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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The group continues going through victim empathy letters the following week, in late October. Henger has Steven answer question No. 13: "When you think of me now, what are your thoughts?" Steven, who is young and Latino, has an unusual case. His victim was a young girl who picked up the letter-size pictures of his penis that he placed at a bus shelter for her to find. Steven masturbated in the bushes while watching her and eventually planned to have sexual contact with the girl. He fantasized and masturbated at home about other potential victims.
"I felt rejected and was looking for someone to love me," reads Steven. He thought she liked the pictures because he left the images for other girls, but she was the only one to pick them up.
An older man in the group, Ken, tries to coach Steven: "Thinking she liked the pictures was a distortion," he says. Henger agrees and adds, "I don't think you thought she really liked it. That's bullshit. You really liked it."
Steven complains, "Loving kids got me into trouble." Almost everyone in the group joins in a sarcastic, "Awwww." Ken coaches some more: "You're stuck someplace. If you're hurting someone, that's not love."
Henger considers victim empathy the turning point in therapy. "Many of these men have no idea of the harm they create," he explains. "They are consumed with themselves. I can see the change when they realize they hurt somebody." He adds that the change cannot be solely demonstrated "on the surface" by shows of emotion. "A blubberer can be full of it," he says. Instead, Henger is looking for the offender to take full responsibility for his crime, not blame the victim in any way for what transpired, and to "refer to people as people, vs. objects."
Henger, who is 50, has been working with sex offenders for almost a decade. He had not planned on doing so when he trained as a therapist. Instead, after earning a masters degree in guidance counseling from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, he opened a private practice in which he worked, for the most part, with couples and families.
Henger had some clients who were victims of sexual abuse, but when he searched for institutions that offered training programs for treating the special issues of those clients, he couldn't find any. When he started doing his own research on the topic, he came to the conclusion that there were many more victims of sexual abuse than there were offenders. There was, he says, "a need to eradicate the source."
In 1991, Henger first set up a relapse prevention program for adolescent offenders. Then, in 1994, he discovered that Wisconsin was home to the Wisconsin Sex Offender Treatment Network, the nation's first program to train mental health professionals in up-to-date treatment specifically for sex offenders. Basically, the program created a network in which Lloyd Sinclair, a psychotherapist with 27 years of experience in the field, ran workshops for mental health professionals, who, once trained, could run therapy groups for offenders on parole and probation around the state. Henger signed up and became one of the inaugural graduates.
Once he began working exclusively with sex offenders, Henger never looked back. In nine years he has treated 2,000 male and female sex offenders in prisons and community settings. The makeup of his clientele is broad: He has treated indigents, firemen and heads of corporations. Reflecting national statistics, the vast majority are white and knew their victims. Says Henger, "Most of these guys can't talk to a stranger, let alone offend one."
Henger has done most of his work outside prisons. Offenders are challenged by living in a community, he says, and challenging situations create an opportunity to intervene -- opportunities to change deviant thinking and behavior. Prison programs usually offer a set number of treatment sessions, perhaps 30. Outside, Henger can work with his clients for years -- with more control. "In prison, a man will say anything to get out," says Henger. With a client on parole or probation, Henger's therapeutic supervision is enforced by probation agents; regular polygraph tests augment his analyses of progress.
A central, obligatory tenet of the ATSA manual and Henger's therapy is, "Members shall not make statements that a client is 'cured' or no longer at any risk to reoffend." As in Alcoholics Anonymous, the assumption in the treatment of sex offenders is that they "may require ongoing management."
Henger, a sturdy man with steady dark eyes, believes in the constant vigilance of therapy, telling his groups, "This is no different than a fireman or a military man in training. You need to keep a constant edge."
