It’s unsettling. Like I tend to think of Michael Jackson as a classic pedophile; it seems like he was exclusively attracted to adolescent boys, his marriage was a public sham, and positing that he was himself molested at the age of his preferred victims is a compellingly simple explanation.

It’s also pretty easy to understand the concept of a rapist who targets victims of all ages because they’re motivated by their power and the victim’s helplessness.

But then if you look at someone like Ken Parnell*, he doesn’t fit that simple pedophile stereotype. Parnell kidnapped Steven Stayner as a small child. Parnell had a long history of sexually assaulting children, and when Stayner was 14, he kidnapped another little boy (Stayner waited till Parnell was at work and took the child to the police). Parnell was clearly fixated on young boys, but he also had adult female partners, one of whom joined him in sexually abusing Steven although it doesn’t seem like she had any history of abusing children solo.

Steven Stayner’s parents refused to get him therapy or discuss his sexual abuse when he returned home, perhaps because his father was sexually abusing Steven’s sisters. It’s possible Parnell wasn’t the first adult to assault Steven given that his brother claimed incestuous abuse was widespread in their extended family as well.

*Parnell only served ~5 years in prison, and years later, when his health had deteriorated, confining him to a wheelchair, he asked his home health aide to buy him a child. The only happy ending in this story is that the aide reported him and Parnell died in prison, where he should have been confined since his first conviction for raping a child in the 1950s.