Medicine: Crime in California

When two particularly gruesome sex murders occurred in California in 1949 and 1950, there rose a statewide outcry that all sex offenders should be locked up for life, sterilized or even executed. California decided to go slow on new legislation and find out some facts, e.g.: How common are sex crimes? Who commits them? And why? Last week, after three years of study, a team of researchers at the University of California's Langley Porter Clinic, headed by famed Psychiatrist Karl M. Bowman, turned up some of the answers.

Nobody can estimate how many sex "crimes" are actually committed, the researchers concluded, because most sexual acts which violate California's penal code are done in private by "mutually consenting" adults. Even when the crime is clearer, as in cases involving children, it is often hushed up. But in recorded court cases, the investigators could find no evidence of a great wave of sex crime, or that "sex fiends" were everywhere on the prowl. Serious sex offenses made up one-tenth of all the criminal cases tried in the superior courts. The fact finders considered the commoner misdemeanors (such as exhibitionism and peeping) as "socially offensive but nondangerous."

No Deterrent. It would do no good to enact still harsher punitive laws, the re—searchers suggested, because the people who are going to commit sex crimes are so emotionally disturbed that they do not count the possible cost. Unhappily, there is no sure way to spot them before they go wrong. But the courts are making more use of the state's "sex-psychopath law," which provides psychiatric treatment for convicted offenders. And (except for homosexuals) they rarely repeat their offenses after they get out on parole.

Some significant facts turned up in the investigation:

¶Although 31% of California's sex felonies were listed as rape cases, many were the statutory, nonviolent kind, involving teen-age girls who had already become promiscuous or actual prostitutes.

¶In rape cases, the offender is most likely to be a young married man (45% were still living with their wives, 19% were separated, divorced or widowed).

¶Juvenile sex offenses are usually minor, with one notable exception: a few teenage youths use force, liquor or gang methods to subdue their victims.

No Love at Home. Surprisingly, too, Dr. Bowman's fact finders reported that even in cases where small children are molested they are often willing victims and repeat the experience. This rarely happens with a child who is happy at home; the child will probably run to mother and tell her all about it. The upset can be treated, and the incident need do no permanent harm. But such cases made up only one-third of the total. Nancy's case was more typical. From the age of four, Nancy was repeatedly molested by a middle-aged man. Her mother had been in & out of mental hospitals ever since Nancy's birth. When at home, she often forgot to feed Nancy, accused the child of causing her own mental ills, and beat her. When the mother died, Nancy (then eight) felt herself to blame. She kept on having trysts with the man until she was eleven, when he went to court and she went to the Langley Porter psychiatrists.