PREDATORS: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders
Who They Are, How They Operate,
and How We Can Protect
Ourselves and Our Children
By Anna C. Salter, Ph.D, first published in 2003
A world-renowned expert provides a psychological profile of serial sex offendersâhow they think, how they deceive their victims, and how they elude the law.
Chapter 2: Deception (pp. 25-29)
Recently I interviewed a psychopath. This is always a humbling experience because it teaches me over and over how much of human motivation and experience is outside my narrow range. Despite the psychopathâs lack of conscience and lack of empathy for others, he is inevitably better at fooling people than any other type of offender. I suppose a conscience just slows people down. A convicted child molester, this particular one made friends with a correctional officer who invited him to live in his home after he was released â invited him despite the fact that the officer had a nine-year-old daughter.
The officer and his wife were so taken with the offender that, after the offender lived with them for a few months, they initiated adoption proceedings â adoption for a man almost their age. Of course, he was a child molester living in the same house as a child. Not surprisingly, he molested the daughter the entire time he lived there. Later, when this was disclosed and the offender was reincarcerated, the guard and his wife continued to try to visit him in prison. They wanted to understand how he could do this. They wanted to see him. They were still attached to him. Even the offender was astonished by their behavior. He told his psychologist, âI feel like saying, âWhat the fuck is wrong with you, lady, I molested your fucking daughter.’â
The saddest part of this story is that if this offender wasnât tired of toying with the guard and his wife, he could easily do it again. All he would have to do is cry and feign regret, and in all likelihood the guard and his wife would shortly be advocating for the inmateâs release with the parole board.
What these experiences have taught me is that even when people are warned by a previously founded case or even a conviction, they will routinely underestimate the pathology with which they are dealing. Niceness and likability will override a track record of child molestation any day of the week.
Likability is such a potent weapon that it protects predators for long periods of time and through almost incomprehensible numbers of victims. Mr. Saylor, an athletic director in an elementary school, operated undisturbed for almost twenty years. He tells me there is almost no limit to the number of molestations that one can get away with.
I created my first victim when I was thirteen, a female victim. . . . Sally was six and I was thirteen, and I raped and molested Sally by forcing my hands and fingers on her vulva and in her vagina and forcing objects into her vagina. Sally is my only female victim, my one female victim. I created my first male victim when I was fifteen, and I have been victimizing male children virtually nonstop until my incarceration.
Q: How old are you now?
A. Iâm thirty-three now, and I have been incarcerated for three years.
Q. How many total victims did you have?
A. I have eleven male rape victims, one female rape victim, and I have approximately 1,250 male molest victims, and I say approximately because I really donât know.
I am stunned by this number and fumble around for a few minutes. Finally I find my voice.
Q. How many kids were you molesting a week to have a rate like that?
A. There were times when I went a whole week, two weeks, three weeks without ever molesting anybody. And there were other times that I molested daily. Two and three times a day. On average I would say I molested five children a week over that twenty year period.
Q. And you mean five different kids?
A. Yes.
There were several outcries by children over the years, but it was not easy for parents to accept that a man with Mr. Saylorâs impeccable credentials and otherwise responsible behavior might be molesting children.
One childâs family, by no means atypical, simply said to their son, âJohn loves you. John wouldnât do anything to hurt you. There must be some mistake.â Mr. Saylor told me the child made no mistake at all. It took almost twenty years and well over a thousand child victims before a single allegation stuck.
Such a long period of molesting without consequences changed Mr. Saylor.
After so many years of raping and molesting, I finally reached a point to where it was like I felt invincible. The children love me. They care about me. Theyâre not going to tell regardless of what I do. And my thinking was also, even if they do tell, based on past conditions which parents did not believe the children, my thinking was theyâre not going to believe the child anyway, and I got very bold with my molest. . . .
There is no . . . Let me rephrase that. There were no boundaries for me. No place was off limits. No time was off limits. And no set of circumstances was off limits. At any time that I saw an opportunity to get what I wanted, which was to rape or molest, I took advantage of it.
There were other times that I molested and raped while at work. Or I simply manipulated the child into coming into my office, and I just simply locked the door and proceeded to do what I wanted to do, which was to rape the child.
My nephew, I raped him for a period of nine years. Raped and molested him for a period of nine years. And very few cases did I rape him in which no one was in the house.
I sit silent for a moment, thinking. How many mothers over the years have I heard testify that he couldnât have molested their child? They were always present.
Did they ever sleep? I would ask. They would always look at me incredulously. How could anyone get up in the night and molest a child without the other parent knowing? After all, they always assure me, they are very light sleepers. But I have had victims and offenders both tell me of offenders who molested children while the wife was sleeping in the same bed. That Mr. Saylor would molest a child in an office adjacent to a gym full of people does not surprise me. I have seen an interview with an offender who talked about leaving the door open and molesting a child with his wife in the next room. The possibility of getting caught just added to the thrill.
But still, Mr. Salyor does manage to surprise me, for he has done something I have never seen before.
There were times that I raped in a car with the parents in the front seat, me in the backseat with the children. The child would feel such a bond of trust that the child would decide okay, Iâd like to go to sleep, and Iâd manipulate the child and lay him across the seat and molest the child with my hand on his penis. By forcing my hands on his penis while the parents were in the front seat.
Why would a child not tell? Because, for reasons we do not clearly understand, children freeze when confronted with something they cannot make sense of. A child in the back seat with an adultâs hand on his penis is not going to know how to understand or explain that. He will think that an adult whom he loves and respects canât be doing anything wrong. Besides, this is an adult his parents respect. He will likely wonder if his parents even know and approve. After all, theyâre in the front seat. Or heâll be embarrassed and wonder if he will be blamed.
Regardless of the reason, the fact seems undeniable. It is only a minority of children who disclose abuse at the time.2 No study I can find on this topic has ever found otherwise.
If children can be silenced and the average person is easy to fool, many offenders report that religious people are even easier to fool than most people. One molester, who was himself a minister, said:
I considered church people easy to fool . . . they have a trust that comes from being Christians. . . .They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people. . . . I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.
In interviewing victims in the growing number of cases involving priests, I have been surprised â although I should not have been â by how deeply religious many of the victimsâ families who were thrilled to have a priest take an interest in their children, who wanted their children to be altar boys, who could not believe that a priest would do anything wrong.
The growing crisis in the Catholic Church just underlines the fact that offenders can recognize ideal settings for child molesters even if the rest of us canât. In truth, a deeply religious and trusting group of people, plus the requirement of celibacy (an ideal cover for any man who has no sexual interest in adults), plus a hierarchy that doesnât report complaints to the police and simply moves the offender on to new and fresh territory with new potential victims, is the ideal setting for pedophiles. Even without such extreme conditions, however, interviews with offenders had convinced me that people in general are just plain easy to fool. What makes fooling us so easy is not the worst in us, it is often the best. As one rapist said,
Because people want to believe in something. They want to hope. And they want to believe. They want to, thereâs something inside of people that makes them want to believe the best in things and the best in others. Because the alternative is not very nice.
True enough. The alternative is not very nice.
From Chapter 9: Rose-Colored Glasses and Trauma (pp. 157-160)
A neighbor sits in my kitchen. âI choose to believe there is good in everyone,â she tells me, âbecause of the unintended consequences to my life if I do not. I feel an openness to others that wouldnât be there if I didnât believe that thereâs good in everybody.â
I like this woman a great deal, and I worry for her. What she is saying sounds naive to me, and worse, dangerous. But this woman is neither naive nor foolish. She is, in fact, one of these people of whom the world needs more. She goes to medical school half-time so that she can be more present for her family. She is an outstanding parent, a gentle and responsible person, an altogether constructive force in the world. She does not think salvation lies in a bigger VCR or a new DVD. As a result, her children have grown up without the mall-hunger that eats into the souls of so many. Instead, they are responsible and self-assured. Each spring her family goes to Haiti so she and her husband can volunteer in the health clinics. She wants her children to see the larger world and all that must be done before everyone has a roof over his or her head.
What do I say to this woman? Nothing I can say will change her outlook and, actually, itâs working pretty well. If her beliefs allow her to function this well, shouldnât I be saying, as the woman did in the When Harry Met Sally restaurant scene, âIâll have what sheâs having?â Iâm silent for a moment, thinking that anything I say will make me sound like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
Finally, I decide I respect this woman too much to be evasive. Shutting up means closing up, and I would like to expand my dialogue with her, not strangle it by not being present. And then again, it is also true she peels back the skin on cadavers and dissects the muscles. As if anything I could say would shake her.
So I answer honestly, the backlog of interviews with rapists, child molesters, sadists, and psychopaths jangling like discordant bells in my head. âYouâd be lunch,â I say, âin a prison environment. The psychopaths would see you coming. And they would very quickly figure out what you want to see and give it to you. Before you know it, theyâd be talking about spiritual values and poverty around the world.â The problem is, of course â and we both know it â the types of people who exist in prison also exist outside of prison. People run into psychopaths every day, and I am thinking that sooner or later, she may also.
âTo me,â I say, âyou sound like a minnow arguing there arenât any bass in the world. You believe what you want to be true. What youâre really doing is projecting who you are out there. But there are people out there who are very different from you.
âNot to mention itâs a moot point,â I go on, âas to whether there is good deep down in everybody because there are some folks where you and I are never going to find it.â
She laughs. The fading sun lays ribbons of light across the blue table top in my kitchen. Vapor rises from her tea. What Iâm saying sounds surreal here, belied by the murmur of childrenâs voices in the play room, the sound of jazz, the smell of wood burning in the fire place. In this easy moment, the joy that is never far from the surface of her face lies open and exposed. The wariness that is never far from the surface of mine is banked. I think the world Iâve built in this small, comfortable home is a bubble that I will protect with tooth and claw. She feels the world she has created in her own loving home is a mirror of the larger world. She would reason with an intruder. I would shoot him.
Do we live in the same world? Yes and no. What world each of us lives in has as much to do with our beliefs as it does with the facts in front of us. The facts are always swept up in theory, in our beliefs about the meaning of what we see. My neighbor and I both see assault and suffering in the world. We just donât draw the same conclusions from it. I will argue here that oneâs worldview is a complex and paradoxical issue. The most optimistic viewpoints on the world can be shown to make us healthier and happier, but also can â unchecked â make us vulnerable to predators as well. But how and where and when to scan those around us for predators as opposed to looking for the good in everyone are not easy questions to answer.
People want to make the world have meaning, but the randomness of trauma defies meaning. Malevolence defeats it. When Bad Things Happen to Good People is a book that tries to make sense of the fact that dreadful things happen for no good reason. It was a best-seller when it was published twenty years ago, and it is still in print today. Why is this book so successful? Because it tries to make sense of something that most people find senseless and unnerving, the randomness of trauma.
It is a curious phenomenon, this need to find meaning, even justice and purpose, in the random events that afflict humankind. After all, logic would question the notion that there is any meaning to be found. Why shouldnât bad things happen to good people? What reason is there to think that smallpox or brain tumors select on the basis of virtue or vice?
What the success of When Bad Things Happen and countless other books on the same topic demonstrate is that the meaning that seems most comforting to people has a distinct rose-colored look to it. I would argue â and the research would concur â that almost everyone lives with illusions that make the world less frightening. Most often, these illusions imply that diseases, hurricanes, faulty brakes, and nuclear bombs are moral entities that are sensitive to issues of justice. Alternatively some believe that such disasters are tools in the hands of a higher power, which uses them selectively and with discretion. But what kind of a higher power would use smallpox? Nobody youâd want to meet, thatâs for sure.
These illusions have their pros and cons. Once I was hiking in the Sierras and came across a giant sign at the entrance to a trail. The sign said, âThe Mountains Donât Care.â The rangers, it seemed, had had enough of hikers who ventured up to commune with Mother Nature without ice axes, warm coats, or water. Lost in the glory of the mountains, they would trust the Great Spirit to take care of them. But the Sierras obey their own gods, ones that have to do with wind and temperature and altitude. The temperature can slide like a bobsledder on a record run, and spring days that begin with sweat and suntan lotion can end with whiteouts and frostbite. Too many people have died in T-shirts, curled up in snow banks, with no idea even which way leads home. What concern is it to the mountains whether these two-legged ants live or die?
Why do bad things happen to good people? Because the mountains donât care. But we so badly want them to.
The great gift of consciousness, of course, is that you donât have to live with whatâs âout thereâ in the âreal world.â The mountains may not care, but we are free to believe they do. In the âreal worldâ we live in â the one inside our heads â the dialogue goes on endlessly between whatâs out there and what we want to be out there. All truces in this endless war are transient, all settlements subject to later interpretation. âThings as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar,â Wallace Stevens wrote. And then he warned us, âI cannot bring a world quite round/Although I patch it as I can.â1
Of course, he lies. Stevens brings the world round quite nicely, as all the great poets do, but then again, if itâs a question of just taking the rough edges off reality, you and I are as gifted as he. A vast body of research confirms my suspicion that my friendâs rose-colored point of view is more common than my more cynical one.2 In fact, as early as 1978, there were more than one thousand articles on what are termed âpositive illusions,â the tendency of people to soften the world, ignoring and minimizing its bad aspects and overgeneralizing its good ones â and the research has only picked up speed since then. In general, people hold positive illusions about themselves, about the amount of control they have over their fates, and about the benevolence of the world. I will look at each of these in turn. As will be seen, these positive illusions have an impact on our functioning (mostly pro) and on our susceptibility to predators (mostly con). Finally, these illusions are themselves susceptible to the impact of trauma, which sometimes shatters them, leaving a bleak world in its wake.
