“I’m in the group, Miss, because I don’t want to hurt other people in the same way that adults hurt me. I don’t want to do it, but every time I think of them doing it to me I must do it to someone else.”
Marcelle Lund, director of Child Abuse Therapeutic and Training Services, heard this from a 15-year-old patient.
A new interest in offender psychology is evolving as the incidence of sexual violence continues to rise. Champions of victims, especially child victims, realise the cycle of sexual violence can only be stopped once victim support is supplemented by an understanding of rapists and molesters.
Lund realised this 15 years ago when she was running a child-abuse prevention programme in the Western Cape. She was seeing 12 to 15 rape cases a day and became tired of shifting the responsibility to the victims by saying over and over again: “Say no. Run away.”
First-hand information about the perpetrators, she realised, was the best way to protect women and children. She had to learn “how they recruit, how they work, how they keep their victims in compliance”.
Lund and Joan van Niekerk, of Childline KwaZulu-Natal, have long known that the treatment of sex offenders is, as Van Niekerk puts it, a “primary child protection activity. It is not surprising that insight about the value of offender psychology originates among people who work with children.
“Child protection professionals repeatedly witness the fact that child victims often become perpetrators. International research confirms, too, that most offenders have been abused as children, either physically or sexually. Boys are more likely to respond to sexual abuse by acting out the experience and, many researchers say, trying to overcome the helplessness they felt during the abuse. Later feelings of helplessness trigger the same abusive behaviour.”
This sinister continuum does not wait for children to become adults. Research shows that 50% to 60% of adult sex offenders commit their first offences as adolescents. When they get away with the deed, their need for power and sexual pleasure is rewarded.
In the manual for the recently introduced South African Young Sex Offenders Programme, Louise Ehlers and Tammy van der Sandt cite shocking figures: the average juvenile offender has seven victims, the average for adult offenders is 380.
Arresting this continuum, says Van Niekerk, is a difficult project that requires long-term work. Childline programmes, often an adjunct to community or custodial sentences, vary in length according to the individual offender.
“If there is a fixed pattern of behaviour we work with them over a period of years. Some offenders should never leave therapy — those who are compulsive, like addicts,” she says.
Professionalism and experience are required to deal with patients who are typically “difficult and resistant”, she says. The greatest challenge is that the work requires a leap of empathy. The cycle continues unless the root cause of the offender’s actions, his own victimisation, is dealt with.
The offenders need to undergo a form of victim therapy programme where their own experience of abuse is used to teach them empathy for the people they have violated. Looking at their early history within a relationship of trust with a counsellor is the only way to break through their denial and emotional detachment, she says.
“Sexual offenders distance themselves emotionally from what they are doing … and the only way to teach them empathy is to handle them with empathy and care,” says Van Niekerk.
This gruelling work is seldom applauded. Society prefers to call for offenders to be removed from their communities, but imprisonment alone does not stop abuse. Carol Bower of Resources Aimed at the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect says that prisons are “factories of sex offenders. In prison, masculinity is about violent sexuality, it’s part of being a man.”
Lund says that unless sex offenders undergo rehabilitation, they “sit around with large chunks of time and nurture revenge fantasies of more deviant sexual offences. They ruminate on the erotic side of the offence and masturbate. The sexual impulse remains paired with the aggressive act and they come out compelled to repeat.”
She recently helped to set up a rehabilitation programme in Pollsmoor prison, Cape Town, one of the few prisons where these programmes have been implemented successfully. Sex offenders in Pollsmoor are being reached with a new programme called Friends against Abuse, for men who have been raped in prison. The programme, run by Lizelle Alberts, is an indirect invitation to sex offenders to apply for treatment.
“There are complex nuances in prison. Sex offenders present their own victimisation at the first opportunity they get,” says Lund.
A Department of Correctional Services official says that parolees and people in community service have for many years been obliged to attend workshops on issues such as sexual offences or “the rights of females”. Overcrowding in prisons has, however, frustrated efforts at meaningful rehabilitation inside prisons.
The correctional services department recently launched a project called Gearing Correctional Services for Rehabilitation, stating that its core business is being aligned with rehabilitation rather than with mere custody.
The correctional services official says it is hoped that restorative justice measures and imminent innovations such as plea bargaining will reduce the number of people in prisons, making space for rehabilitation programmes.
The South African Young Sex Offenders Programme is an example of restorative justice principles and of a dawning awareness of sex offender psychology. The programme is a consortium of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders (Nicro), Resources Aimed at the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cape Town, and the University of the Western Cape’s community law centre.
The consortium is funded by the Open Society Foundation, but also enjoys the support of the Department of Social Services and, says Nicro’s Moefeeda Salie-Kagee, the goodwill of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development.
It has been piloted in the Western Cape over the past two years and recently expanded into the Eastern Cape, where the first training programme has been completed at Port Elizabeth’s One Stop Youth Justice Centre.
It was designed as a diversion programme for first offenders involved in exploratory rather than coercive sexual crimes. The programme was formulated to pick up those children who would probably be acquitted because of their youth or the courts’ high standards of proof.
The children are required to admit to their actions and to show remorse. They attend 10 two-hour sessions where they examine their behaviour and participate in workshops on issues such as impulse control and social and sexual myths. They examine the build-up to their offence to help them recognise the signs and to avoid relapsing.
The programme is not, however, therapeutic. Bower says it is more appropriately described as a “behaviour modification intervention … that may, in the end, more properly be an assessment tool”.
Much trepidation has been expressed about possible misuse of the programme. Ehlers, who co-wrote the manual, is anxious about it being used in isolation rather than as part of a long-term, multimodal approach.
“Given that there is nothing else, it is naive to say that it is never administered inappropriately,” says Salie-Kagee of Nicro.
Van Niekerk confirms that misuse of the programme is “potentially quite dangerous — it is too short term and people who work with sex offenders need to be hand-picked”, but it is also acknowledged that the programme is the best available in a situation where there is, as yet, little else.