17. Tip of the Iceberg

North Carolina is home to the only federal prison with a residential treatment program for sexual offenders. 155 male inmates in the program agreed to participate in a study to find out more about their early sexual experiences in an attempt to learn more about the early careers of pedophiles. The two psychologists who performed the study asked the men to self-report on their sexual experiences every six months during the 18-month program.

The results of their research have not been published; even though it was accepted by the Journal of Family Violence, the Journal has decided not to publish the results, citing the volatility and perhaps sensational nature of the data. For they found that 85 percent of men who had first downloaded child pornography from the internet later molested children.

It is one of the greatest mysteries to many of us: what makes someone see the face of a child and imagine the face of a lover. I can’t understand either, even though I was that girl once. Once someone looked at my smile and saw something I was not yet.

The New York Times write-up of the study results was picked up by the Raleigh News & Observer due to the local connection to the research and the residential program in Butner, which makes many people uncomfortable. Talking about the molestation and abuse of children invokes an irrational rage in most people that cannot imagine something as tame as residential treatment for what strikes some as an unforgivable sin. When I read the article in our paper, I could only remember one incident with my father which happened in the first few weeks after we first became re-acquainted and were writing a lot of letters to one another.

My father was unemployed and living in a tiny basement apartment in Staten Island, separated from his third wife, depressed and grasping at straws . . . me, although I didn’t know that at the time. He began writing me long autobiographical letters, telling me the story of his life, first to fill in the gaps from my childhood, things I didn’t know about him, his side of the divorce, that kind of thing; but as time went on he began to tell me his entire history, becoming more and more open with each letter until he was telling me every intimate detail of his life. Including details of his love lives, the births of his children, his three marriages, and his wide variety of sexual experiences.

I was 33 years old. Some of the things my father was telling me about, while not shocking me in any moral or behavioral sense, did unnerve me in a deep-seated way, like stones falling into a deep well. At the time, I did not yet understand why these stories were bothering me, and why I was starting to once again have the same dreams I had over and over in my childhood. Until my father sent one letter in particular, in which he said the picture he enclosed was one he kept around because it reminded him of me. And now that he had found me, he didn’t need it anymore.

The picture was a centerfold from Hustler magazine, of a young brunette with long curly hair with one hand cupping a naked breast and one, um, pleasuring herself. This is the picture that reminded my father . . . of his first-born daughter. When did my father first start looking at pictures that made him fantasize about what he would later call “dirty sex?” My father, I believe strongly, did not molest me for a long period of time. I think that my father experiemented with me and did some things he had no idea would hurt me to the extent that they did. However, my father was an incredibly selfish man his entire life.

If we don’t learn to recognize the tips of these icebergs when they appear in our lives, we will never avoid them. We need more research, no matter what our personal feelings about these people are.