Development of a rational taxonomy for the classification of rapists: the Massachusetts Treatment Center system.

Abstract

Many attempts to classify sexual offenders have focused either on the direct application of broad psychiatric diagnostic categories or on specific offense characteristics, such as the nature of the act (e.g., rape versus exhibitionism) or the age of the victim (adult versus child).1-6 Investigators have either looked at the incidence of neurosis, personality disorder, and psychosis among sexual offenders I. 7.8 or have compared psychiatric or legal subgroups of sexual offenders on various dimensions.15 Another approach has yielded more promising results. It attempts to generate and test rational taxonomic models based upon clinical experience with sexual offenders. 16-27 While most of these efforts have not produced elaborated rape taxonomies, they nevertheless provided the groundwork for future developments. Guttmacher' and Guttmacher and Weihofen,28 for example, described three types of rapists. The first type are those cases in which the offense is an explosive expression of a pent-up sexual impulse. The second type are those cases in which the offense is sadistic and the third type are those cases in which the offense is committed by an antisocial criminal. In the first group, designated true sex the aim is primarily sexual, whereas in the second group, aggression is at least as important, if not more important, than sex. The last group, labeled aggressive is composed of men for whom rape is an undifferentiated part of a generic criminal record. KOpp22 dichotomized rapists on the basis of whether the offense behavior could be seen as ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic. In one type of rapist, the behavior resulted from a break in the individual's character defense. Such an individual is more likely than not to experience guilt and remorse as well as concern for the victim after the assault. The other type of rapist is the antisocial, psychopathic individual, characterized as unempathic, cold, and without the experience of guilt. In their prodigious study of 1,356 sex offenders, Gebhard et al. 19 distin-