"There's a certain amount of power and control over young girls that he might not feel with a woman," said psychiatrist Wayne Myers, a professor at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

James Colliton, who was arrested Friday on rape charges, is a married father of five with a brick-and-vinyl house in Poughkeepsie. The 41-year-old's suburban family apparently had no idea he used a Manhattan apartment to allegedly have sex with girls as young as 13.

"Does he suffer from potency problems with his wife and women his own age?" Myers wondered. "Was he looking for some greater feeling of himself as a man?"

"He turns them from Madonnas into whores. He's got a need to sully their innocence by payment and by the sexual act."

Michelle Ascher Dunn, a clinical social worker and family therapist in Manhattan, said if the charges against Colliton are true, he is a classic pedophile. "They don't have self-control. They're not able to think straight ... and nothing will stop them short of a prison cell or sometimes medication," she said. "They can be married. They can be grandparents. They can be policemen. The fact that they're accomplished and married with children does not mean that they don't have a split in their personalities - and when they're on that side of the split, they don't care about the consequence."

Sexual predators often point to their childhoods or emotional problems to explain their demented behavior, but there is no agreed-upon explanation for their actions, she said.

"A predator is like a lion with a gazelle," she explained. "He's not going to stop until he's killed the gazelle, no matter what kind of childhood he had. He's a sexual predator and he's probably not curable."

Originally published on March 5, 2006