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Child Sexual Predators are Premeditated, Not Opportunistic

By Dr. Duane Dobbert

The 2007 abduction of then 13-year-old Ben Ownby from his bus stop in Missouri suggests that child sexual predators "cruise" bus stops looking for any child that is unescorted. While this appears to be an opportunistic behavior, it is not.

Michael Devlin, arrested and convicted for the abduction of Ownby, was also convicted of abducting, sexually assaulting, and holding Shawn Hornbeck captive for a few years.

Both Ben and Shawn were abducted at the time of their puberty thus suggesting that Michael Devlin is afflicted with hebephilia. In contrast to pedophilia, in which the afflicted person's fantasy love group is prepubescent children, a person afflicted with hebephilia's fantasy love group is youth who have arrived at sexual maturity. Further, there is a gender preference.

Michael Devlin's fantasy love group is boys who are at sexual maturity, yet sexually inexperienced. It is this "virgin" quality that precipitates recurrent, intense, sexual arousal in the hebephile. Michael Devlin possessed the delusion that these boys, once they had their sexual encounter with him, would love him equally in return.

The abduction of Ben, the second boy, lends credibility to the diagnosis. Shawn was no longer "just" arriving at puberty and had been sexually assaulted by Devlin for years. Devlin was no longer intensely sexually aroused by Shawn and needed a new young man who was just reaching puberty and was a virgin.

Devlin was not opportunistic; he was premeditated. He was locating a specific age and gender. He is not aroused by girls or women, nor prepubescent or post-adolescent males. His fantasy love group is middle school age boys.

Consequently to meet his intrinsic psycho/sexual needs, he had to search out a specific fantasy lover from his fantasy love group. It just happens that Ben was his victim. Devlin could have found an unescorted pubescent boy at age group soccer practice, little league baseball, boy scouts, etc.Devlin abducted Shawn and Ben because they met his intrinsic psycho/sexual needs, not because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dr. Dobbert presented the accredited seminar "The First Line of Defense Against Sexual Predators" and the workshop "Law Enforcement & School Transportation Collaboration on Amber Alerts" during the 2009 STN EXPO in Reno, Nev.

Remembering Everette Johnson, 5-Year-Old Atlanta Boy Killed by His School Bus

Tragically, no matter how much school bus safety training is provided to them or how much it’s pounded into the heads of school bus drivers to check their mirrors constantly before leaving bus stops, it seems there will be incidents like what happened on Tuesday.

An Atlanta Public Schools bus ran over 5-year-old Everette Johnson, a kindergartner at Usher Elementary School in the north part of town, after several children unloaded at the afternoon stop. According to news reports, Johnson turned around and headed back to the bus after unloading and apparently dropped his backpack beneath the bus. The driver didn’t see him and began to pull away from the curb as Johnson reached beneath the bus for his backpack.

Per School Transportation News research, Everette’s death was the third since August, the second of the regular 2009-2010 school year and the 16th of the 2009 calendar year. The Kansas Department of Education surveys all 50 states each year to determine the number of student fatalities that occur in the so-called school bus danger zone, the approximate 10- to 12-foot area around the vehicle where the majority of student deaths occur as opposed to inside the bus.

From the 1970-1971 through the 2007-2008 school years, the KDOE’s pupil transportation unit data shows that 718 students have been killed by the school bus during the loading or unloading process.

Results for 2008-2009 are expected late this year or in early 2010.

N.C. Pregnant Teen Shot Dead

The title itself is horrifying and the details are no better. Moments after a relative left Tiffany Wright, a pregnant 15-year-old, at her bus stop, she heard three gunshots. Moments later, that same relative found Tiffany dead with a gunshot wound to the head. Tiffany was a student at Hawthorne High School in Charlotte, N.C. Her baby was born alive but is not expected to survive.

Parents Tackle Fear of Walk to School

In a recent New York Times article, writer Jann Hoffman looked at one mother's decision to allow her daughter to walk to school against a backdrop of fear of strangers, what some consider over-protective parents, and a nation that is slowly learning some of the horrors that await children that are victims of sexual predators:

The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school-bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.

According to the article, in 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school, a number that dropped to 13 percent by 2001. Another study from the Journal of the American Planning Association, showed that half of the San Francisco Bay Area parents surveyed would not allow their children to walk without being supervised, while 30 percent said their decision was based on "fear of strangers." According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited children, almost 800,000 children are reported abducted each year. Are we bring too protective?

Teens in "Miracle in Missouri" Case Recount Their Ordeal on 48 Hours

By Lisa Hudson

You may recall the shock, joy and sadness that came with the "Miracle in Missouri" back in January 2007. At the time, 13-year-old Ben Ownby went missing on January 8, 2007 when he did not return home from school and authorities came to believe he was abducted after exiting his school bus.

Four days later, a series of tips led to police to the apartment of Michael Devlin and they were stunned to find not just Ben but another teen, Shawn Hornbeck, who had been missing for 4.5 years. The elation that came with the boys' rescue was tempered when the full horror of what they went through at the hands of Devlin was made public. Devlin ultimately was charged with 80 counts of sexual assault, kidnapping and attempted murder and was sentenced to 72 life terms, and an additional 170 years in prison for his crimes.

In the wake of the incredible outcome to the Jaycee Lee Dugard case, the CBS-TV news program 48 Hours recently provided a fresh update to their original September 2008 piece where both Shawn and Ben discuss their ordeal. A video and transcript of the is online.

Sex Offender Arrested After Jaycee Lee Dugard Surfaces 18 Years Later

Registered sex offender Phillip Garrido, 58, and his 54-year-old wife Nancy were arrested in a kidnapping case that spans almost two decades. On June 10, 1991, Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted on the way to her bus stop while her stepfather watched. On Aug. 27, Dugard walked into a San Francisco Bay area police station and told detectives who she was. The story of what has happened since the day she was kidnapped 18 years ago is still unraveling.

The case was featured on America's Most Wanted.

UPDATE:
Garrido has admitted to fathering two girls, 11 and 15, with Dugard, who spent the last 18 years hidden in a collection of shacks in Garrido's backyard. Dugard has expressed guilt over bonding with the registered sex offender, while Garrido, during a jailhouse phone interview, has said he has "completely turned my life around" in the past several years:

"You're going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, from the victim," he said. "If you take this a step at a time, you're going to fall over backward and in the end you're going to find the most powerful, heartwarming story."

How the story of a man who kidnapped an 11-year-old girl, kept her hostage for 18 years, raped her and forced her to give birth to two of his children at home, and never allowed any of them to see a doctor, will be considered "heartwarming" is anyone's guess.

Once a Molester, Always a Molester?

The Center for Sex Offender Management (CSOM) was created in 1997 "enhance public safety by preventing further victimization through improving the management of adult and juvenile sex offenders who are in the community." It has received funding via the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs and offers training to those who are responsible for sex offender management, including probation and parole officers.

Included on the group's Web site is research performed on sex offenders, including a 1997 study by Prentky, Lee, Knight, and Cerce which found that:

"...over a 25-year period, child molesters had higher rates of reoffense than rapists. In this study, recidivism was operationalized as a failure rate and calculated as the proportion of individuals who were rearrested using survival analysis (which takes into account the amount of time each offender has been at risk in the community). Results show that over longer periods of time, child molesters have a higher failure rate—thus, a higher rate of rearrest—than rapists (52 percent versus 39 percent over 25 years)."

Below is a chart from that study:

A Tough Lesson Yet to be Learned by Many Motorists

Tragedy occurred this past week when a Raleigh, N.C., girl was struck and killed by a passing motorist after disembarking the school bus. Ashley Ramos-Ramirez was only 6-years old and a first grader. While technically not the new school year’s first fatality because Ashley attended a year-round elementary school, her senseless death at the hands of an 83-year old woman who said she didn’t see the school bus stop arm or flashing red lights calls attention to school bus safety, said Ashley’s principal.

“This is definitely something we can learn from to make sure...everyone understands school bus safety rules,” Green Elementary Principal Shelly Watson said.

Doubly unfortunate for Ashley’s family is that the driver is only facing misdemeanor charges because a new North Carolina law pass this summer that requires an automatic felony charges for anyone charged with killing a student while illegally passing a stopped school bus does not go into effect until Dec. 1.

The news article points to information on the School Transportation News Web site on the inherent safety of school buses, citing fatality data that shows more children are killed in the so-called "danger zone," the 10-foot perimeter around school buses as they are stopped to load or unload students.

Police Officers Forget to Turn on GPS Bracelet

After being released from prison and fitted with his mandated GPS ankle bracelet, Salvador Medina went on a violent crime spree that included the abduction and sexual assault of three sisters, ages 15, 15 and 11, and threatening a woman with a knife while her 3-year-old child looked on. But, the GPS bracelet he was wearing had one problem: it was never turned on. Arizona DOC Director Charles Ryan apologized by saying:

“I would probably say to the victims I'm sorry that you have been victimized by this individual.”

Although he went on to say that he will hold the individuals responsible for the mistake accountable, how will that help the three sisters who went through something so horrible that it will change everything about the way they live, who they trust and a future that has now been changed forever.