◆ SpookStack

HAR96S KINSEY Re ne spring evening a young man in California carefully took all the identification papers from his wallet and left them behind at his home. From his automobile he removed the regis- tration certificate, bearing his name, which state law requires to be attached in plain view to the steering column. He hid this in the glove'compart- ment, locked it—and then went on the prowl. He soon found a woman walking alone on an other- wise deserted street, forced her into his car, drove her to a lonely dirt road and raped her. But the car got stuck, and he needed help getting it started again; so he had the woman get out and give the car a push. As she shoved against the rear bumper, her eyes were only inches from the license plate. She had plenty of time to memorize the number, and as soon as he let her go she re- ported it to the police. The young man went to prison, where he was still serving his sentence when | interviewed him. This man was one of many, young and old, in prison for sexual offenses of all kinds, whose cases are summarized in the new report that the Insti- tute for Sex Research will publish in July. His par- ticular story is of special interest for two reasons. He comes close to what public opinion regards as the vicious and uncontrollable ‘‘sex criminal’: His crime was premeditated, his victim selected en- tirely by accident; he struck at the first woman he found, without regard to her age or physical ap- pearance. And he also exhibited a peculiar quirk = that seems common to these men: Although he <=... was extremely careful about his wallet and his * registration certificate, he was grossly careless on the matter of the license plate, a detail that anyone smart enough to take the other precau- tions might have been expected to remember. At the very beginning of the institute study, when the late Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Dr. Wardell Pomeroy and | began visiting prisons to conduct our interviews, we were struck by the fact that very few of the prisoners resembled the boogeyman of popular imagination—the ‘‘sex fiend,”’ hopped up by dope, his imagination fired by pornography. Some, indeed, were the most pathetic and harm- less of bumblers. And virtually all were what modern slang calls losers: They were generally By DR. PAUL GEBHARD Our Dangerous Sex Laws Lapies efor JouRNAL MAY m from low-class homes; they had very little educa- tion or success at jobs, and they went about their crimes so ineptly that they practically fell into the arms of the police. ’ For the readers of the Ladies’ Home Journal, perhaps the outstanding message of the new re- port is that the average American woman and her children are in far less danger of becoming victims of a sex criminal than is generally supposed. We live in an age of frank discussion, and news- papers, therefore, feel far freer than in the past to talk about sex crimes on the front page and in -considerable detail. Prosecuting attorneys lecture about sex criminals, sometimes with more eye to headlines than to facts. The police visit schools to show movies warning girls against talking to strange men. As a result, we seem to be threat- ened by danger on all sides. Unmarried women living in big cities ask for unlisted phone numbers to avoid the obscene calls. Suburban mothers drive their daughters to and from school to thwart the lurking stranger. But the truth is: Sexual crimes, especially those involving force or violence, are far rarer than the headlines would indi- cate. Moreover, the kind of men who get involved in sexual offenses tend to be concentrated in the poorer neighborhoods of our cities; they live and commit their crimes largely on their own side of the tracks. The chances that a woman living in a good neighborhood will encounter a_ sadistic rapist, or that her daughter will be injured by an attacker, are not very much greater than the danger of being struck by lightning. The stereotyped “sex criminal’’ of popular imagination turns out to be many different kinds of men. Contrary to general belief, few of them take dope, although many of them do commit their crimes under the influence of alcohol. And few are in any way inspired by pornography. As the institute’s previous reports have shown, pornography of all kinds is mostly read and en- joyed by men of more than average intelligence and with vivid imaginations. The men in prison for sexual offenses, on the other hand, turned out to be men of rather low intelligence and imagination. Their disinterested and indeed scornful attitude toward pornography was perhaps best summed