Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

I am talking to Bob. He, too, is in court-ordered therapy. Two and a half years ago he
was convicted of indecent assault on his girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter. "She was
curious about drinking," he says. "Her mother and I decided we would all get together
and drink. Better at home, you know?" The first time, all three drank together. But later
the drinking took place when Bob's girlfriend was away. "The first time it went okay," he
says. "Then two weeks later, we did it again. I talked her into giving me a back rub.
Then I gave her one. I felt her breasts. She didn't say no. I was very attracted. She got
up and went upstairs. She got on the phone, but she didn't say `Stop.' Then she
pretended to fall asleep facedown. I fondled her buttocks, pulled her pants down, felt
her vagina.
"She was crying. I started to get scared. For myself. I really got scared. I'm trying to
figure out how to react. I ask her, `You want me to leave? ' She says to me, ` No. Mom
loves you.' She went outside and didn't come back. She called her girlfriend whose
mom works at the courthouse. The cops showed up. I was thinking, Oh shit, this is real."
Bob was given a two-year probation, with therapy. (The sentence was light because this
was his first offense and the molestation hadn't progressed beyond fondling.) "She
would have dropped it," Bob says, "but the courts already had it."
I ask Bob about his therapy. "I have a lot more knowledge now than I had," he replies —
"about how many lives I can screw up. Every time she goes through something in the
future I'm going to have to ask myself, `Was I responsible for that?' "
Violent and nonviolent
Males who molest children have traditionally been lumped into two broad categories,
violent and nonviolent. Included in the latter are offenders who are fixated and
regressed. Psychologist A. Nicholas Groth, Ph.D., founder of the Sex Offender Program
at the Connecticut Correctional Institution at Somers, describes fixated offenders as
adult men who "continue to have an exclusive or nearly exclusive sexual attraction
toward children." Regressed offenders are attracted to their peers, but under stress—
illness, loss of job or spouse—turn to children as substitutes.
To refine these categories, Robert A. Nass, Ph.D., a Pennsylvania therapist who treats
sex offenders, suggests a third group: quasi-adult sex offenders—men who yearn for a
loving relationship with another adult but, because of their own immaturity, are unable to
have one and turn to children instead.
Incestuous Father
In researching Characteristics of Incest Offenders, the most detailed study of male
perpetrators to date, David Finkelhor and Linda Meyer Williams of the University of New
Hampshire questioned 118 incestuous fathers in exacting detail. Based on the men's
explanations about why and how the incest started and how the men felt about what
they had done, the researchers identified five distinct types of incestuous father:
� the sexually preoccupied—men who are obsessed about sex and tend to
sexualize almost every relationship;
� adolescent regressives—men who have adolescent-like yearnings for young girls
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