Pamela Schultz on Not Monsters

In my December 5, 2013 blog titled  Emily Yoffee From Slate Must Read Not Monsters: Analyzing the Stories of Child Molesters, I riff onYoffee's article about college women drinking too much which places them in a vulnerable situations to be raped. I then compared Yoffee's article to Dr. Pamela Schultz  (2005) book, Not Monsters: Analyzing the Stories of Child Molesters. 


Not Monsters is an academic approach to understanding why people commit such monstrous crimes like child molestation and rape. Between 1995 and 2000, Schultz conducted countless one-on-one interviews with incarcerated child molesters and rapists. She uses a self-narrative approach to document, analyze, and to tell the stories of 9 convicted sex offenders. "The focus of this book is to show the troubling statistics surrounding child sexual abuse, and its impact upon victims, perpetrators, and society, take on a new meaning when viewed through the framework of narrative, which captures the nature of a discursively created reality."

After going through an intense 40 day spirit quest with God, and having been taken on a topsy-turvey-rodeo-ride into my past as a victim of sexual abuse, I commend Schultz's forgiving nature of  'The Man Who Molested Me' and seeing these offenders as men and not as monsters unlike the majority of people in contemporary society. In my 40 days with God, I learned that forgiveness is NOT about setting the other person free from his crime, but setting myself free from the power and control He bestowed on me.  Due to my experience I can understand how forgiveness brings an incredible peace, and how hate the crime not the person takes an immeasurable amount of strength to journey into freedom. Nevertheless, I knew I had to catch up with Schultz to have her answer some of the many questions I had about Not Monsters. Without further ado here is Alfred University's very own, Dr. Pamela Schultz discussing her book, Not Monsters: Analyzing the Stories of Child Molesters in her own words. 

BG: Have your perceptions changed on Megan's Law since becoming a mother of a teenager?

Schultz: Not in the least. Whenever a person who has been convicted of any sexual crime moves into the area code of my kids’ school district, the school district wastes my school-taxpaying dollars by mailing out notices.  It drives me crazy, especially when I know that (1) chances are the offender isn’t someone who goes trolling for strangers to molest, since the majority of offenders molest kids they already knows; and (2) the most “constructive” result for a letter like that is to panic people, perhaps unnecessarily. As a mother who has taken the time to research the facts surrounding the crime of child sexual abuse, I am pretty confident that I can keep my kids, from getting into situations with adults that can put them at risk. Even given my own history of abuse, I'm not unusually afraid of strangers abducting and assaulting my kids, although of course as as a mom I worry about pretty much everything. Yes, knowledge is power. But Megan's Law gives people the illusion that they have useful, valid, knowledge that will allow them to better protect their kids, and that kind of false awareness actually keeps people from digging up the truth for themselves.

BG: In your research over the years, have you come across information of people who have been sexually abused whom are repulsed by sex as opposed to acting out sexual fantasies?

Schultz: Absolutely. There are way more survivors of sexual abuse who are repulsed by sex than titillated by it.  After all, even though they may have been introduced to sex early on, it wasn't in a positive, empowering way.  Instead, they were shown that sex means dominating and controlling the weaker person.  Becoming a dominatrix might be a more positive way of working through this as an adult, but many survivors end up more passive than assertive in their sexual expression.

BG: Why did you first refer to your abuser as 'The Man Who Molested Me' as opposed by name when telling Tony's narrative?

Schultz: Well, actually I never meant to identify him by name in the narrative—it was an editorial slip-up.  I preferred to think of him as representative in a symbolic way of a kind of universal offender.  Besides, he was dead by that point, but his family and friends were still out there, and I didn't want to shine a spotlight on them.  My intent was not to achieve some kind of revenge by “outing” him in the book.  I didn't have a chance to confront him about my childhood abuse because he died before I was ready to articulate it.   I didn't view my book as a catharsis, a chance to dump all my personal pain out in public.  I wanted to use my experience to put the stories I related into a more personal context.

BG: How were you changed by your research? (Not by the abuse necessarily, but the shift through a looking glass i.e. through academic eyes as opposed to being a victim)?

Schultz:  I was a thinker, but now I think of myself as a doer, in the fact I feel compelled to use my knowledge and experience to make some impact rather than bottle it all up and watch from the sidelines.


BG: I find it interesting as a sexual abuse victim you'd chosen to interrogate men who actually abuse as opposed to interviewing abuse victims. What's the psychology behind this?

Schultz: I actually did interview victims when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, which was a study of the ways in which both survivors and perpetrators of sexual abuse rhetorically make sense of their experiences (this turned into my first book, which was published as an academic monograph and something maybe a handful of people would ever read).  And don’t forget that some of the offenders I interviewed in prison were also sexually victimized as children.  But my decision to ultimately focus on the perpetrators was twofold.  First, it was due to convenience, since I was given access to perpetrators after I was invited to visit the sex offender groups being run at a nearby correctional facility.  Second, I quite frankly found it more interesting and empowering to listen to offender stories as opposed to the stories told by victims.  I have deep empathy for sexual abuse victims, but due to my past, it isn't healthy for me to wallow in their pain because it can pull me back into touch with my own.   I already understood what victims go through because I was one myself.  What I didn't understand was the motivations of the perpetrators

BG: Child Molesters consider themselves sex addicts?

Schultz: Sometimes, but not always.  Pedophiles are no more sex addicts than anyone else, unless their pedophilia amounts to an obsession and acting out that they have no control over. Actually, I’d say that the majority of the offenders I've met are not pedophiles in the strict sense of the term.  Rather, they are addicted to power and control, which they have been taught is achieved via sexual domination, and children represent a vulnerable outlet for this addiction.  Or else they have no sexual boundaries and molest a child within reach primarily because the kid is a convenient receptacle.  Sometimes they are trapped at about the age of their own victimization and think that they relate, emotionally and sexually, to kids because they are their peers.  And sometimes, they are just sleazy people who live in a culture obsessed with sex and youth, and they are turned on by the prospect of actually acting out the perverse fantasies that our cultural obsession toys with but doesn't want to admit to.

There are people who are truly addicted to sex, just as there are people addicted to alcohol or drugs, and it is a terrible affliction.  But given how trendy the idea that being a sex addict has become—you know it’s stylish when there’s been more than one critically praised TV show about it--I think that the idea of sexual addiction has become a lazy, somewhat titillating way of excusing slutty behavior.  And sexual offenders can view this label as an easy fix for their problems.

BG: What are your thoughts on watchdog.com? 

Schultz: I think that parents should have access to whatever information makes them feel safe.  But I am not particularly impressed with familywatchdog (watchdog.com is some security company, not a sex offender registry site).  For example, I was able to find a registered offender who apparently lives on a street near my son’s school.  In fact, the house that is listed as his is on the very same street, a few doors down, from the home of a woman who used to take care of my daughter when she was in elementary school and who still runs a before- and after-school day care out of her house.  So as a parent, what do I do with this information?  Not allow her to babysit my kid, even though she is a fabulous caregiver and would never let my child out of her sight?  So this convicted offender’s presence cuts into her livelihood.

His conviction is listed as “attempted course of sexual conduct against child two or more acts/child.” Given that this man’s address is within 1000 feet of an elementary school and kids walk by his house all the time, and there are a number of kids who live on that street, the assumption can be made that he isn't considered to be a Level 3 offender and that his risk to re-offend is low.  I might also assume that he isn't considered to be a predator, so his victims were probably not strangers.  So what good does plastering his name on the website do?  For one, it makes it difficult if not impossible to ever move beyond his conviction and view himself as anything but a sex offender.  And two—and this is more potentially problematic—it can pinpoint who his victims were because his full name and address is publicized for anyone to see.

BG: How long did it take you compile the research, write, and publish Not Monsters? 

Schultz: Truthfully, I can't recall specifically when I got permission from the NYS Department of Corrections to proceed but I believe I started the interviews in 1995 or 1996. The book was published in 2005.

BG: Have you ever had any updates on these men and have any of them been released back into society? 

Schultz: I am certain some of them have been released.  One man, with whom I ended up doing over 20 hours of tape with, and who claimed to have had over 70 victims, was released after 10 years.  He petitioned the court to return to his home city of Rochester NY to live with his mother, but was refused and sent to NYC.  He got off the bus in the Bowery and was immediately propositioned by a young teenage male prostitute.  Considering that his victim of choice was a young boy between the ages of 9 and 12, this was certainly a temptation.  He ended up spending the next two years there, struggling to find work and alternately living in halfway houses or homeless, before succumbing to cancer.

Tony from the book remained incarcerated indefinitely, although as he grew older and frailer, there was little chance of him reoffending.  His family petitioned the courts for his release to their care, but I don’t know if it ever happened.  He and I exchanged a couple of letters, then I didn't hear from him again.

I stopped going into the prison and spending time in the sex offender groups when I was a few months pregnant with my daughter in 1999.  It suddenly didn't feel healthy for me to be in those surroundings anymore.  I went out a couple more times after she was born, but then quit altogether when I was in the writing stages of the book.  I had too much stuff going on in my personal life and didn't want to bring the negativity home with me.

BG: "Being willing to listen to the stories of offenders can help us win the war" How so? 

Schultz: Because to conquer an enemy, you need to know them well.  You can’t strategize or anticipate unless you can predict their behavior.  The mass-mediated images of child molesters don’t nearly jibe with the reality.  How successful can we be in combating the crime when we've constructed a picture of the offenders that is more fantasy than fact?

BG: If trust is relative, why should child molesters be given a second chance when evidence shows that 'therapy' did not rehabilitate them, hence, potentially committing the same crime twice? 

Schultz: Evidence doesn't show that therapy doesn't rehabilitate them.  Evidence does show that a combination of cognitive/behavioral and pharmacological interventions can keep them from reoffending.  Convicted child sexual abusers actually have lower recidivism rates than those for other crimes.  Our prison system might pay lip service to being a place of rehabilitation but don’t kid yourself—the public wants retribution, so doesn't put faith in the types of psychological interventions that prisons can offer to inmates.  Treatment programs are not nearly so politically popular as punishment.  And what does punishment accomplish?  Further alienation, isolation, frustration and anger….exactly those qualities that led some offenders to commit their crimes in the first place.

BG: So, what about poetic justice for the victims? Page 187 states, “To perceive a child molester as a child himself goes contrary to the expectation that he is a monster, since when we see him as someone was once vulnerable, and perhaps even innocent, suddenly it becomes difficult to hold onto the images of himself as irrevocably evil."

Schultz: How is this poetic justice? Offenders are people too, and were once innocent children. 

Thank you, Dr. Schultz for taking the time to squeeze me in your ridiculously busy schedule to answer these questions.