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We've got two on sociopathy in childhood.

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One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael, to a Florida elementary school for the first day of what the family chose to call “summer camp.” For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son, an elegant boy with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly light brown hair, whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment. Michael’s eight-week program was, in reality, a highly structured psychological study — less summer camp than camp of last resort.

Michael’s problems started, according to his mother, around age 3, shortly after his brother Allan was born. At the time, she said, Michael was mostly just acting “like a brat,” but his behavior soon escalated to throwing tantrums during which he would scream and shriek inconsolably. These weren’t ordinary toddler’s fits. “It wasn’t, ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I’m frustrated’ — the normal things kids do,” Anne remembered. “His behavior was really out there. And it would happen for hours and hours each day, no matter what we did.” For several years, Michael screamed every time his parents told him to put on his shoes or perform other ordinary tasks, like retrieving one of his toys from the living room. “Going somewhere, staying somewhere — anything would set him off,” Miguel said. These furies lasted well beyond toddlerhood. At 8, Michael would still fly into a rage when Anne or Miguel tried to get him ready for school, punching the wall and kicking holes in the door. Left unwatched, he would cut up his trousers with scissors or methodically pull his hair out. He would also vent his anger by slamming the toilet seat down again and again until it broke.

When Anne and Miguel first took Michael to see a therapist, he was given a diagnosis of “firstborn syndrome”: acting out because he resented his new sibling. While both parents acknowledged that Michael was deeply hostile to the new baby, sibling rivalry didn’t seem sufficient to explain his consistently extreme behavior.

By the time he turned 5, Michael had developed an uncanny ability to switch from full-blown anger to moments of pure rationality or calculated charm — a facility that Anne describes as deeply unsettling. “You never know when you’re going to see a proper emotion,” she said. She recalled one argument, over a homework assignment, when Michael shrieked and wept as she tried to reason with him. “I said: ‘Michael, remember the brainstorming we did yesterday? All you have to do is take your thoughts from that and turn them into sentences, and you’re done!’ He’s still screaming bloody murder, so I say, ‘Michael, I thought we brainstormed so we could avoid all this drama today.’ He stopped dead, in the middle of the screaming, turned to me and said in this flat, adult voice, ‘Well, you didn’t think that through very clearly then, did you?’ ”

Anne and Miguel live in a small coastal town south of Miami, the kind of place where children ride their bikes on well-maintained cul-de-sacs. (To protect the subjects’ privacy, only first or middle names have been used.) The morning I met them was overcast and hot. Seated on a sofa in the family’s spacious living room, Anne sipped a Coke Zero while her two younger sons — Allan, 6, and Jake, 2 — played on the carpet. So far, she said, neither of the younger boys exhibited problems like Michael’s.

“We have bookshelves full of these books — ‘The Defiant Child’, ‘The Explosive Child,’ ” she told me. “All these books with different strategies, and we try them, and sometimes they seem to work for a few days, but then it goes right back to how it was.” A former elementary-school teacher with a degree in child psychology, Anne admitted feeling frustrated despite her training. “We feel like we’ve been spinning our wheels,” she said. “Is it us? Is it him? Is it both? All these doctors and all this technology. But nobody has been able to tell us, ‘This is the problem, and this is what you need to do.’ ”

At 37, Anne is voluble and frank. She had recently started managing a food truck, and the day we met, she was in Florida business mufti: a Bluetooth headset and iPhone, jean shorts and a fluorescent green tank top emblazoned with the name of her business. Miguel is more reserved. A former commercial pilot who now works as a real estate agent, he often acted as the family’s mediator, negotiating tense moments with the calm of a man who has landed planes in stormy conditions.

“In the beginning, I thought it was us,” Miguel said, as his two younger sons played loudly with a toy car. “But Michael defies logic. You do things by the book, and he’s still off the wall. We became so tired of fighting with him in public that we really cut back on our social life.”

Over the last six years, Michael’s parents have taken him to eight different therapists and received a proliferating number of diagnoses. “We’ve had so many people tell us so many different things,” Anne said. “Oh, it’s A.D.D. — oh, it’s not. It’s depression — or it’s not. You could open the DSM and point to a random thing, and chances are he has elements of it. He’s got characteristics of O.C.D. He’s got characteristics of sensory-integration disorder. Nobody knows what the predominant feature is, in terms of treating him. Which is the frustrating part.”

Then last spring, the psychologist treating Michael referred his parents to Dan Waschbusch, a researcher at Florida International University. Following a battery of evaluations, Anne and Miguel were presented with another possible diagnosis: their son Michael might be a psychopath.

For the past 10 years, Waschbusch has been studying “callous-unemotional” children — those who exhibit a distinctive lack of affect, remorse or empathy — and who are considered at risk of becoming psychopaths as adults. To evaluate Michael, Waschbusch used a combination of psychological exams and teacher- and family-rating scales, including the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits, the Child Psychopathy Scale and a modified version of the Antisocial Process Screening Device — all tools designed to measure the cold, predatory conduct most closely associated with adult psychopathy. (The terms “sociopath” and “psychopath” are essentially identical.) A research assistant interviewed Michael’s parents and teachers about his behavior at home and in school. When all the exams and reports were tabulated, Michael was almost two standard deviations outside the normal range for callous-unemotional behavior, which placed him on the severe end of the spectrum.

Currently, there is no standard test for psychopathy in children, but a growing number of psychologists believe that psychopathy, like autism, is a distinct neurological condition — one that can be identified in children as young as 5. Crucial to this diagnosis are callous-unemotional traits, which most researchers now believe distinguish “fledgling psychopaths” from children with ordinary conduct disorder, who are also impulsive and hard to control and exhibit hostile or violent behavior. According to some studies, roughly one-third of children with severe behavioral problems — like the aggressive disobedience that Michael displays — also test above normal on callous-unemotional traits. (Narcissism and impulsivity, which are part of the adult diagnostic criteria, are difficult to apply to children, who are narcissistic and impulsive by nature.)

In some children, C.U. traits manifest in obvious ways. Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans who has studied risk factors for psychopathy in children for two decades, described one boy who used a knife to cut off the tail of the family cat bit by bit, over a period of weeks. The boy was proud of the serial amputations, which his parents initially failed to notice. “When we talked about it, he was very straightforward,” Frick recalls. “He said: ‘I want to be a scientist, and I was experimenting. I wanted to see how the cat would react.’ ”

In another famous case, a 9-year-old boy named Jeffrey Bailey pushed a toddler into the deep end of a motel swimming pool in Florida. As the boy struggled and sank to the bottom, Bailey pulled up a chair to watch. Questioned by the police afterward, Bailey explained that he was curious to see someone drown. When he was taken into custody, he seemed untroubled by the prospect of jail but was pleased to be the center of attention.

In many children, though, the signs are subtler. Callous-unemotional children tend to be highly manipulative, Frick notes. They also lie frequently — not just to avoid punishment, as all children will, but for any reason, or none. “Most kids, if you catch them stealing a cookie from the jar before dinner, they’ll look guilty,” Frick says. “They want the cookie, but they also feel bad. Even kids with severe A.D.H.D.: they may have poor impulse control, but they still feel bad when they realize that their mom is mad at them.” Callous-unemotional children are unrepentant. “They don’t care if someone is mad at them,” Frick says. “They don’t care if they hurt someone’s feelings.” Like adult psychopaths, they can seem to lack humanity. “If they can get what they want without being cruel, that’s often easier,” Frick observes. “But at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever works best.”

The idea that a young child could have psychopathic tendencies remains controversial among psychologists. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, has argued that psychopathy, like other personality disorders, is almost impossible to diagnose accurately in children, or even in teenagers — both because their brains are still developing and because normal behavior at these ages can be misinterpreted as psychopathic. Others fear that even if such a diagnosis can be made accurately, the social cost of branding a young child a psychopath is simply too high. (The disorder has historically been considered untreatable.) John Edens, a clinical psychologist at Texas A&M University, has cautioned against spending money on research to identify children at risk of psychopathy. “This isn’t like autism, where the child and parents will find support,” Edens observes. “Even if accurate, it’s a ruinous diagnosis. No one is sympathetic to the mother of a psychopath.”

Mark Dadds, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales who studies antisocial behavior in children, acknowledges that “no one is comfortable labeling a 5-year-old a psychopath.” But, he says, ignoring these traits may be worse. “The research showing that this temperament exists and can be identified in young children is quite strong.” Recent studies have revealed what appear to be significant anatomical differences in the brains of adolescent children who scored high on the youth version of the Psychopathy Checklist — an indication that the trait may be innate. Another study, which tracked the psychological development of 3,000 children over a period of 25 years, found that signs of psychopathy could be detected in children as young as 3. A small but growing number of psychologists, Dadds and Waschbusch among them, say that confronting the problem earlier may present an opportunity to help these children change course. Researchers hope, for example, that the capacity for empathy, which is controlled by specific parts of the brain, might still exist weakly in callous-unemotional children, and could be strengthened.

The benefits of successful treatment could be enormous. Psychopaths are estimated to make up 1 percent of the population but constitute roughly 15 to 25 percent of the offenders in prison and are responsible for a disproportionate number of brutal crimes and murders. A recent estimate by the neuroscientist Kent Kiehl placed the national cost of psychopathy at $460 billion a year — roughly 10 times the cost of depression — in part because psychopaths tend to be arrested repeatedly. (The societal costs of nonviolent psychopaths may be even higher. Robert Hare, the co-author of “Snakes in Suits,” describes evidence of psychopathy among some financiers and business people; he suspects Bernie Madoff of falling into that category.) The potential for improvement is also what separates diagnosis from determinism: a reason to treat psychopathic children rather than jail them. “As the nuns used to say, ‘Get them young enough, and they can change,’ ” Dadds observes. “You have to hope that’s true. Otherwise, what are we stuck with? These monsters.”

When I first met Michael, he seemed shy but remarkably well behaved. While his brother Allan ran through the house with a plastic bag held overhead like a parachute, Michael entered the room aloofly, then curled up on the living room sofa, hiding his face in the cushions. “Can you come say hello?” Anne asked him. He glanced at me, then sprang cheerfully to his feet. “Sure!” he said, running to hug her. Reprimanded for bouncing a ball in the kitchen, he rolled his eyes like any 9-year-old, then docilely went outside. A few minutes later, he was back in the house, capering antically in front of Jake, who was bobbing up and down on his sit-and-ride scooter. When the scooter tipped over, Michael gasped theatrically and ran to his brother’s side. “Jake, are you O.K.?” he asked, wide-eyed with concern. Earnestly ruffling his youngest brother’s hair, he flashed me a winning smile.

If the display of brotherly affection felt forced, it was difficult to see it as fundamentally disturbed. Gradually, though, Michael’s behavior began to morph. While queuing up a Pokémon video on the family’s computer upstairs, Michael turned to me and remarked crisply, “As you can see, I don’t really like Allan.” When I asked if that was really true, he said: “Yes. It’s true,” then added tonelessly, “I hate him.”

Glancing down a second later, he noticed my digital tape recorder on the table. “Did you record that?” he asked. I said that I had. He stared at me briefly before turning back to the video. When a sudden noise from the other room caused me to glance away, Michael seized the opportunity to grab the recorder and press the erase button. (Waschbusch later noted that such a calculated reprisal was unusual in a 9-year-old, who would normally go for the recorder immediately or simply whine and sulk.)

It was tempting to scrutinize Anne and Miguel for signs of dysfunctional dynamics that might be the source of Michael’s odd behavior. But the family seemed, if anything, exceedingly normal. Watching Anne ride herd on her two younger boys that afternoon, I found her to be brusque and no-nonsense. When Allan started running around the living room and then crashing into the sofa cushions, she spoke sharply: “Allan! Stop it.” (He did.) When Jake and Allan grew whiny about a shared toy, she arbitrated the dispute with a tone of patient exasperation familiar to most parents. “Just let him play with it for five minutes, Allan, and then it’ll be your turn.” And when she grew touchy about parenting strategies — Anne favors structure and strict rules; Miguel is inclined to be lenient — Miguel listened quietly, then conceded that his relaxed approach might be “optimistic.”

It certainly seemed so. As the night progressed, Michael’s behavior grew more violent. At one point, while Michael was downstairs, Jake clambered goofily onto the computer chair and accidentally unpaused Michael’s Pokémon video. Allan giggled, and even Miguel smiled affectionately. But the amusement was brief. Hearing Michael on the stairs, Miguel said, “Uh oh!” and whisked Jake out of the chair.

He wasn’t fast enough. Seeing the video playing, Michael gave a keening scream, then scanned the room for the guilty party. His gaze settled on Allan. Grabbing a wooden chair, he hoisted it overhead as though to do violence but paused for several seconds, giving Miguel a chance to yank it away. Shrieking, Michael ran to the bathroom and began slamming the toilet seat down repeatedly. Dragged out and ordered to bed, he sobbed pitifully. “Daddy! Daddy! Why are you doing this to me?” he begged, as Miguel carried him to his room. “No, Daddy! I have a greater bond with you than I do with Mommy!” For the next hour, Michael sobbed and screamed, while Miguel tried to calm him. In the hall outside his room, Miguel apologized, adding that it was “an unusually bad night.”

“What you saw, that was the old Michael,” he continued. “He was like that all day long. Kicking and hitting, slamming the toilet seat.” But he also noted that Allan had provoked Michael, at one point taunting him for crying. “He loves to poke at him when he can,” Miguel said.

From the bedroom, Michael called out: “He knows the consequences, so I don’t know why he does it. I will hurt him.”

Miguel: “No you won’t.”

Michael: “I’m coming for you, Allan.”

An hour later, after the boys were finally asleep, Miguel and I sat down at the kitchen table. Growing up, he said, he had also been a difficult child — albeit not so problematic as Michael. “A lot of parents didn’t want me around their kids, because they thought I was crazy,” he said, closing his eyes at the memory. “I didn’t listen to adults. I was always in trouble. My grades were horrible. I would be walking down the street and I would hear them say, in Spanish: ‘Ay! Viene el loco!’ — ‘Here comes the crazy one.’ ”

According to Miguel, this antisocial behavior lasted until his late teens, at which point, he said, he “grew up.” When I asked what caused the change, he looked uncertain. “You learn to pacify the rough waters,” he said at last. “It just happens. You learn to control yourself from the outside in.”

If Miguel’s trajectory seemed to offer some hope for Michael, Anne remained doubtful. Recalling the chipper hug that Michael gave her earlier that evening, she shook her head. “Two hugs in 10 minutes?” she said. “I haven’t gotten two hugs in two weeks!” She suspected that Michael had been trying to manipulate me and was using similar tricks to manipulate his therapists: conning them into believing he was making progress by behaving well during the hour that he was in treatment. “Miguel likes to think that Michael is growing and maturing,” she said. “I hate to say it, but I think that’s him developing a larger skill set of manipulation.” She paused. “He knows how to get what he wants.”

One morning, I met up with Waschbusch at the site of his summer treatment program, a small elementary school tucked into the northwest corner of the Florida campus. Before becoming interested in psychopathy, Waschbusch specialized in attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder, and for the past eight summers has helped run a summer-camp-style treatment program for kids with severe A.D.H.D. Last year was the first time he included a separate program for callous-unemotional, or C.U., kids — a dozen children between 8 and 11. Michael was one of his earliest referrals.

Waschbusch’s study is one of the first to look at treatments for C.U. children. Adult psychopaths are known to respond to reward far more than punishment; Waschbusch hoped to test whether this was true in children as well. But the process had been challenging. Where the A.D.H.D. kids were disruptive and hard to control, the C.U. kids showed a capacity for mayhem — screaming, tipping over desks, running laps around the classroom — that Waschbusch called “off the charts.”

“We had kids who were trying to climb the fence and run into the next field during P.E., kids who had to be physically restrained many times a day,” Waschbusch said, as we made our way to the school’s playground. “It really blew us away.” With short-cropped iron gray hair and an earnest, slightly distracted manner, Waschbusch came across as surprisingly cheerful — though he was also vigilant. While leading me down the school’s main hallway, he warily scanned each classroom door we passed, as if to confirm that no child was about to burst out of it. The study had a ratio of one counselor for every two children. But the kids, Waschbusch said, quickly figured out that it was possible to subvert order with episodes of mass misbehavior. One child came up with code words to be yelled out at key moments: the signal for all the kids to run away simultaneously.

“The thing that’s jumped out at me most is the manipulativeness that these kids are showing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “They’re not like A.D.H.D. kids who just act impulsively. And they’re not like conduct-disorder kids, who are like: ‘Screw you and your game! Whatever you tell me, I’m going to do the opposite.’ The C.U. kids are capable of following the rules very carefully. They just use them to their advantage.”

As we talked, Waschbusch led me to the school’s outdoor basketball court, where a highly structured game of keep-away was in progress. Initially, the game appeared almost normal. Standing in a circle, kids tried to pass the ball to one another, over the head of the kid in the middle, while the counselors gave constant feedback — praising focus and sportsmanship and taking careful note of any misbehavior. When the ball flew wide on a pass, a burly boy with short-cropped hair gave his receiver a smoldering look. “That anger — that goes beyond what you see in ordinary kids,” Waschbusch said. “These kids, they take offense easily and react disproportionately. The same is true for grudges. If one of the kids scored a goal on him” — the smolderer — “he would be furious. He would be angry at that kid for days.”

I had observed the same intense, focused anger in Michael. One night, while Michael watched his Pokémon video, Allan climbed up to sit in the chair next to him with the strap end of a Beyblade launcher dangling from his mouth. Michael looked at him with hatred, then calmly turned back to the computer. Thirty seconds passed. Suddenly, Michael pivoted, grabbed the strap with vicious force and hurled the launcher across the room.

At the summer program, though, Michael seemed less violent than morose. Outfitted in red shorts and a blue baseball cap, he played well in keep-away, but appeared bored in the group evaluation circle that came afterward. While a counselor tallied points, Michael lay on the ground, flicking a thread he had pulled out of his shirt.

The summer program was now in its seventh week, and most of the children had yet to show signs of improvement. Some, including Michael, were actually worse; one had begun biting the counselors. At the start of the program, Waschbusch noted, Michael’s behavior was comparatively good: he would sometimes jump up from his desk or run around the classroom but would only rarely have to be forcibly removed, as often happened with the wildest children. Since then, his behavior had spiraled badly — in part, Waschbusch thought, because Michael had been trying to impress another child in the program, a girl I’ll refer to as L. (Her name has been abbreviated to her first initial to protect her privacy.)

Charming but volatile, L. quickly found ways to play different boys off one another. “Some manipulation by girls is typical,” Waschbusch said as the kids trooped inside. “The amount she does it, and the precision with which she does it — that’s unprecedented.” She had, for example, smuggled a number of small toys into camp, Waschbusch told me, then doled them out as prizes to kids who misbehaved at her command. That strategy seemed particularly effective with Michael, who would often go to detention screaming her name.

According to Waschbusch, calculated behavior like L.’s distinguishes so-called “hot-blooded” conduct disorders from more “coldblooded” problems like psychopathy. “Hot-blooded kids tend to act out very impulsively,” he added as we followed the children inside. “One theory is that they’ve got a hyperactive threat-detection system. They’re very fast to recognize anger and fear.” Coldblooded, callous-unemotional children, by contrast, are capable of being impulsive, but their misbehavior more often seems calculated. “Instead of someone who can’t sit still, you get a person who may be hostile when provoked but who also has this ability to be very cold. The attitude is, ‘Let’s see how I can use this situation to my advantage, no matter who gets hurt from that.’ ”

Researchers have linked coldblooded behaviors to low levels of cortisol and below-normal function in the amygdala, the portion of the brain that processes fear and other aversive social emotions, like shame. The desire to avoid those unpleasant feelings, Waschbusch notes, is part of what motivates young children to behave. “Normally, when a 2-year-old pushes his baby sister, and his sister cries, and his parents scold him, those reactions make the kid feel uncomfortable,” Waschbusch continued. “And that discomfort keeps him from doing it again. The difference with the callous-unemotional kids is that they don’t feel uncomfortable. So they don’t develop the same aversion to punishment or to the experience of hurting someone.”

Waschbusch cited one study that compared the criminal records of 23-year-olds with their sensitivity to unpleasant stimuli at age 3. In that study, the 3-year-olds were played a simple tone, then exposed to a brief blast of unpleasant white noise. Though all the children developed the ability to anticipate the burst of noise, most of the toddlers who went on to become criminals as adults didn’t show the same signs of aversion — tensing or sweating — when the advance tone was played.

To test the idea that C.U. children may be less responsive to reward and punishment than the average child, Waschbusch established a system in which kids were awarded points for behaving well and docked points for acting out, and then he modified it to include weeks where either the reward (points earned) or the punishment (points lost) were augmented. At the end of each week, children chose prizes, based on the number of points they’d earned. Every day, Waschbusch and his counselors tracked each child’s behavior — the number and severity of outbursts, any instances of good behavior — and entered the results into a blinded data set. With just a dozen children in the program, Waschbusch admitted, the observations were more like a series of case studies than like a trial with robust statistics. Still, he hoped that the data would provide a starting point for researchers trying to treat C.U. children.

“So little is known about how these kids operate,” Waschbusch said, following the ragged lineup indoors. Even now, he noted, the idea that C.U. kids might respond differently to treatment was largely untested. “This is uncharted territory,” he admitted. “People are worried about labeling, but if we can identify these kids, at least we have a chance to help them.” He paused. “And if we miss that chance, we might not get another one.”

The morning after my visit, Waschbusch invited me to watch a videotape made during one of the program’s classroom sessions. The viewing took place in a room jammed with extra chairs and a small TV on rollers. William Pelham, the chairman of Florida International’s psychology department, stopped by to say hello. “Dan’s going to prevent the next Ted Bundy,” he told me cheerfully.

Waschbusch stared intently at the screen. As the camera panned across the classroom, Michael shoved at his desk uncomfortably, then tipped back in his chair, fidgeting. “Michael, you’re not on task,” a counselor reprimanded gently. “O.K.!” Michael said angrily. Next to him, a tiny boy with glasses dropped his pencil on the floor repeatedly, earning a reprimand, then pretended to chew on his own arm.

After lunch, the situation deteriorated. During class, L. hurled an eraser at another girl but instead hit a slight, dark-haired boy, who promptly scooted his chair backward at high speed, crashing into the desk of the students behind him. Watching L. chase the boy around the room, Wasch­busch dismissed the idea that she was simply out of control. “This is planned,” he said grimly. “She knows exactly what she’s doing.” When a counselor ordered L. to sit down, she returned to her chair and drew quietly for two minutes, earning 10 reward points. “That’s the difference, right there,” Waschbusch said, pointing at the screen. “If this were impulsivity, she’d already be up and running around again.”

One of the challenges of working with severely disturbed children, Waschbusch noted, is figuring out the roots of their behavioral problems. This is particularly true for callous-unemotional kids, he said, because their behavior — a mix of impulsivity, aggression, manipulativeness and defiance — often overlaps with other disorders. “A kid like Michael is different from minute to minute,” Waschbusch noted. “So do we say the impulsive stuff is A.D.H.D. and the rest is C.U.? Or do we say that he’s fluctuating up and down, and that’s bipolar disorder? If a kid isn’t paying attention, does that reflect oppositional behavior: you’re not paying attention because you don’t want to? Or are you depressed, and you’re not paying attention because you can’t get up the energy to do it?”

In addition to refining the psychological measures that test for C.U. in children, Waschbusch also hopes to gain a better sense of why some callous-unemotional children grow up to be deeply troubled adults while others do not. Magnetic resonance imaging on the brains of adult psychopaths has shown what appear to be significant anatomical differences: a smaller subgenual cortex and a 5 to 10 percent reduction in brain density in portions of the paralimbic system, regions of the brain associated with empathy and social values, and active in moral decision making. According to James Blair, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, two of these areas, the orbitofrontal cortex and the caudate, are critical for reinforcing positive outcomes and discouraging negative ones. In callous-unemotional children, Blair says, that connection may be defective, with negative feedback not registering the way it would in a normal brain.

These differences, researchers say, are most likely genetic in origin. One study calculated the heritability of callous-unemotional traits at 80 percent. Donald Lynam, a psychologist at Purdue University who has spent two decades studying “fledgling psychopaths,” says that these differences may eventually solidify to produce the unusual mixture of intelligence and coldness that characterizes adult psychopaths. “The question’s not ‘Why do some people do bad things?’ ” Lynam told me by phone. “It’s ‘Why don’t more people do bad things?’ And the answer is because most of us have things that inhibit us. Like, we worry about hurting others, because we feel empathy. Or we worry about other people not liking us. Or we worry about getting caught. When you start to take away those inhibitors, I think that’s when you end up with psychopathy.”

While the chance of inheriting a predisposition to psychopathy is high, Lynam noted, it is no higher than the heritability for anxiety and depression, which also have large genetic risk factors, but which have still proved responsive to treatment. Waschbusch agreed. “In my view, these kids need intensive intervention to get them back to normal — to the place where other strategies can even have an effect. But to take the attitude that psychopathy is untreatable because it’s genetic” — he shook his head — “that’s not accurate. There’s a stigma that psychopaths are the hardest of the hardened criminals. My fear is that if we call these kids ‘prepsychopathic,’ people are going to draw that inference: that this is a quality that can’t be changed, that it’s immutable. I don’t believe that. Physiology isn’t destiny.”

In the 1970s, the psychiatry researcher Lee Robins conducted a series of studies on children with behavioral problems, following them into adulthood. Those studies revealed two things. The first was that nearly every psychopathic adult was deeply antisocial as a child. The second was that almost 50 percent of children who scored high on measures of antisocial qualities did not go on to become psychopathic adults. Early test scores, in other words, were necessary but not sufficient in predicting who ultimately became a violent criminal.

That gap is what gives researchers hope. If a genetic predisposition to psychopathy is a risk factor, the logic goes, that risk might be mitigated by environmental influences — the same way that diet can be used to lower an inherited risk for heart disease. Like many psychologists, Frick and Lynam also suspect that the famously “intractable” nature of psychopathy may actually be overblown, a product of uninformed treatment strategies. Researchers are now careful to distinguish between callous-unemotional traits observed in children and full-blown adult psychopathy, which, like most psychological disorders, becomes harder to treat the longer it persists.

Still, Frick acknowledges that it’s not yet clear how best to intervene. “Before you can develop effective treatments, you need several decades of basic research just to figure out what these kids are like, and what they respond to,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing now — but it will take a while to get real traction.”

And there are other challenges. Since psychopathy is highly heritable, Lynam says, a child who is cold or callous is more likely to have a parent who is the same way. And because parents don’t necessarily bond to children who behave cruelly, those children tend to get punished more and nurtured less, creating what he calls “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“It reaches a point where the parents just stop trying,” Lynam said. “A lot of the training is about trying to get these kids’ parents to re-engage, because they feel like they’ve tried it all and nothing works.”

Anne admitted to me that this had been her experience. “As horrible as this is to say, as a mom, the truth is that you put up a wall. It’s like being in the army, facing a barrage of fire every day. You have to steel yourself against the outbursts and the hate.”

When I asked Anne if she worried about Michael’s behavior taking a psychological toll on his brothers — Allan, in particular, seemed to worship Michael — she seemed surprised by the idea. Then she told me that the previous week, Allan had “run away” to a friend’s house, located more than a mile from home. “Of course we were worried sick,” she added hastily. “But Allan is confident that way.”

Anne is a strict disciplinarian, she said, particularly with Michael, who she worries would otherwise simply run wild. She mentioned an episode of “Criminal Minds” that terrified her, in which a couple’s younger son was murdered by his older brother. “In the show, the older brother didn’t show any remorse. He just said, ‘He deserved it, because he broke my plane.’ When I saw that, I said, ‘Oh my God, I so don’t need that episode to be my life story down the line.’ ” She laughed awkwardly, then shook her head. “I’ve always said that Michael will grow up to be either a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer.”

Told that other parents might be shocked to hear her say such a thing, she sighed, then was silent for several seconds. “To them I’d say that they shouldn’t judge until they’ve walked in my shoes,” she said finally. “Because, you know, it takes a toll. There’s not a lot of joy and happiness in raising Michael.”

While it may be possible to modify a callous-unemotional child’s behavior, what’s less clear is whether it’s possible to make up for underlying neurological deficits — like a lack of empathy. In one oft-cited study, an inmate therapy group that halved the recidivism rate in violent prisoners famously increased the rate of “successful” crimes in psychopaths, by improving their ability to mimic regret and self-reflection. A related article recently speculated that treating antisocial children with Ritalin could be dangerous, because the drug suppresses their impulsive behavior and might enable them to plan crueller and more surreptitious reprisals.

In another study, the researcher Mark Dadds found that as C.U. children matured, they developed the ability to simulate interest in people’s feelings. “We called the paper ‘Learning to Talk the Talk,’ ” Dadds said. “They have no emotional empathy, but they have cognitive empathy; they can say what other people feel, they just don’t care or feel it.” When Anne worried that Michael might have begun manipulating his therapists — faking certain feelings to score points — she might have been more right than she knew.

Most researchers who study callous-unemotional children, however, remain optimistic that the right treatment could not only change behavior but also teach a kind of intellectual morality, one that isn’t merely a smokescreen. “If a person doesn’t have the hardware to do emotion processing, you won’t be able to teach it,” Donald Lynam observes. “It may be like diabetes: you’re never really going to cure it. But if your idea of success is that these kids aren’t as likely to become violent and end up in jail, then I think treatment could work.”

Frick is willing to go further. If treatment is begun early enough, he says, it may be possible to rewire the brain so that even C.U. children might develop greater empathy, through therapies that teach everything from identifying emotions (C.U. children tend to have difficulty recognizing fear in others) to basics of the Golden Rule. No one has yet tested such treatments in C.U. children, but Frick notes that one early study indicated that warm, affectionate parenting seems to reduce callousness in C.U. kids over time — even in children who initially resist such closeness.

As of January, Waschbusch’s analysis of the reward-versus-punishment strategies showed little consistency — possibly because the study group was so small. This summer, he plans to expand the program from one group to four: each group will be split between C.U. children and children with conduct disorder. Waschbusch hopes that by comparing the two, it will be possible to evaluate the differences in their responses to treatment.

As for Michael, it was hard to tell whether the program had helped. During the last week at camp, he bit a counselor on the arm, something he’d never done before. At home, Miguel said, Michael had become slyer in his disobedience. “He doesn’t scream as much,” he told me. “He just does what he wants and then lies about it.”

Miguel said he still had hope that Michael’s development would follow a similar path to his own. “Sometimes when Michael does things, I know exactly why,” he said with a shrug. “Because I’ve done the same kind of thing.” In the meantime, he offers Michael what advice he can. “I try to tell him: You’re here with a lot of other people, and they all have their own ideas of what they want to be doing. Whether you like it or not, you just have to get along.”

Ultra-Orthodox Shun Their Own for Reporting Child Sexual Abuse

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”

By cooperating with the police, and speaking out about his son’s abuse, Mr. Jungreis, 38, found himself at the painful forefront of an issue roiling his insular Hasidic community. There have been glimmers of change as a small number of ultra-Orthodox Jews, taking on longstanding religious and cultural norms, have begun to report child sexual abuse accusations against members of their own communities. But those who come forward often encounter intense intimidation from their neighbors and from rabbinical authorities, aimed at pressuring them to drop their cases.

Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses. Some victims’ families have been offered money, ostensibly to help pay for therapy for the victims, but also to stop pursuing charges, victims and victims’ advocates said.

“Try living for one day with all the pain I am living with,” Mr. Jungreis, spent and distraught, said recently outside his new apartment on Williamsburg’s outskirts. “Did anybody in the Hasidic community in these two years, in Borough Park, in Flatbush, ever come up and look my son in the eye and tell him a good word? Did anybody take the courage to show him mercy in the street?”

A few blocks away, Pearl Engelman, a 64-year-old great-grandmother, said her community had failed her too. In 2008, her son, Joel, told rabbinical authorities that he had been repeatedly groped as a child by a school official at the United Talmudical Academy in Williamsburg. The school briefly removed the official but denied the accusation. And when Joel turned 23, too old to file charges under the state’s statute of limitations, they returned the man to teaching.

“There is no nice way of saying it,” Mrs. Engelman said. “Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”

Keeping to Themselves

The New York City area is home to an estimated 250,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews — the largest such community outside of Israel, and one that is growing rapidly because of its high birthrate. The community is concentrated in Brooklyn, where many of the ultra-Orthodox are Hasidim, followers of a fervent spiritual movement that began in 18th-century Europe and applies Jewish law to every aspect of life.

Their communities, headed by dynastic leaders called rebbes, strive to preserve their centuries-old customs by resisting the contaminating influences of the outside world. While some ultra-Orthodox rabbis now argue that a child molester should be reported to the police, others strictly adhere to an ancient prohibition against mesirah, the turning in of a Jew to non-Jewish authorities, and consider publicly airing allegations against fellow Jews to be chillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name.

There are more mundane factors, too. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews want to keep abuse allegations quiet to protect the reputation of the community, and the family of the accused. And rabbinical authorities, eager to maintain control, worry that inviting outside scrutiny could erode their power, said Samuel Heilman, a professor of Jewish studies at Queens College.

“They are more afraid of the outside world than the deviants within their own community,” Dr. Heilman said. “The deviants threaten individuals here or there, but the outside world threatens everyone and the entire structure of their world.”

Scholars believe that abuse rates in the ultra-Orthodox world are roughly the same as those in the general population, but for generations, most ultra-Orthodox abuse victims kept silent, fearful of being stigmatized in a culture where the genders are strictly separated and discussion of sex is taboo. When a victim did come forward, it was generally to rabbis and rabbinical courts, which would sometimes investigate the allegations, pledge to monitor the accused, or order payment to a victim, but not refer the matter to the police.

“You can destroy a person’s life with a false report,” said Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, a powerful ultra-Orthodox organization, which last year said that observant Jews should not report allegations to the police unless permitted to do so by a rabbi.

Rabbinic authorities “recommend you speak it over with a rabbi before coming to any definitive conclusion in your own mind,” Rabbi Zwiebel said.

When ultra-Orthodox Jews do bring abuse accusations to the police, the same cultural forces that have long kept victims silent often become an obstacle to prosecutions.

In Brooklyn, of the 51 molesting cases involving the ultra-Orthodox community that the district attorney’s office says it has closed since 2009, nine were dismissed because the victims backed out. Others ended with plea deals because the victims’ families were fearful.

“People aren’t recanting, but they don’t want to go forward,” said Rhonnie Jaus, a sex crimes prosecutor in Brooklyn. “We’ve heard some of our victims have been thrown out of schools, that the person is shunned from the synagogue. There’s a lot of pressure.”

The degree of intimidation can vary by neighborhood, by sect and by the prominence of the person accused.

In August 2009, the rows in a courtroom at State Supreme Court in Brooklyn were packed with rabbis, religious school principals and community leaders. Almost all were there in solidarity with Yona Weinberg, a bar mitzvah tutor and licensed social worker from Flatbush who had been convicted of molesting two boys under age 14.

Justice Guston L. Reichbach looked out with disapproval. He recalled testimony about how the boys had been kicked out of their schools or summer camps after bringing their cases, suggesting a “communal attitude that seeks to blame, indeed punish, victims.” And he noted that, of the 90 letters he had received praising Mr. Weinberg, not one displayed “any concern or any sympathy or even any acknowledgment for these young victims, which, frankly, I find shameful.”

“While the crimes the defendant stands convicted of are bad enough,” the judge said before sentencing Mr. Weinberg to 13 months in prison, “what is even more troubling to the court is a communal attitude that seems to impose greater opprobrium on the victims than the perpetrator.”

Silenced by Fear

Intimidation is rarely documented, but just two weeks ago, a Hasidic woman from Kiryas Joel, N.Y., in Orange County, filed a startling statement in a criminal court, detailing the pressure she faced after telling the police that a Hasidic man had molested her son.

“I feel 100 percent threatened and very scared,” she said in her statement. “I feel intimidated and worried about what the consequences are going to be. But I have to protect my son and do what is right.”

Last year, her son, then 14, told the police that he had been offered $20 by a stranger to help move some boxes, but instead, the man brought him to a motel in Woodbury, removed the boy’s pants and masturbated him.

The police, aided by the motel’s security camera, identified the man as Joseph Gelbman, then 52, of Kiamesha Lake, a cook who worked at a boys’ school run by the Vizhnitz Hasidic sect. He was arrested, and the intimidation ensued. Rabbi Israel Hager, a powerful Vizhnitz rabbi in Monsey, N.Y., began calling the mother, asking her to cease her cooperation with the criminal case and, instead, to bring the matter to a rabbinical court under his jurisdiction, according to the mother’s statement to the court. Rabbi Hager did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

“I said: ‘Why? He might do this again to other children,’ ” the mother said in the statement. The mother, who asked that The New York Times not use her name to avoid identifying her son, told the police that the rabbi asked, “What will you gain from this if he goes to jail?” and said that, in a later call, he offered her $20,000 to pay for therapy for her son if the charges were dropped.

On April 24, three days before the case was set for trial, the boy was expelled from his school. When the mother protested, she said, the principal threatened to report her for child abuse.

Prosecutors, against the wishes of the boy’s parents, settled the case on April 27. Mr. Gelbman was given three years’ probation after pleading guilty to endangering the welfare of a child.

Mr. Jungreis, the Williamsburg father, had a similar experience. He first suspected that his son was being molested after he came home with blood in his underwear at age 12, and later was caught touching another child on the bus. But, Mr. Jungreis said, the school principal warned him to stay silent. Two years later, the boy revealed that he had been molested for years by a man he saw at a mikvah, a ritual bath that observant Jews visit for purification.

Mr. Jungreis, knowing the prohibition on calling secular authorities, asked several rabbis to help him report the abuse, but, he said, they told him they did not want to get involved. Ultimately, he found a rabbi who told him to take his son to a psychologist, who would be obligated to notify law enforcement. “That way you are not the moser,” he said the rabbi told him, using the Hebrew word for informer. The police arrested Meir Dascalowitz, then 27, who is now awaiting trial.

Prosecution of intimidation is rare. Victims and their supporters say that is because rabbinical authorities are politically powerful; prosecutors say it is because there is rarely enough evidence to build a criminal case. “The intimidation often works, at least in the short run,” said Laura Pierro, the head of the special victims unit at the Ocean County prosecutor’s office in New Jersey.

In 2010, Ms. Pierro’s agency indicted Shaul Luban for witness tampering: he had sent a threatening text message to multiple recipients, urging the Orthodox Jewish community of Lakewood, N.J., to pressure the family of an 11-year-old abuse victim not to cooperate with prosecutors. In exchange for having his record cleared, Mr. Luban agreed to spend about a year in a program for first-time offenders.

Mr. Luban and others “wanted the phone to ring off the hook to withdraw the complaint from our office,” the Ocean County prosecutor, Marlene Lynch Ford, said.

Threats to Advocates

The small cadre of ultra-Orthodox Jews who have tried to call attention to the community’s lack of support for sexual abuse victims have often been targeted with the same forms of intimidation as the victims themselves.

Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg of Williamsburg, for example, has been shunned by communal authorities because he maintains a telephone number that features his impassioned lectures in Yiddish, Hebrew and English imploring victims to call 911 and accusing rabbis of silencing cases. He also shows up at court hearings and provides victims’ families with advice. His call-in line gets nearly 3,000 listeners a day.

In 2008, fliers were posted around Williamsburg denouncing him. One depicted a coiled snake, with Mr. Rosenberg’s face superimposed on its head. “Nuchem Snake Rosenberg: Leave Tainted One!” it said in Hebrew. The local Satmar Hasidic authorities banned him from their synagogues, and a wider group of 32 prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis and religious judges signed an order, published in a community newspaper, formally ostracizing him.

“The public must beware, and stay away from him, and push him out of our camp, not speak to him, and even more, not to honor him or support him, and not allow him to set foot in any synagogue until he returns from his evil ways,” the order said in Hebrew.

“They had small children coming to my house and spitting on me and on my children and wife,” Rabbi Rosenberg, 61, said in an interview.

Rabbi Tzvi Gluck, 31, of Queens, the son of a prominent rabbi and an informal liaison to secular law enforcement, began helping victims after he met troubled teenagers at Our Place, a help center in Brooklyn, and realized that sexual abuse was often the root of their problems. It was when he began helping the teenagers report cases to the police that he also received threats.

In February, for example, he received a call asking him to urge an abuse victim to abandon a case. “A guy called me up and said: ‘Listen, I want you to know that people on the street are talking about what they can do to hurt you financially. And maybe speak to your children’s schools, to get your kids thrown out of school.’ ”

Rabbi Gluck said he had helped at least a dozen ultra-Orthodox abuse victims bring cases to the Brooklyn district attorney in recent years, and each time, he said, the victim came under heavy pressure to back down. In a case late last year that did not get to the police, a 30-year-old molested a 14-year-old boy in a Jewish ritual bath in Brooklyn, and a rabbi “made the boy apologize to the molester for seducing him,” he said.

“If a guy in our community gets diagnosed with cancer, the whole community will come running to help them,” he said. “But if someone comes out and says they were a victim of abuse, as a whole, the community looks at them and says, ‘Go jump in a lake.’ ”

Traces of Change

Awareness of child sexual abuse is increasing in the ultra-Orthodox community. Since 2008, hundreds of adult abuse survivors have told their stories, mostly anonymously, on blogs and radio call-in shows, and to victims’ advocates. Rabbi-vetted books like “Let’s Stay Safe,” aimed at teaching children what to do if they are inappropriately touched, are selling well.

The response by communal authorities, however, has been uneven.

In March, for example, Satmar Hasidic authorities in Williamsburg took what advocates said was an unprecedented step: They posted a Yiddish sign in synagogues warning adults and children to stay away from a community member who they said was molesting young men. But the sign did not urge victims to call the police: “With great pain we must, according to the request of the brilliant rabbis (may they live long and good lives), inform you that the young man,” who was named, “is, unfortunately, an injurious person and he is a great danger to our community.”

In Crown Heights, where the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement has its headquarters, there has been more significant change. In July 2011, a religious court declared that the traditional prohibition against mesirah did not apply in cases with evidence of abuse. “One is forbidden to remain silent in such situations,” said the ruling, signed by two of the court’s three judges.

Since then, five molesting cases have been brought from the neighborhood — “as many sexual abuse-related arrests and reports as there had been in the past 20 years,” said Eliyahu Federman, a lawyer who helps victims in Crown Heights, citing public information.

Mordechai Feinstein, 19, helped prompt the ruling by telling the Crown Heights religious court that he had been touched inappropriately at age 15 by Rabbi Moshe F. Keller, a Lubavitcher who ran a foundation for at-risk youth and whom Mr. Feinstein had considered his spiritual mentor.

Last week, Rabbi Keller was sentenced in Criminal Court to three years’ probation for endangering the welfare of a child. And Mr. Feinstein, who is no longer religious, is starting a campaign to encourage more abuse victims to come forward. He is working with two prominent civil rights attorneys, Norman Siegel and Herbert Teitelbaum, who are asking lawyers to provide free assistance to abuse victims frustrated by their dealings with prosecutors.

“The community is a garden; there are a lot of beautiful things about it,” Mr. Feinstein said. “We just have to help them weed out the garden and take out the things that don’t belong there.”

For Ultra-Orthodox in Abuse Cases, Prosecutor Has Different Rules

An influential rabbi came last summer to the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, with a message: his ultra-Orthodox advocacy group was instructing adherent Jews that they could report allegations of child sexual abuse to district attorneys or the police only if a rabbi first determined that the suspicions were credible.

The pronouncement was a blunt challenge to Mr. Hynes’s authority. But the district attorney “expressed no opposition or objection,” the rabbi, Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, recalled.

In fact, when Mr. Hynes held a Hanukkah party at his office in December, he invited many ultra-Orthodox rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group, Agudath Israel of America. He even chose Rabbi Zwiebel, the group’s executive vice president, as keynote speaker at the party.

Mr. Hynes has won election six times as district attorney thanks in part to support from ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who lead growing communities in neighborhoods like Borough Park and Crown Heights. But in recent years, as allegations of child sexual abuse have shaken the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, victims’ rights groups have expressed concern that he is not vigorously pursuing these cases because of his deep ties to the rabbis.

Many of the rabbis consider sexual abuse accusations to be community matters best handled by rabbinical authorities, who often do not report their conclusions to the police.

In 2009, as criticism of his record mounted, Mr. Hynes set up a program to reach out to ultra-Orthodox victims of child sexual abuse. Called Kol Tzedek (Voice of Justice in Hebrew), the program is intended to “ensure safety in the community and to fully support those affected by abuse,” his office said.

In recent months, Mr. Hynes and his aides have said the program has contributed to an effective crackdown on child sexual abuse among ultra-Orthodox Jews, saying it had led to 95 arrests involving more than 120 victims.

But Mr. Hynes has taken the highly unusual step of declining to publicize the names of defendants prosecuted under the program — even those convicted. At the same time, he continues to publicize allegations of child sexual abuse against defendants who are not ultra-Orthodox Jews.

This policy of shielding defendants’ names because of their religious status is not followed by the other four district attorneys in New York City, and has rarely, if ever, been adopted by prosecutors around the country.

Some sex-crime experts and former prosecutors said the policy contributed to a culture of secrecy in ultra-Orthodox communities, which made it harder to curb sexual abuse.

Mr. Hynes, through a spokesman, said he would not publicize information about specific accusations because he did not want to discourage victims from coming forward. But at least one ultra-Orthodox rabbi acknowledged asking him not to publicize these cases and said other rabbis had as well.

The number of sexual abuse cases involving children being prosecuted by Mr. Hynes’s office is up sharply. But an examination by The New York Times shows that some of Mr. Hynes’s claims about the Kol Tzedek program appear to be inflated.

Through an extensive search of court and other public records, The Times determined the names of suspects and other details in 47 of the 95 cases attributed to the Kol Tzedek program. More than half of the 47 seemed to have little to do with the program, according to the court records and interviews.

Some did not involve ultra-Orthodox victims, which the program is specifically intended to help. More than one-third involved arrests before the program began, as early as 2007. Many came in through standard reporting channels, like calls to the police.

While the 47 cases did include charges against camp counselors, yeshiva teachers and rabbis, they also included cases like that of a Borough Park cafe owner who was convicted of molesting a female Hispanic immigrant who worked for him.

At least three others were of ultra-Orthodox defendants who groped women on public transportation, including one Borough Park resident accused of placing his penis on a woman’s shoulder. The woman immediately called the transit police.

Mr. Hynes would not be interviewed for this article. He has never publicly opposed the ultra-Orthodox Jewish position that a rabbi must first determine that an accusation of child sexual abuse is valid before the authorities are notified.

His aides acknowledged that Rabbi Zwiebel informed him about Agudath’s position last summer.

“D.A. Hynes did meet with Zwiebel and told him he wouldn’t interfere with someone’s decision to consult with his or her rabbi about allegations of sexual abuse, but would expect that these allegations of criminal conduct be reported to the appropriate law enforcement authorities,” said Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for Mr. Hynes.

Prosecutors in the district attorney’s office emphasized that the Kol Tzedek program, which has a hot line, a part-time social worker and links to social service agencies, demonstrated that Mr. Hynes cared deeply about the issue.

“This is an incredible success,” said Rhonnie Jaus, chief of his sex crimes division. “I know how many cases we used to have before that. When I say a handful, I mean a handful every single year. It’s ridiculous the difference we have that I see with my own eyes between before the start of Kol Tzedek and now.”

Asked whether the office was exaggerating the program’s impact, she said all of the victims involved took advantage of the program’s services. “Our numbers are not inflated,” she said. “If anything, they are conservative.”

Still, some who have urged more aggressive prosecution said Mr. Hynes was too beholden to ultra-Orthodox rabbis for political support.

Rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University was one of the few victims’ advocates who attended the Hanukkah party in December.

“Basically, I looked around the room and the message that I got is: You are in bed with all the fixers in Brooklyn,” Rabbi Blau said. “Nothing is going to change, because these people, the message they got is: These are the ones that count.”

Potential Conflicts of Interest

David Zimmer was 25 when he groped a 9-year-old girl in a garage in Borough Park, court records said.

“She liked it,” he later told the police.

He then took two sisters there, ages 9 and 10. In August 1998, he was accused of raping the 10-year-old, according to court documents.

The police arrested Mr. Zimmer that year, but the case’s impact on the credibility of Mr. Hynes’s office resonates today.

Back then, prosecutors seemed in a strong position, with a handwritten confession from Mr. Zimmer. Initially charged with more than 24 counts of sex offenses, he pleaded guilty to one count of sexual abuse in the first degree and received five years’ probation.

Mr. Zimmer’s lawyer was Asher White, who is married to Henna White, Mr. Hynes’s longtime liaison to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Ms. White, an adherent of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement, makes $138,000 a year, more than most of Mr. Hynes’s prosecutors.

Ms. White organizes gatherings like the Hanukkah celebration, while overseeing the Kol Tzedek program. As a result, she has dual roles: she is supposed to encourage ultra-Orthodox victims to come forward despite opposition from some rabbis, even as she tries to maintain relationships with rabbis generally.

Ms. White and her husband declined to respond to questions about Mr. Zimmer’s case, or to disclose whether they had discussed it with each other. Prosecutors said Ms. White had no involvement, but entanglements like these have long raised questions about how Mr. Hynes handles prosecutions in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Hopes that probation and treatment would lead to the rehabilitation of Mr. Zimmer were shaken when new accusations surfaced: A prosecutor this month told a judge that while working as a locksmith in recent years, Mr. Zimmer went into homes and repeatedly molested children who lived there. The police discovered that he had kept a diary detailing the many times that he had abused children, the prosecutor said.

He pleaded not guilty to charges of sexually abusing four girls, ages 6 to 10. He is being held on $1 million bond. Ms. Jaus said the original plea agreement was the best that the office could do because the victims’ parents did not want them to testify.

“I have never received any pressure to do anything in a particular case,” she said.

But the father of the first 9-year-old, who said he never knew about Mr. White’s involvement, said he would have allowed his daughter to take the stand.

“The district attorney’s office called me and said this guy’s not 100 percent normal, so they were going to give him probation,” said the father, who asked not to be identified to protect his daughter’s identity. “If they don’t want to prosecute, what are you going to do?”

Mr. Hynes often describes how, growing up in the only non-Jewish family in his building in Flatbush, he spent the Jewish Sabbath turning on lights for his Orthodox neighbors, who could not perform such tasks under Jewish law.

When he was the only non-Jew in a four-way Democratic primary in his failed 1994 bid for attorney general of New York State, he placed advertisements in Jewish publications signed by more than 150 Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders.

“I’m really the Jew in this race,” he joked to a reporter for The Jewish Week. Referring to his opponents, he said, “I probably know more Yiddish than they do combined.”

Mr. Hynes’s attention to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has translated into votes. In 2005, when Mr. Hynes eked out a 42 percent to 37 percent victory in the Democratic primary for district attorney, he won in a landslide in several ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. In one election district in Williamsburg that is filled with Hasidic synagogues, Mr. Hynes pulled in 84 percent of the vote, according to election records.

The relationship has not always been smooth. He angered many of his closest ultra-Orthodox Jewish supporters in 1999 when he charged Bernard Freilich, a popular rabbi, with intimidating a witness in a sexual abuse case. Rabbi Freilich was acquitted the next year.

“I never knew of cases in which Joe Hynes bowed to community pressure,” said Aaron Twerski, former dean of the Hofstra University School of Law, who had served with Rabbi Freilich as community advisers to Mr. Hynes. “He would listen, and if there were merit, he might rethink something, but Joe’s his own man.”

Brooklyn’s highly cloistered ultra-Orthodox Jewish community — by some estimates, more than 200,000 people, the largest outside of Israel — would present challenges for any prosecutor. Informing on a fellow Jew to a secular authority is traditionally seen as a grave sin, and victims who do come forward can face intense communal intimidation to drop their cases.

In part for this reason, of the roughly 1,200 cases Mr. Hynes’s sex crimes unit handles each year, few until recently involved ultra-Orthodox Jews, though experts said the rate of sexual abuse in these communities was believed to occur at the same rate as in society over all.

But even when Mr. Hynes’s office did bring cases, they often ended in plea bargains that victims and their families believed were lenient. The Jewish Week, in a 2008 editorial, described Mr. Hynes’s attitude toward these cases as “ranging from passive to weak-willed.”

Rabbi Zwiebel of Agudath Israel defended Mr. Hynes’s record. “The D.A. has made a conscious effort to be sensitive to the cultural nuances of the different communities that he works with,” said Rabbi Zwiebel, though even he believes the names of those convicted should be publicized for the safety of the community.

Outreach Program Formed

Mr. Hynes seemed to turn a page in 2009 when he announced the creation of Kol Tzedek.

The announcement came in the wake of criticism after a 2008 plea deal he made with Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, a grade school teacher at a Flatbush yeshiva who had been the subject of sexual abuse complaints to rabbinical authorities for more than 30 years.

In the plea deal, which at least one victim’s father opposed, Mr. Hynes reduced two felony counts of sexual abuse to a single misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child. The rabbi received three years’ probation and was not required to register as a sex offender.

“That case really got the advocacy movement rolling,” said Mark Appel, founder of Voice of Justice, an advocacy group unrelated to the district attorney’s program of the same name. “People were so angry.”

Mr. Hynes’s aides said they had made more than 40 presentations to community members promoting Kol Tzedek. And of the few cases that yielded convictions that The Times was able to identify, the outcomes were roughly similar to cases involving offenders who were not ultra-Orthodox. Still, the new effort has not quieted the criticism.

Marci A. Hamilton, a professor of constitutional law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, blamed Mr. Hynes for not speaking out against the ultra-Orthodox position that mandates that allegations must be first reported to rabbis. The position potentially flouts a state law that requires teachers, social workers and others to report allegations of sexual abuse immediately to the authorities.

She said Mr. Hynes was essentially allowing rabbis to act as gatekeepers.

“That’s exactly what the Catholic Church did, what the Latter-day Saints did, what the Jehovah’s Witnesses did,” said Ms. Hamilton, author of “Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children.”

Victims’ rights groups say Mr. Hynes has also failed to take a strong stand against rabbis and institutions that have covered up abuse, and has not brought charges recently against community members who have sometimes pressed victims’ families not to testify.

Ms. White, his liaison to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, said the district attorney had few options, in part because some victims declined to implicate those who threatened them, fearful that if they did, they would face even more pressure.

“I always feel so bad for those parents, because you watch the shock on their face when they find out that their child has been abused, and then they get all of the pressure,” Ms. White said.

Mr. Hynes’s refusal to publicize the names of people arrested through Kol Tzedek has deepened suspicions among victims’ rights groups, while winning praise from some rabbis.

“I think that’s where the rabbis put a little pressure on him,” said Rabbi Shea Hecht, an informal adviser to Mr. Hynes. “I know I went to speak to him about that. I said ‘Listen, you got to do the arrest, you go to do the investigation, but please don’t give out the names before we know if the man is guilty.’ ”

In response to a Freedom of Information request by The Times, Mr. Hynes’s office acknowledged that in the “vast majority of cases, the disclosure of a defendant’s name would not tend to reveal the identity of the sex-crime victim.”

But, the office said, because the ultra-Orthodox community is “very tight-knit and insular,” there is “significant danger” that disclosure would cause victims to withdraw cooperation, making prosecutions “extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

Several former prosecutors interviewed for this article said the policy seemed to make little sense.

“The idea is that the more information you give out, the more likely it is that victims might come forward with complaints,” said Bennett L. Gershman, a former Manhattan prosecutor who specializes in prosecutorial conduct at Pace University Law School. “So the idea that a prosecutor would conceal this kind of information strikes me as illogical, and almost perverse.”

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And finally, a piece in the New Yorker about Mitt Romney's bullying days. More or less.