In the final edition of a three-part series on child rape, the Cape Times looks at the psychology of those who rape children and the potential for the rehabilitation of sex offenders. Three health centres in the province have raised the alarm about the vulnerability of children, with the rapes of at least two minors a day in the past three months. Rebecca Jackman shares the findings of therapist Arina Smit and social worker Amelia Kleijn.
Cape Town - Rape is about power and control, but it is important to understand there are different categories of rapists.
That’s according to Arina Smit, the clinical unit manager of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders (Nicro)
She said rapists could be classified according to their motives and there had yet to be a clear understanding of the different types of offenders.
“The first thing of rehabilitation is to understand the type of person, the type of behaviour and what drives them.”
And when looking at child rapists, she said, they first had to exclude “anything potentially related to paedophilia”.
She explained that paedophilia meant that a person was sexually attracted to a child, which could be managed but not treated.
Smit said it was necessary to understand the individual “clearly” and while some might be paedophiles, some might be adults who were themselves raped as children.
With regard to those traumatised as children, Smit said she didn’t want to directly relate trauma as a child to negative behaviour in adulthood.
“But we cannot deny that some of these people have definitely been traumatised themselves,” she added.
To understand and to rehabilitate, she said, they had to look at the cycle of the sexual offence – involving fantasies that evolved into the offence that translated into anxiety and guilt.
“Often sex is used as a way to get rid of anxiety,” Smit explained, adding that the rapist might commit another offence to overcome the anxiety of the last.
When looking at rehabilitation for an adult sex offender, she said: “The more times they’ve gone through the cycle of offending, the more imprinted it becomes.
“The earlier you pick it up, the biggest chance there is to really work on rehabilitation,” she said, adding that there was a higher chance of success with juveniles than with adults.
When it concerned the rape of a child, she said, it was “often to do with people who are not properly educated” and “mostly under the influence of alcohol or drugs”. Substance abuse which led to aggressive behaviour was “almost consistent” and the attack was “not about the child as a sexual being”, but other dynamics.
And that often involved children who were easy to manipulate, could be easily threatened and would keep secrets because they were scared.
Social worker Amelia Kleijn has done extensive research into the psychosocial histories of rapists, interviewing 10 prisoners over three years - all of whom had raped children under the age of 3 years.
“One of the reasons I undertook my doctoral study was to explore if the motivation for baby rape was the HIV-cleansing myth. I found no evidence of this whatsoever in my study.
“A person who rapes a very small child is incredibly damaged,” she said, adding that the person responsible could be the product of a “very damaged childhood”.
“Child rape has nothing to do with sex, in the same way the rape of an elderly woman has nothing to do with sex.”
She said it was about revenge, anger and power which could stem from being physically abused as a child.
“When you beat a child, you beat the empathy out of them,” Kleijn said.
She said she found in her study that the rapes were not because the men found the children sexually alluring.
“People often confuse rape as being an act of sex and when you’re talking about child rape it isn’t,” she explained.
She said that to be able to sexually abuse a child, the rapist often had an “antisocial personality disorder”, meaning that they lacked remorse or empathy. And the men she interviewed all showed the features of this disorder – “the products of very violent childhoods and a very violent society”.
“These men were also once sweet little babies and dear little toddlers, but from day one they entered the world, there were problems,” said Kleijn.
Cape Times