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Sex Crime Outbreak Points Up Need Of Protective Law/sBy HOWARD BDAKESLEE Associated Press Science EditorNew York—JP—The current outbreak of child sex murders points up America's forgotten crime problem—protection of children.This Is the consensus of a groui of police, medical and legal experts queried by the Associated Press The murders are not unusual, they say, but are incidents in thousands of attacks which go on against children yearly.They think the attacks will continue until the public wakes up to the real cause of the occasional child sex murder.They think the problem can be attacked. But to do so will require new types of laws, new kinds oi social work training, and new types of medical confinement in custodial hospitals.Comments come from New York’s famous Judge Samuel S. Leibowitz,Kings County (Brooklyn) Court;Alfred Kinsey, who wrote the scientific book Sexual Behavior In The Human. Male; J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI; Charles P. Taft,Cincinnati lawyer, brother of. the Senator, and humanitarian student and churchman; Dr. Charles C.Burlingame, Hartford, Conn., one of the leaders of American psychiatry, and from scientists in police work who did not want their names used-There are no statistics on the crimes against children. The only figures are on rape of all kinds, which the FBI finds increased 1.3 per cent in the first half of this year, compared to the same period last year.«These are only the “rapes known to the police.” They are up 50 per cent in 10 years.Child sex crimes follow regular patterns. One is attacks by elderly men. Often this is only Bexual petting. The reasons are senility, reversion to childish curiosity, and lack of other outlets. If the child cries out, the man is apt to feel that killing her is the only way to protect his reputation.A second pattern ia attacks by young men. The experts say these probably are fewer. They are made by types of men whose actions can often be predicted.A third is attacks within a family, where everything is likely to be hushed up. This number is unknown, but some experts say it may be very large. It fosters Freudian sexual warping of child character, and develops potential child murders.A fourth is crimes stimulated by publicity of a horrible sex murder.These are few, and due to excitement overcoming men just on the verge of sex offenses. No objection is made to the publicity itself, but to the failure to use it for constructive ends.Judge Leibowitz, formerly a prominent criminal attorney, talked in his chambers the day after he tried three unpublicized sex crimes.The Judge said he believed one of the attacks would almost surely have gone to murder had not the victim’s outcries brought the police.This,” he said, “is not new. The murders this month are a rash.They are one-day wonders, then the interest dies and goes back to the old routine.“A lot can be done if people realize that this isn’t a one-day horror.There are thousands of these cases.“When, a rape degenerate appears before me, I can only send him to an institution. What kind? Prison!Where he receives no psychiatric treatment whatever, and he comes out a thousand times worse than he went in.“They need special institutions— call them custodial hospitals, where they can be cared for, not for a fixed length of time, but until they are cured.”Dr. Kinsey said: “We question the validity of any statement that sex crimes have increased, We doubt the existence of any data to warrant such*a statement. Three or four sex crimes against children do not constitute a crime wave. As in racial and nationalistic hysteria, present public concern over sex crimes is a product of emphasis on particular cases, without consideration of the statistical incidence in the total population.In his famous book Dr. Kinsey studied 1,200 sex offenders who had been sent to prison. He said the confinement failed to reform them,J. Edgar Hoover said:“The sex offender must be dealt with before, not after, his perverted urges explode into horrible orime.Almost invariably he gives forewarning of his propensities and should be placed under observation at that time.”
Newspaper Details
Kingsport News
Kingsport, Tennessee, US
Mon, Nov 28, 1949
Page 8
Full Page
Clipped by
University O.
AR, USA 08 Sep 2023
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