Few people ever would have suspected that the man police arrested last week for peeping at a 16-year-old girl from outside her bedroom window was a well-respected physician, husband, and father. But those who make a living dealing with the darker side of human behavior say that the origins of sexual deviance are complex and mysterious.
“You look at this individual, and you say ‘what on earth for?’ ” Lt. Rob White, head of the Metro Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit, says of the bizarre case of Dr. Don Blanton. The brother and father of the girl being watched chased Blanton and caught him in the family’s backyard. He was wearing gloves and a ski mask and carrying a camcorder. “He’s a doctor; he had a nice house and family. It just makes you want to delve into his mind more and figure out why people do what they do,” White adds.
Last week, Blanton’s double life came to a screeching halt when sex crime detectives booked the Summit Medical Center emergency room physician for videotaping the teenage girl from the backyard of her West Nashville residence. At 10:30 p.m. that Tuesday night, the girl’s father and brother, who had for years caught glimpses of a Peeping Tom around their home and tried unsuccessfully to catch him, finally nabbed the elusive perpetrator as he tried to take off on foot from their Forrest Park Avenue backyard. They held the doctor until police arrived at the scene. To make the matter even more bizarre, Blanton and the family he victimized knew one another.
Blanton told sex crime detectives that he had previously recorded the family and others in the neighborhood. Police later seized videotapes from his home, presumably containing footage of other girls and women he secretly watched. Blanton’s lawyer has said his client is set to begin extensive treatment at an out-of-state facility for his bizarre behavioral pattern. Meanwhile, the doctor faces two misdemeanor counts for unlawful photography and criminal trespassing. The maximum sentence he could receive for each is 11 months and 29 days.
According to police, there is no indication that Blanton’s wife had any know- ledge of her husband’s clandestine activities. In fact, his work as an emergency room physician could have been used as an alibi for his late-night prowling. And while some have wondered how Blanton could have hid illicit videotapes from his wife, Lt. White explains that voyeurs sometimes splice their racy footage in the middle of, say, a documentary about old churches.
So what drove a physician to sneak out after hours and videotape young girls and women in the privacy of their homes? Blanton’s lawyer, Ed Yarbrough, explained to WTVF-Channel 5 that his client “has a sexual addiction.” If only it were that easy. While Yarbrough might have meant to create sympathy for Blanton by comparing his problems with those of drug and alcohol addiction, experts say that the doctor’s voyeurism is an altogether separate problem.
“It’s much easier to say that a person is addicted than to say that a person made a conscious choice,” says Dr. Donna Moore, who speaks about the issue in general terms and is unfamiliar with the specifics of the Blanton case. “But you don’t just find yourself in the backyard of someone’s home without a certain amount of planning.”
Moore is the coordinator of sex offender services at Tennessee-based Centerstone Community Mental Health Centers. She says that her facilities don’t treat voyeurism as a sexual addiction; instead, it’s regarded as a behavioral problem. Their patients undergo a rigorous and long-term outpatient program that includes polygraph tests meant to uncover the extent and nature of the patient’s deviant behavior.
“You have to look at what a person gains from that behavior,” she says. “As behavioral creatures, we usually do things that make us feel good.”
In the case of voyeurism, therapists might try impress upon the patient that peeping at someone is not a victimless crime—that, in fact, it constitutes a severe and damaging invasion of someone’s privacy. In addition, the patient also might be treated with “sexual reconditioning,” in which therapists try to make having inappropriate fantasies uncomfortable for the patient. For example, a patient might be instructed to sniff an ammonia capsule every time he has a pleasurable sexual fantasy about children.
Dr. Oakley Ray, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt, also rejects the notion that voyeurism is a sexual addiction. “A lot of people want to use the word ‘addiction’ for anything that is ongoing and repetitive,” he says. “But for me it involves much more than that—it involves ongoing activity that is basically disruptive to someone’s normal life. Voyeurism doesn’t always have those kinds of consequences.”
And for years that was true with Blanton. Until police arrested him last week, Blanton went about his normal working and home life while living—uncaught—as a criminal. Sex addicts, on the other hand, plunge into behavior ranging from adulterous affairs to compulsive masturbation that keeps them from everyday activities—even after they’ve been caught and suffered the consequences of their actions.
Like Moore, Ray says that treating voyeurism requires a thorough approach. “The treatment needs to be intense and long-term,” he says. “It’s not like removing an appendix; it’s more like heart disease, where you have to change your behavior.”
As head of Metro’s Sex Crimes Unit, White would seem to have a deeper understanding of what drives sexual deviance. But even he admits to lacking definitive answers. “We talked to a guy who exposed himself out in Bellevue. We asked him, ‘What makes you do what you do?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m just driving down the road, and I had to do it.’ ”
