A boy aged four played freely with his own genital organs, and also made peculiar coitus-like movements in bed, and in contact with his mother. When the latter, greatly alarmed, asked him how he had learned to do this, he explained that a young woman twenty years of age, living in the house, had performed these manipulations with him.
Magnan also reports (“Lectures on Mental Disorders,” Nos. 2 and 3, p. 41) the case of a lady, twenty-nine years of age, who performed sexual acts with her nephew, aged five.
These cases rarely attain publicity, because they usually remain undiscovered. Fornicatory acts with children, such as are frequently alluded to in the newspapers, chiefly concern children between the ages of six and fourteen years. In these cases the offences are most often committed by schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, or by private tutors and governesses. We further often find other women undertaking such acts, displaying a sexual activity which they have no opportunity of satisfying in intercourse with full-grown men. In the third place, debauchees and exhausted roués seek new and piquant excitement by intercourse with such fruits verts. Of such Laurent writes:[640]
“They have used and misused woman; they have explored all the stages of natural and unnatural love; they have visited Lesbos and Paphos; and they have experienced every possible sexual artificiality. Their sexual desires have become torpid, their manliness is on the decline, and sexual death approaches. But the more exhausted they are, the less willing are they patiently to acquiesce in their loss. It is with them as with inebriates who are full to the throat and still continue to drink. One day they notice a little girl in the street and feel stimulated by her youthful charms. Thus their love begins.”
The blameless, the natural, and the pure, in the essence of the child and of the intact virgin, has a stimulating influence upon such perverted individuals: it acts as a contrast to their own sexual shamelessness and artificiality. The contrast, in fact, has the effect of a most powerful stimulus. Nor can we fail to recognize the existence in such cases also of a sadistic element in the performance of coitus with a defenceless child, and in the sanguinary act of defloration of an immature individual. In the eighties there flourished in England such a “mania for defloration,” the scandalous details of which were illustrated in a lurid light by the revelations of the Pall Mall Gazette.[641] With regard to this sadistic element in acts of fornication with children, we must take into account the possibility that in the corporal punishment of children by the teacher may have originated the awakening of the latter’s sexual activities,[642] and that in this we may find the cause of the beginning of sexual relationships between teacher and pupil.
Other not infrequent causes of the sexual misuse of children are to be found in alcoholic intoxication and in senile dementia. Tramps, also, who have for a long time been deprived of the opportunity of intercourse with women, are apt to gratify their long-repressed libido on the body of the first child they meet. Child labour in factories also offers opportunities for fornicatory acts with children.
A few especially striking instances of acts of fornication with children are appended:
1. The son of a greengrocer, A., twenty years of age, living in the Keibelstrasse, had for a long time immoral intercourse with the eight-year-old daughter of the milkman W., in the same street. He had not only violated her, but had committed other injuries. The young fellow continued his immoral conduct after he had become infected with venereal disease, and therefore naturally infected the girl. She became so ill that she had to be confined to bed, and the doctor who was called in diagnosed venereal infection. Notwithstanding this, the little girl continued to lie about the matter, and only after a whipping did she admit having had intercourse with A. The latter, a man with a crippled foot, as soon as he saw that his misconduct had been discovered, concealed himself in an outhouse, and was only arrested by the police after a prolonged search. He is now in prison.
2. The model and friend of a painter, during the absence of the latter from home, seduced his son, twelve years of age, after preliminary repeated masturbation, to coitus and cunnilinctus.
3. A celebrated actress, now in advanced age, in the case of a boy who sought a situation in her house, gave rise by various manipulations to an erection of the penis, and seduced him to coitus; she invited him repeatedly to visit her, and continued this scandalous practice with him for eight years.