Sex Crimes

Sex Offenses and Offenders: An Analysis of Data on Rape and Sexual Assault

The following study, by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, is not only comprehensive, but will tell most people more than they ever wanted to know about sex crimes and the people who commit those crimes. We have done some editing to make the study fit the format of our pages, and to eliminate some surplusages.

Pedophile Priest: The Crimes of Father Geoghan

Dec. 1, 2003 Updated Jan. 25, 2006

Father John Geoghan

Father John Geoghan sexually molested young boys for over three decades with the full knowledge of the Archdiocese of Boston. By the time Cardinal Bernard Law got around to having him defrocked in 1993, Geoghan had become the poster boy for the priest-pedophilia scandal that racked every Catholic diocese in the United States.

by Denise Noe

The perception that child molesting was a rare crime perpetrated by a small number of raincoat-clad misfits crumbled in the 1970s and '80s when studies disclosed the astonishing prevalence of this crime and the outward ''normalcy'' of its perpetrators.

''One out of three girls and one out of seven boys will be sexually abused by the time they reach 18,'' Ellen Bass and Laura Davis reported in their book, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. Feminists were at the forefront of publicizing the prevalence and damage caused by these crimes. In both incest and non-family child molesting, the perpetrators were almost always men, the victims about 90 percent female. Feminist writers such as Florence Rush and Judith Hermann believed these statistics reflected an imbalance of power between the sexes. They thought the traditional family, with its ideology of male headship, led many men to treat children as property.

The Austrian Ogre: The Case That Shocked the World

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

updated 08/24/09

The Austrian Ogre: The Case That Shocked the World

May 20, 2008 Updated Nov. 23, 2010

Josef Fritzl, photographed just after his arrest

Josef Fritzl locked his 18-year-old daughter Elisabeth in his cellar and raped her repeatedly for the next 24 years. She would bear him seven children, three of whom he moved upstairs to live with him and his wife, and four to languish below, one of whom would die days after birth.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

In the past only fly fishermen would have heard of the Lower Austria town of Amstetten and only a few elderly Austrians would have been able to say that they’ve heard the name Josel Fritzl before.

Amstetten is 40 miles (65 kms) from Linz and 81 miles (130kms) from Vienna and just fewer than 23,000 people live there. The town, which was first mentioned in 995, is on the Ybbs River, a contributory to the Danube. The Ybbs’s crystal clear water makes it a fly-fishing paradise. Few who have gone there to fish though would have known that the town had once been the seat of two sub-camps of the Nazis’ Mauthausen-Güsen group of concentration camps. It’s not something the locals wish anyone to recall or mention.

Back row (lr): Author Lora Lusher's paternal grandfather, her father SFPD Inspector Ted Lusher, her mother Claire, her maternal grandmother (who lived with Jack Bokin and his parents) and Bokin's father, Jack Sr. Front row (lr): Lusher's brother, her sister, Lora Lusher at age 2 and her cousin Jack Bokin at age 9.

The Man Who Got Away

Albert Bradford: a/k/a Malik Hakim

The story of Albert Bradford, a talented and charismatic man who went to prison at the age of 17 with three life sentences for rape, transformed himself into an artist of note and a leader of men -- then committed his most heinous crime of all and beat the system.

by J. J. Maloney

(Ed. Note: One would think that Albert Bradford would be high up on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, but it never happened – even though he owes the state of Missouri the balance of three life sentences, and is wanted for trial in a crime more shocking and brutal than the ones that earned him those life sentences. It is a strange and fascinating tale of how this man beat the system.)

On March 12, 1951, 17-year-old Albert Bradford entered the courtroom of Judge Harry F. Russell in St. Louis, Missouri. He was charged with two counts of rape and two counts of armed robbery. One of the two women raped by Bradford was white. Bradford might have expected a sentence of five, or even ten years, which at that time would be normal for a teenaged first offender.

When Judge Russell announced a sentence of life imprisonment, Bradford cried out, "Judge, have mercy on me!" while his mother and other female relatives began screaming. During the ensuing melee that broke out, with Bradford’s hysterical mother being ordered out of the courtroom, someone split the cheek of deputy constable Venable Slater.

Finally subdued, Bradford was sentenced to a second term of life imprisonment, at which point he cried out, "Oh, god!" and fainted. Bradford was still in a faint when the third life sentence was imposed.