The relationship between child abuse and wanting a child highlights the crucial importance of competent counseling for women with unplanned pregnancies. These distraught women are often exposed to a brand of "counseling" by antichoice proponents that can only be described as incompetent and unethical.

Although unwanted pregnancy is linked to child abuse, contraceptive and sex education and counseling, which should be mandatory components of all child abuse programs, are absent from most of them. Many abusive parents whose children have been removed from them keep bearing more children whom they abuse.

Research evidence is demonstrating that current treatment programs cannot stem the ever burgeoning tide of child abuse, which will continue indefinitely unless the focus is changed to primary prevention. It is true that the causes of child abuse are complex, multiple, and interrelated, but there is little doubt about the major contributors to the problem.

Recidivism of abuse is a crucial measure of the effects of treatment on parents and, indirectly, on children. Early investigators of recidivism reported ranges from 20 to 60 percent. Even higher recidivism rates are found in recent, more methodologically sophisticated research.

Helfer (1978) states that every year 1 ½ percent of our children are reported as suspected victims of child abuse. While social agencies are working to help this year's 2 percent, they are still trying to figure out what to do with last year's 2 percent and are pleading with legislators for more money to deal with next year's 2 percent.

There is a Jewish legend about the fools of Chelm, a community of smug simpletons who lacked insight into their incredible stupidity. They lived at the top of a steep mountain from which they had to traverse a narrow winding path to reach the market at the foot of the mountain.

A chronic problem in providing mental health care has been to motivate helping agents to work with aggressive client populations. For a variety of reasons, mental health providers have preferred to treat the "walking well," while the more difficult problems of working with the develop mentally delayed, the drug and alcohol addict, and the violent offender are avoided.

First, potential rapists and potential rape victims must learn that actual rapes are not like their usual fantasies of rape. Rape is not the rough seduction of an ambivalent woman who becomes overwhelmed by her biological response to a penis in her vagina or mouth and ultimately orgasms from the experience.

Marshall (1981) measured normal subjects' arousal to rape stimuli before and after subjects were confronted by a hostile, angry female (who was actually a researcher feigning anger toward the subjects). Following this brief confrontation, subjects showed definite increases in their sexual arousal to descriptions of rape.

Rape prevention can be more effective if greater attention is paid to the types of behaviors that frequently precede the rape. In our studies of rapists, 49 percent were found to have histories of other types of paraphilias, generally preceding the rape behavior. When 34 rapists were questioned, they reported a total of 54 paraphilias, for an average of 1.6 other paraphilias per rapist.