We need Gene and we need the stern judge, and we need the district attorney, but we need to work together, not for retribution, but for regenerating the family. That is the whole purpose of it.

Now, the punishment is, in large part, felt by the offending father by going through the process. Now, you don't want to reduce that process. It is like going through an obstacle course which, again, he is told over and over again, and the family is told over and over again, that this is something that society cannot admit.

You know, it isn't just loving. When I used to talk about caring, I am saying that we treat each family and each individual in a way that they feel that they will be helped, and it is not pity, and it is not again a pollyannish pat on the back, and I want to make that very clear. Now, I would like to turn this over to Tom, because Tom has experienced the process, and he can speak to it much more personally than I can.

STATEMENT OF THOMAS H. MOORE, VICE PRESIDENT, PARENTS UNITED, INC.

Mr. MOORE. My name is Tom Moore. I am the vice president of Parents United. I helped form the organization, and I have been with it for 5 years.

Five years ago, I was arrested for lewd and lascivious conduct with my daughter, and consequently because of this, I spent 9 months in the county jail.

I am one of the bank examiners that Gene is talking about. I had a very good job. My wife worked, a superstraight family at that time, four children, two cars, swimming pool in the backyard. I thought Í was very aware of what was going on and knew myself very well.

Something happened to my marriage in the last 2 years of it. I turned to my daughter consequently. My wife wasn't there for me when I needed her. I didn't come to this realization overnight, of course. It took a lot of searching on my part.

After talking to Hank and having my wife and my daughter in counseling, I came to a lot of realizations and insights within myself. I wasn't given straight messages. I had turned off my feelings. I had really shut down a lot of doors on myself.

One of the things that I found out for myself, and other members of Parents United, is that we open the doors to the feelings again, and I say again, because I believe that we all have the feelings, and we just lose contact with them. I came in contact with them again, and they felt really good.

My life has been—I don't cry, and I am really strong, and I take care of everything, and I had these types of situations coming down on me, and it was really difficult for me not to be able to cry, either in front of my children or in front of my wife, when I felt like it, so it was suppressed a lot.

Going to jail did me absolutely no good. It was purely a punitive measure. I lost my job, we sold our house because we couldn't keep it. My wife was working, but we moved our kids from our really nice neighborhood and schools into a cheap apartment complex, which was all we could afford.

My daughter was put in a shelter for 2 weeks when I was first arrested, a very traumatic, very traumatic experience for her. It was terrible. I had already moved out of the house; however, they still held her for 2 weeks in a shelter. I couldn't have any contact with her. She felt that she was the one that was guilty, that she was being punished. We had to keep restating to her, you know, reaffirming that she was not guilty, and also my other three children at first felt that she was guilty.

We talked about this, and we were able to talk about it through the program. If it wasn't for the program, I have a pretty good idea where I would be, and where the rest of my family would be. I would be one of these other statistics that we have running around someplace, the family on welfare, or the kids shooting heroin or smoking pot, or something.

What has happened is that our family is closer now than it ever has been, even though I felt we were close before. My former wife and I, of course, are no longer married, and it wasn't because of this situation. It was because we came to the realization that we were not compatible with one another; we had gone in different directions in our lives. However, we are still very close, and we get along fantastically well.

The things that it has opened up for me, it is really hard to express some of them. I wouldn't be sitting here to begin with. I wasn't even aware that I was scared when I was scared, and I was so uptight that I was getting stiff necks all the time, because I was really afraid to talk to people.

That is another thing that it has brought out in me; that I am able not only to face other people, but I am able to face myself. I have had to take a really hard look at everything that has gone on in my life.

What we do in Parents United is, in my own belief, a fantastic job. I see men come in that categorically deny that they have ever done anything to their child, and in our group, it is pretty hard to sit there with 14 other men looking at you and say that you haven't done anything, when the other 14 know that you are lying, and we are some of the best liars in the world, and I will admit that.

We are trying to survive, so when this first happens, we will say anything to survive. I will go to Parents United, I will go to a psychiatrist; whatever you want me to do, I will do it. That means that I will survive. We use this survival method and say, sure, we all want to survive; however, let's take responsibility for what we did and open up not only to other people, but to ourselves. Admit it within ourselves that something has gone wrong; that we have really got a problem.

It is so fantastic. That is the reason I have stayed with the program. I didn't go through it and then drop out and then go back to being a bank examiner or a mechanic, or whatever. I am really supercharged on it and what it has done, and I also want to stress that I really believe in taking care of the child. That is one of my main concerns.

I feel that if we help the individual, especially in a family situation, if the child still can go back to it, that the same thing will

happen to them that happened to me. The family will be closer, they will be better able to take care of themselves and their child.

I also had this happen to my son not long ago, and it was a mindblowing experience. I have been on both sides of the fence. I did it to my daughter, and then I had it happen to my son, and I really had to look at myself, and whether I wanted to kill this man or not, and while I was talking to him with my anger and hurt, I also was looking at myself and realizing; yet, "Remember, Tom, I was in the same spot once before, and he needs help," and throwing him into jail isn't the

answer.

If you want to punish him, that is fine, but I think we should really have to make it clear that we are punishing him, and that is not helping him.

The man is right now in a VA hospital, and he comes to our group once a week. I hope that he continues this, because he has got more insights into what was going on inside of him than he ever had before.

If we would have locked him up, probably he would be a basket case, and he could have gone through the whole trip of the system. When you get thrown into jail, I am telling you, it is really scary. It is a scary thing.

I am the only one in there that can't say what I am in there for. I have to lie a lot, and I have to keep covering that lie up, because I hear what they are doing to people that are child molesters, which brings up another point. I am classified, or I was; I am not on probation any more, and I have had my records cleared, as a sex offender. As a sex offender, I have to register with every police department wherever I live. I can't leave my country without getting a transfer through another probation department, and when people find this out or know that I am a registered sex offender, I am categorized.

I don't believe that incest is something that you can categorize with what the public thinks is a typical sex offender. There is something else that happens in there, because it is within the family. Very few of our men have had anything outside of the family, that I am aware of. It has always been inside the family, and it comes down really hard on them.

OK. So if society wants to come down hard on us, we will live through that, but I just think that this is another part of the law that is kind of misguided, in how we are dealing with the whole area.

Mr. GIARETTO. Before I turn this to Debbie, I want to give you some statistics.

Elizabeth mentioned that, oh, around 40, 50 percent of drug-abusive women have been incestuously assaulted; prostitutes around 25 percent; young prostitutes as high as 70 percent, and in another study on sexually dysfunctional women, about 80 percent have been incestuously maltreated.

Up to this point, in over 800 families, none of our girls has turned to prostitution. None have any serious drug problems, and this includes those girls who were deserted not only by the family, but by the community, and by desertion, I mean when a youngster at 13 finally finds her father's attention intolerable and she runs away, again a healthy reaction, and then says that she has run away because she was abused. The policeman then interrogates the father. He has seen television and he knows about his Miranda rights and denies, and then the dis

trict attorney drops the case, and when he drops the case, this irks us no end, because that youngster is not being given full dignity and respect as a member of our society.

Now, in order for this to happen, the mother has to desert her, too, and say, "You are a liar," or, "You are a seductress."

Now, we have a few girls like that; oh, maybe around 15 to 20, and with those girls, we have to go to extraordinary means in order to build around them something that resembles family, or at least some kind of support.

Debbie was a girl who was deserted by her mother and was never able to go back to her family, and I would like for her to tell her story.

STATEMENT OF DEBBIE, MEMBER, DAUGHTERS UNITED

DEBBIE. I am Debbie, and it started when I was 9 years old, and at the age of 15, I finally had the courage to go and tell the police. They called the family in, and my step-father admitted to it, but my mother didn't want to have to face the guilt, because she knew it was going on since I was 9.

I was really withdrawn when I first started going to the group. I couldn't face people. I didn't like people. If it wasn't for Hank, I probably wouldn't be here, because I couldn't handle it. My mother rejected me; I had nobody.

When I went into foster homes, my mother made it so I couldn't go to any of my relatives to live, so it was just me out on my own.

I am a volunteer counselor for the Daughters United. I counsel girls from the ages of 14 through 16. I talk to them about how I got through my experience, and I am now going to go to school and major in psychology, and now I have some purpose in my life.

And that is it.

Mr. GIARETTO. I want to say something about the denying mother. One of the things that happens in these situations is that you keep looking around for fall guys; you know, when I read my first case. I came from a humanistic viewpoint, and I was going to be compassionate with this man, and I wanted to kill him. It was a very lurid case; fondling at 5, oral copulation at 8, sodomy at 10, full intercourse at 13, and this really threw me for a loop, and I had to find out within myself what it was that turned me around like this, and I had to go into a lot of deep self-exploration, to find out what my hangups were. When I finally met with the father and it turned out to be someone like Tom, and most of them are, they are very contrite, they are very helpless, and they wish to God they hadn't done it, and they really want to know what they need to do to find out about themselves, not to do it again.

So, you know, then you become sympathetic with the father, and then you hear about the rejecting mother, and you say, "Now, you are the essential parent of this family. You bore this child. How could you desert her?" And, again, it turns out that the lady has to deny because she is so fearful of what will happen to her family and to her marriage and to the rest of her children, that sometimes she may have to sacrifice one of the children, and it is an awful thing that we do to a family.

Tom said that his divorce did not come about as a result of the incestuous behavior. As a matter of fact, it was a precursor to it.

And, again, we look for no fall guys. The mother eventually has to face the daughter and assume full responsibility for what happened as a mate. In other words, she and her husband couldn't put together a good marriage and, as a result, the father turned to the youngster, and the father very seldom goes to the youngster for sexual reasons.

At the beginning, it is just to make a connection. Again, it is the problem of alienation; looking for someone who will care for you, and it is something that they have to learn how to do, and as soon as you stop blaming, they will take all kinds of-they will do all kinds of things in order to avoid that confrontation with the law, which means the end of their family.

So, that is the reason I urge that we, as the people who are the interface between the troubled family and the society, that we do whatever is necessary to resocialize that family, and the family is the system, and you deal with all the dynamics, and if you start blaming any particular member of the family, you don't get at the caused root of it.

Another thing I want to say about an organization myself, and where the training comes in. Once you become first, you become an advocate of the child, then you finally become an advocate of the family, and then you think, guys like Gene are pigs, and Gene is a human being, too, and he is going to do what he is going to do, until we are able to convince him that what we do is better than what he has been doing, and then Gene becomes a friend.

We fight, we are still friends, and we still come from a different point of view, and that is great, because I think diversity is what makes us, and finally it is hammered into a system that works.

You know, we don't bat 1,000. Don't make that mistake. There are some families that, somehow, escape us, and I still think that is because our system is still imperfect.

We, of course, can't deal with, at this point, the chronic child offender who has been seeking sexual gratification for, say, 30 or 40 years. We don't have that power; we don't have the wherewithall to deal with that, but we can deal with over 90 percent of the cases.

Ms. COBEY. Mr. Kildee, one thing that we have noticed, it is now over 800 families that we have had in the program, only two of those families was pornography-involved at all. Other than those two families, it has just never in any way been applicable to whatever happened.

I think that one of the really important things to also understand about this program and this whole concept is that the object of it is that we are basically right now, as Hank said, an alienated society, and the way this program works is by having volunteers from the community, both professional volunteers, graduate students, and people themselves who have been through "Parents United," people themselves who have been through the criminal process, children who have been in "Daughters United," or in the boys' group, and we have brought other people in, lay people in from the community, and have gotten them all involved and have broken this network of alienation, this whole concept of: I am going to go out and exploit people as much as I can exploit them, and that is sort of the underlying con