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There is much speculation about how widely an automobile is used for, or as a chief means of, committing a sex offense. Included in this tabulation are offenses that involved the use of a car but that actually took place outside the car. This happened particularly in some of the cases involving force. When all auto offenses are combined, regardless of whether they happened in city, country, or in an unrecorded location, we find that the three aggression groups rank the highest. From 21 to 30 per cent of them are associated with autos. But these aggression offenses still occur less often in cars than they do “in the open,” and residences are also ahead of autos in two of the three subclasses. In the nonforce offenses we find the automobile playing a relatively important role only in the offenses involving young teenagers (twelve to fifteen), and this is evident in both heterosexual and homosexual offenses. It would seem that interest in cars and willingness to go for rides in them is a strong factor here. These young people generally are not licensed drivers and do not have the use of a car, but the automobile and the culture surrounding its use are important elements in their lives. In the remainder of the heterosexual and homosexual offenses, those involving either young children or adults, the use of the auto drops to between 7 and 15 per cent. The other offense in which a car figures fairly frequently is exhibition. The incidence is 19 per cent here, representing 44 cases. It is usually reported that the exhibitionist had parked by a sidewalk curbing and waited until he caught the eye of a likely female in order to get his own erotic reaction from the exhibition behavior. In other instances he had driven along, trailing a chosen female, and then pulled his car up to the curb near her. Incest occurred in cars in only six cases out of the 169 father-daughter incest convictions on which data were available. If offenses occurring in automobiles are classed on the basis of a rural or urban location when identifiable, it is clear that once on wheels the sex offender generally tends to gravitate to less populated areas with his partner or victim. This is most marked in the aggression groups, in which the rural auto offenses outstrip the urban ones.

It seems clear that while automobiles were of some importance, they did not play a major role as a site for or as an aid in sex offenses. They were most used in the aggression offenses, in exhibition, and in acts against male or female minors. It might be suggested that our sample of convicted sex offenders came from an economic and social class that did not typically have cars available for their use. There may be some validity in this notion, but car ownership is so ordinary, even at lower income levels, that it seems doubtful. The once-held notion that cars furnish the chief means for sex offenses is just not substantiated by the present data.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 10:04 am and is filed under Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.