Child Rape and the Death Penalty: Two Cheers for the Supreme Court

On June 25, 2008 the United States Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, denied the applicability of the death penalty in cases of child rape. Both Barack Obama and John McCain publicly disagreed with the decision, but I wholeheartedly agree with the Court in this instance.

Besides generally opposing capital punishment I support the Court majority because of its practical concerns about child witness’ veracity, the likelihood that if the perpetrator was the parent a child might be more reluctant to report rape, and the increased likelihood that a perpetrator would kill the only witness to the crime. The Court also reflects my view that the death penalty, if ever justified, should be reserved for people who literally take a life. But to advocates of the death penalty for child rapists this is essentially what has been done to the victims, even if they have not physically died, because they believe child rape victims cannot ever be made psychologically whole. Since the Court chose not to  to assess this contention the door unfortunately has been left open to political agitation to reverse the decision. It is this matter that concerns me.

Before addressing the evidence pertaining to long-term effects of child rape on its victims it is important to be aware of the dangers of emotional reasoning. When considering adult sexual contact with children, including forcible rape, the understandable and valid disgust that people have becomes evidence, in itself, for the belief that such an event must cause long-term or even permanent damage to the victim. But feelings are not facts and it is possible for something to be reprehensible and not typically cause such enduring effects.

The social science and psychological literature on the effects of sexual assault on children is based on two kinds of studies: clinical and non-clinical research. Clinical studies involve patients who have either chosen to see a therapist or been referred to one because of real or suspected psychological problems.

One of the severe disadvantages of clinical research is that the clinician only sees a patient when a harm has already occurred or is believed to have occurred. There is no way for the clinician to know with any certainty in most cases whether presenting symptoms, e.g., depression, sleeping disorders, anxiety, poor relationships with others, or sexual dysfunction, are necessarily caused by any particular life event. The same symptom can, in fact, have a variety of sources. The retrospective vantage point of the clinician---trying to construct a narrative to understand the patient from their past life---lends itself to the facile embrace of long-held but often unexamined just-so stories.

Since Freud Westerners widely accept the  belief that childhood social experiences trump all others in determining our psychological and social functioning as adults, but the evidence for this is scant. In fact, experiences at any age can make or break us and children may be more resilient in handling trauma than adults. We are now far more sensitive to the reality of child sexual abuse than was the case in 1940, but that doesn't mean that our attempt to use abuse as an explanation for adult unhappiness is more valid simply because our culture endorses that perspective. The role of biology, pre-existing personality traits, parents, peer groups, previous trauma and the larger culture mediate our responses to what happens to us.

Clinicians also are deficient as theorists because they don't see patients that experienced sexual abuse or rape who do not have psychological symptoms, only those that do or are believed to. The asymptomatic have no need or generally any desire to see a therapist because they were sexually victimized as children any more than the non-alcoholic children of alcoholics do. The self-selection bias of patients means therapists can easily be fooled into thinking there is a 1:1 ratio between sexual victimization and long-term or permanent effects.

Given these problems it's not surprising that clinical studies reveal a strong relationship between childhood victimization and adult disorders. But, even so, a rare prospective clinical study in which children believed to be sexually abused were followed through 18 months of therapy, found that 25% had no symptoms at the time of referral and only 25% continued to have them at the end of the period of the study. The argument that symptoms could show up years later is more of an act of faith than one based on concrete evidence, because if that did happen it would not be possible to attribute it  to the childhood trauma without ruling out many other factors.

Because clinical research is so flawed studies using random samples of the general population are far more valuable in assessing the psychological impact of trauma. Such studies have, through depth interviews, compared the adult functioning of persons who had sex of any kind in childhood with those who did not. In the landmark work, The Social Organization of Human Sexuality (1994), Ed Laumann et al. examined sexual histories of 3300 Americans between the ages of 18-59 and found no significant difference in the psychological and sexual adjustment between those who had any sex with adults when they were under age 14. When "forced" sex was considered by itself, no relationship was found between having such an experience and subsequent functioning in adulthood. Moreover, various measures of severity in forced sex didn't affect outcomes. Unfortunately, the data did not indicate the differential effects of forced sex by age and so it is possible younger victims were more affected in later life than older ones. But, young children do not necessarily take longer than adults to recover from trauma and in cases where being traumatized is heavily dependent on cultural factors, i.e. understanding what is considered normal behavior, very young children might be less likely than older ones and even adults to be symptomatic.

In addition to the Laumann et al. research three pychologists, Rind, Bauserman and Tromovich reviewed 59 studies and also found little evidence that child sexual abuse caused long-term psychological damage. Their work appeared in 1998 in Psychological Bulletin, a prestigious academic journal. It was promptly denounced by right-wing pundits who falsely accused the authors of  defending child sexual abuse, even though this was explicitly denied by the researchers. Malcolm Gladwell, the  noted science writer, cited this work in "Getting Over it," The New Yorker (November 8, 2004), in the context of making the argument that we live in an era when people are believed, without compelling evidence, to be extraordinarily fragile in the face of adversity.

Some researchers who have studied child victims of sexual abuse believe dealing with the justice system (i.e., being witnesses, including all the preparation) can be more traumatic in the long-term than the sexual abuse. This view was supported by my experience as a grand juror many years ago in a case where three 8 year olds were trading oral sex for access to a video game run by a local businessman. The first victim got her friends in on what they believed to be a great opportunity. Only when a neighbor's suspicions led to an arrest did the girls truly understand what was going on in the eyes of the larger society. By the time they testified before us three years later they could barely make eye contact. We had no difficulty indicting the perpetrator, but wondered whether the girls would have been better off had the arrangement not been discovered, they came to realize they were being exploited, ceased cooperating, and freely chose  to call the police.

Most people don't look at clinical, let alone non-clinical research in making judgments about the effects of sexual victimization of children. They rely on magazine articles and television shows which utilize anecdotal evidence. Or they draw upon personal experiences or  those of  people they know. But such evidence is almost completely worthless if one wishes to draw general conclusions since it's possible to come up with cases to prove any point. A friend of mine's son went to jail for some teenage alcohol-induced brawl. Prior to incarceration for six months he never took school seriously and was constantly abusing drugs and alcohol. Incarceration totally changed him in a positive way, and so his mother believes it was a great thing that saved her  son. But she wouldn't argue this would be the case for everyone. If her son appeared on Oprah, however, her vast audience would view things differently unless there  were also guests who had the opposite experience.

I believe it is unfortunate when people don't appreciate the resilience of our species and assume that we are so fragile that terrible experiences will destroy our lives forever.  But human beings cope with mortality, loss of loved ones, natural disasters, and war and keep on ticking. One doesn't have to deny victim's suffering to believe that they can and generally do move on. One of the unfortunate consequences of the "recovery" movement is that victims often stay locked into their status as victims because they are encouraged by well-meaning people to do so.

To return to the Supreme Court ruling, I feel that there is a difference between killing someone and doing terrible things to them but leaving them alive. Because with life there are possibilities that a homicide victim does not have. The Court did the right thing even if their reasoning never challenged the notion that child rape inevitably ruins victims forever.

Comments

[Mosh]

A thoughtful take on what is a highly charged issue for just about everyone.
Since people are apt to draw overly broad conclusions from what amounts to flimsy, anecdotal 'evidence, I wonder what your take is on the current negative campaigning, especially these mindless but nasty attack ads recently run by the McCain campaign. It would be interesting to hear from a sociologist who is a long time student/observer/teacher of American politics. And an old (well not too old) 60s activist.

[zach]

Dont talk about what you dont know about. Until you have lived what they have to live through, keep your simple minded opinons to yourself.

[Mankoff]

If people only talked about what they knew about from their own personal experience we would have very little knowledge of the world. History, for example, could never be written.

What I tried to do is look at what social science tells us about the typical experiences of a large number of people.

The person who wrote the previous comment might have a different perspective and a reason for it, but what is the value in such a response when it provides no information.