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Dit artikel beschrijft een 'sex crime panic' in de dertiger jaren in de VS.

Het is niet zo'n geweldig artikel, vooral ook omdat het slecht is opgebouwd, veel zaken komen wel vier keer terug in een andere samenhang. Van de andere kant bevat het toch ook interessante historische inzichten in hoe er met seksuele criminaliteit werd omgegaan.

Interessant is bijvoorbeeld de verschuiving van de behandeling van die misdaden van het juridische circuit naar het medische / psychiatrische circuit. Een gevangenisstraf had een duidelijke einde, een opname in een psychiatriche kliniek vaak niet. Het was een akelige ontwikkeling. Alsof psychiaters weten wat 'normaal' is ... Als er één beroepsgroep is waarvan gebleken is dat ze totaal geen besef hebben van hun eigen normatieve uitgangspunten dan is het wel de medische / psychiatrische inclusief de therapeutische.

Ik geloof niet zo in die ambivalentie bij die beroepsgroep die de auteur steeds noemt. De beroepsgroep van psychiaters genoot van de positie die ze verworven had en was / is dus verantwoordelijk voor een hoop leed dat aan mensen berokkend werd op basis van ondoordachte normen en waarden. Pas in de zestiger jaren begonnen sommigen een begrip als 'psychopaat' en de hele diagnostiek eromheen in twijfel te trekken.

Estelle B. FREEDMAN
"Uncontrolled Desires - The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960"
in: The Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jun., 1987), pp. 83-106

Over de groei van een 'sex crime panic' in de dertiger jaren in de VS.

"The sex crime panic soon extended beyond the media and into the realm of politics and law. Between 1935 and 1965, city, state, and federal officials established commissions to investigate sexual crime, passed statutes to transfer authority over sex offenders from courts to psychiatrists, and funded specialized institutions for the treatment of sex offenders. As a result, in most states, a man accused of rape, sodomy, childmolestation, indecent exposure, or corrupting the morals of a minor - if diagnosed as a "sexual psychopath" - could receive an indeterminate sentence to a psychiatric, rather than a penal, institution." [mijn nadruk] (83-84)

"A close look at the sex crime panics that began in the mid-1930s, declined during World War II, and revived in the postwar decade reveals that those episodes were not necessarily related to any increase in the actual incidence of violent, sexually related crimes. Although arrest rates for sexual offenses in general rose throughout the period, the vast majority of arrests were for minor offenses, rather than for the violent acts portrayed in the media."(84)

[Maar dat is dus typisch voor een 'moral panic'. ]

"Most psychiatrists remained skeptical about psychopath laws. Rather, the media, law enforcement agencies, and private citizens' groups took the lead in demanding state action to prevent sex crimes. In the process, they not only augmented the authority of psychiatrists, but also provoked a redefinition of normal sexual behavior." [mijn nadruk] (84)

[Later beschrijft de auteur ook psychiaters die protesteerden. Maar uiteindelijk zeiden ze geen 'nee' tegen die ontwikkelingen en lieten ze zich gewoon inschakelen in het beoordelingsproces van 'sex offenders'.]

"The response to the sexual psychopath, however, was not merely expansion of social control over sexuality by psychiatry and the state. Rather, by stigmatizing extreme acts of violence, the discourse on the psychopath ultimately helped legitimize nonviolent, but nonprocreative, sexual acts, within marriage or outside it. At the same time, psychiatric and political attention to the psychopath heightened public awareness of sexuality in general, and of sexual abnormality in particular, between 1935 and 1960.
Thus the response to the sexual psychopath must be understood in the context of the history of sexuality, for it evidenced a significant departure from the nineteenth-century emphasis on maintaining female purity and a movement toward a modern concern about controlling male violence." [mijn nadruk] (85)

[Ja, zo zie je maar weer. Elke handeling / ingreep / maatregel kan onverwachte gevolgen hebben. En wat die laatste alinea betreft: vroeger was seksueel geweld dus de schuld van vrouwen die zich niet 'zuiver' gedroegen en later werd het de schuld van de mannen die niet in staat waren hun lust onder controle te houden? ]

"When it first appeared in Europe in the late nineteenth century, the diagnosis of psychopathy did not refer exclusively either to sexual abnormality or to men. (...) In 1905, Adolf Meyer introduced the concept of the psychopath into the United States, where sexual crime remained synonymous with female immorality. (...) Until the 1920s American psychiatrists who diagnosed mental patients as psychopaths typically applied the term to either unemployed men or "hypersexual" women."(87-88)

"The sexualization of the male psychopath occurred during the 1930s, when American criminologists became increasingly interested in sexual abnormality and male sexual crime. The disruption of traditional family life during the depression, when record numbers of men lost their status as breadwinners, triggered concerns about masculinity."(89)

[Waaraan je ziet hoe normatief die oordelen zijn: een man is pas een echte man als hij het geld inbrengt. Dat een vrouw ook zou kunnen gaan werken en de man voor kinden en huishouden zou kunnen zorgen kwam niet eens bij die criminologen en psychologen en psychiaters op.]

"In this social context, Americans embarked on the serious study of human sexuality, measuring normality and defining deviance. During the twenties and thirties, classic texts by European sexologists, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld, became more widely available. A growing number of American researchers, including Katharine Bement Davis and Robert Latou Dickinson, conducted survey and case studies of sexual practices."(90)

Daarnaast was er in die jaren de invloed van Freud, vooral toen immigranten / vluchtelingen uit Europa de VS binnenstroomden.

[Nou, dan weet je wel wat er met die psychiatrie gebeurde: de ene vage interpretatie van seksueel afwijkend gedrag na de andere.]

"Thus, an older, hereditarian tradition merged with new psychiatric concepts to produce a crude model of the psychopath as oversexed, uninhibited, and compulsive. It was this image that found its way into the popular press and ultimately into the law."(91)

En zo ontstond de paniekzaaierij.

"Each of the two major sexcrime panics - roughly from 1937 to 1940 and from 1949 to 1955 - originated when, after a series of brutal and apparently sexually motivated child murders, major urban newspapers expanded and, in some cases, sensationalized their coverage of child molestation and rape."(92)

"Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover played an important role in fueling the national hysteria and channeling it into support for stronger law enforcement. In 1937 Hoover called for a "War on the Sex Criminal" and charged that "the sex fiend, most loathsome of all the vast army of crime, has become a sinister threat to the safety of American childhood and womanhood."(94)

"Although the psychopath laws were avowedly enacted to protect women and children, they were the product of men's political efforts, not women's. Several women's clubs publicly favored stronger criminal penalties for sexcrimes, and male politicians frequently called on representatives of conservative women's organizations to testify in favor of psychopath legislation. However, in contrast to earlier movements for moral reform and social purity, in which organizations such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union had played a major part, the campaign for sexual psychopath laws had little female, and no feminist, leadership." [mijn nadruk] (96)

"The postwar years, however, provided a climate conducive to there emergence of the male sexual psychopath as a target of social concern. The war had greatly increased the authority of psychiatrists, who had been drafted to screen recruits and to diagnose military offenders."(96)

[Ja, daar lieten ze zich ook al voor inschakelen.]

". In addition, demobilization and reconversion to a peacetime economy stimulated concerted efforts to re establistraditional family life. Returning male veterans needed jobs that had been held by women, who were now encouraged to marry, bear children, and purchase domestic products. Moreover, the onset of the Cold War, with its emphasis on cultural conformity, intensified efforts to control deviant behavior. Nonconformity - whether political, social, or sexual - became associated with threats to national security. And, amid the pressures for social and sexual stability, Alfred Kinsey published his study of male sexual behavior, igniting unprecedented public debate about normal and abnormal sexuality."(96-97)

". Revised laws and new facilities in the 1950s increased commitments [naar psychiatrische instellingen] in several states; Michigan and Maryland, for example, each averaged one hundred per year. Few of those committed, however, were the homicidal sex maniacs on whom the sex crime panic had originally focused. They tended to be white men, often professionals or skilled workers, who were overrepresented among those convicted of sexual relations with children and minor sexual offenses. Black men, who continued to be overrepresented among those convicted of rape, were more likely to be imprisoned or executed than to be treated in mental institutions. In short, white men who committed sexual crimes had to be mentally ill; black men who committed sexual crimes were believed to be guilty of willful violence.
The sexual psychopath laws did not necessarily name specific criminal acts, nor did they differentiate between violent and nonviolent, or consensual and nonconsensual, behaviors. Rather, they targeted a kind of personality, or an identity, that could be discovered only by trained psychiatrists. Whether convicted of exhibitionism, sodomy, child molestation, or rape, sexual psychopaths could be transferred to state mental hospitals or psychiatric wards of prisons for an indefinite period, until the institutional psychiatrists declared them cured." [mijn nadruk] (97-98)

"Whatever ambivalence psychiatrists may have had about incorporating the psychopathic diagnosis into law, the postwar response to sexual crimes helped to solidify psychiatric authority within the criminal justice system in two important ways."(99)

Ze mochten meer onderzoek doen en er ontstonden specialistische instellingen.

"Once institutionalized, the psychopath received treatments according with the therapeutic trends of the era: Metrazol, insulin shock or electro-shock; hormonal injections; sterilization; group therapy; and, in some cases, frontal lobotomy. According to the clinical literature, none of these proved effective in reducing "uncontrolled desires."" [mijn nadruk] (99)