INCEST OFFENDERS VS. MINORS: VARIETIES OF OFFENDERS

The incest offenders vs. minor daughters do not lend themselves easily to classification: the majority could not be fitted into any one taxonomic pigeonhole. In fact, one gains the impression that this very difficulty reflects a general psychological trait of these hard-to-classify offenders: the unthinking and often stupid gratification of impulse, and, once the taboo is broken, the continuation of the behavior based on ease of access. The typical case seems to be a run-of-the-mill lower socioeconomic level husband who, for reasons neither he nor we clearly see, has an incestuous relationship, and having once begun continues it despite his fears and guilt feelings. Perhaps these incest offenders are simply men whose self-control is adequate for most situations but inadequate when they live with and have authority over a female of nubile or near nubile years.

Nevertheless, nearly half of the incest offenders vs. minors can be put into one of three categories, each constituting around one fifth of the cases. First is the drunken variety, requiring no comment. Second are the subculture offenders of whom there were so many among the offenders vs. minors. These men regard any postpubertal female as a suitable sexual object and do not regard a stepdaughter as taboo since she is not a “blood relative.” Although geography was not used as a criterion in categorizing, we subsequently found that of the eight men classed as subculture offenders, six had lived their formative years as children and young adults in Arkansas and/or Oklahoma and the remaining two cases could well have been influenced by what one may call the Ozark attitude toward kinship, since one man had been born and reared in the vicinity of Joplin, Missouri, and the other had spent his life in rural areas of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Third is the situational variety, where the initial incestuous act seems to have arisen from a concatenation of factors, each of which, if taken separately, may be regarded as within the normal range of attitude and behavior. The following case illustrates this. A young man who had been forced into marriage because of a pregnancy for which he doubted his responsibility was divorced from his wife before the birth of a daughter. Years later, when he had remarried, this daughter, then about fourteen, came to live with him following her mother’s death. The man regarded her almost as a stranger, not having seen her for some years, but accepted the responsibility. The girl was quite free and casual about her dress—her stepmother found it necessary to reprimand her—and the man was occasionally aroused by the sight. The marriage had been deteriorating before his daughter came to live with them and continued to do so; finally the wife left.

The man now found himself even more sexually stimulated by his daughter’s careless dress and affectionate behavior and his desires were enhanced by the knowledge that she was having coitus with boy friends. Their affectionate behavior took on a sexual tone, by degrees became outright petting, and within three weeks after the wife’s departure they had their first coitus. Thereafter they continued to have coitus several times a week. The man felt guilty about it, but this only served to reinforce the incest, for his guilt led him to drink and the drink so lowered his inhibitions that he sought coitus even more frequently. Eventually his daughter became pregnant; his estranged wife found out about it and told the police.

Less frequent varieties of incest offenders vs. minors include pedophiles, amoral delinquents, and those so emotionally disturbed as to fall in our category of psychotics.

While the dependent variety of incest offender was very common among the incest offenders vs. children, it is only sparsely represented among the incest offenders vs. minors. Perhaps if more of the unclassified individuals could be classified, we would find there were more of them.

A few senile deteriorates and mental defectives account for the remaining classified cases.

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