Police Psych:  Sex Crimes Cops Part 1:  It’s Not Just About Sex

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP

A soldier may have a few days in combat but they are interspersed with time back at their base.  The regular cop has what I like to call “burst stress” where they see a traumatizing situation, but in between are less stressful situations, or as Officer Friday put “Hour and hours of boredom surrounded by moments of sheer terror.”  There is a way to get away from the stress and the seeing awful things.  But, the cop working with sex crimes/offenses has a daily dose of images, one more awful than the next, each one more and more bizarre.  I read the story last week about a man who was released from a British jail who was talking to a fourteen-year old on the computer and telling her the sexual things he wanted to do to her before he ate her alive.  He had pictures on his computer of a child with an apple in her mouth sitting on a serving plate.  Sick!!  Or how about the detective who went to arrest an accused pedophile and while in the house found martini glasses with half eaten human feces in them and digital images/movies of pre-school children being subjected to anal rape.  Apparent the cocktail was used while watching the movies of children.  Life is a daily assault on these cop’s sensibilities, a diurnal attack of nausea from seeing a young life destroyed.  It is disgusting to even talk about these things, much less see them daily.  But we expect a portion of our police population to endure this attack so they can put the perpetrators in jail.  The problem is the criminals are not the only ones put in jail, as there are many types of mental jails. (more…)