Review
I've said before that I am fascinated by what makes people tick. Some people want to understand cold fusion, dark matter, or internal combustion. I want to understand the motives of humans. It was that interest that caused me to read
Tiger, Tiger - the first-person account of a young girl who spent 14 years under the special attention of a pedophile. Her parents suspected, but ultimately did not interfere.
Fragoso tells her story very matter-of-fact. She doesn't read into other people's motives, she tells what she remembers and what she experienced, and leaves it to the reader to draw their own conclusions. And she resists the urge to editorialize after-the-fact, she doesn't diagnose or excuse or browbeat the characters of her past, she tells the events as she experienced them as a child, not as she has (obviously) come to understand them as an adult....
Beyond the Book
Margaux Fragoso says in the afterword of
Tiger, Tiger that one of the reasons she wrote the book was to bring attention to the need for treatment of pedophiles. The current system focuses on the treatment of the child victims, and punishment for the perpetrators. As a victim herself, she believes the best thing would be to find a way to treat the pedophile so there would be no, or at least fewer, victims.
A web search of the U.S National Library of Medicine demonstrates the lack of attention to this area of study. A search for 'treatment pedophilia' only garners 350 hits, while 'treatment schizophrenia' has over 50,000.
In an article in
Time magazine, experts explain that someone who seeks treatment is likely to be told...
