment is no solution, either.

There, the authorities say, a convicted rapist who had spent 12 years in prison and 5 at the Florida Civil Commitment Center raped and killed a young woman before dawn on Jan. 23 after following her into the veterinary clinic where she worked.

The suspect, Michael Renard Jackson, 37, won release from the commitment center in 2005 after reaching the highest levels of a relapse prevention treatment program, people familiar with the case said.

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Last Updated: 03/07/2007

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