The case against accused child molester Jerry Sandusky includes testimony about eight victims, and the New York Times is reporting that ten more have stepped forward since the case became public. These allegations present a pattern of abuse that extends over more than a decade, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has said he expects more victims to come forward. The allegations against Sandusky seem to validate a common stereotype of child molesters as serial criminals who prey on other peoples’ children. According to a commonly cited statistic, men who molest boys have an average of 150 victims each.
But is that really true? Should we expect that the Penn State case involves another 130 victims, regardless of whether they come forward?
In search of answers to these questions, I spoke with forensic psychologist Michael Seto at the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group and Leilah Gilligan, senior manager at the Center for Sex Offender Management. I learned that statistics about child molesters are riddled with caveats, and experts caution that statistical averages can paint a misleading picture about individual cases. It turns out that the jaw-dropping “150 victims” statistic comes from a detailed survey of 561 paraphiliacs conducted by psychiatrist Gene Abel and some colleagues in 1987. Nearly 200 of these participants said that they’d molested boys.
Molesters in this survey who molested boys outside of their families reported an average of 150 victims. That’s a staggering number, but even more astounding is what’s implied by another statistic the researchers reported — the median number of victims. By definition, half of the values lie above the median, and half are below it. In this study, the median number of victims for men who molested boys (non-incest) was 4.4. That means that half of the molesters victimized 5 or more boys and half molested four or fewer.
Abel’s paper does not report the individual numbers and he declined my request for an interview. But this distribution of the numbers implies a huge range of victim counts. For the average number of victims to work out to 150, a small subset of molesters must have reported molesting an astronomical number of boys. If we trust these numbers (more on that in a minute), they mean that some people who molest boys have hundreds of victims. Others victimize only a few. People who study molesters say there’s no one-size-fits-all profile of a molester, with one exception —nearly all of them victimize children they know.
The absolute number of victims, not how many there are per perpetrator, is what matters when it comes to assessing the harm to society. But it’s clear that not every molester is a serial offender. The ones most likely to have an enormous number of victims are those who molest boys outside of their family. (Molesters in Abel’s survey who targeted girls unrelated to them reported an average of 19.8 victims and the median number of victims for these crimes was 1.3.)
Abel’s study provides the most extreme ratios of molesters to victims. No other surveys have replicated these staggering numbers, but all of these studies are suspect, because they include only molesters who have been caught (and admitted to their crimes) and depend on offenders to truthfully report what they’ve done. The Abel study was unique because researchers were able to offer participants immunity from prosecution for crimes they reported in the survey, though other studies have offered offenders anonymity. Given the legal consequences, though, molesters have little incentive to provide full disclosure.
The evidence presented thus far suggests that Sandusky falls into the most extreme pattern — the worst of the worst — but we’ll have to wait for all the case details to come out before we’ll know for sure.
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Silence pictogram by Matthias M.