After the Foley scandal broke, Hastert, an Illinois Republican, asked the Justice Department to investigate the explicit instant messages for possible violations of federal laws, while defending the decision by his office to deal with the e-mails privately.
The failure to investigate sooner raises questions about House leaders' commitment to protect teenagers in the congressional page program from unwanted advances by lawmakers or adult staffers, said Gary Schoener, a clinical psychologist in Minneapolis and an expert on sexual misconduct cases involving professionals and public institutions.
"It's a very, very bad model for everybody to think that you have to raise a big fuss to get attention and that simply reporting something isn't good enough," Schoener said.
Hastert has been criticized for his handling of the case, with some conservatives calling for him to step aside as House speaker, while others defend him, pointing out that the teenager's family wanted the matter to be dealt with privately.
But several clinicians said that private admonitions seldom work to break behavior patterns that lead to sexual misconduct.
Some of the explicit instant messages between Foley and one or more pages date back to 2003 -- two years earlier than the e-mail exchange with the Louisiana teenager.
"Conceivably, had an investigation been done, the earlier and clearly inappropriate messages could have been discovered," Appelbaum said of the handling of the 2005 discovery.
The explicit earlier messages are now under investigation by the FBI.
Several experts said that alcoholism, being abused and being gay would not explain Foley's alleged sexual advances.
"His self-admitted homosexuality is not the issue. The issue is what looks like a harassment situation," said Gerald Davison, chairman of the psychology department at USC. "The issue of Foley's sexual orientation is entirely and totally irrelevant."
Likewise, he said, if Foley was abused as a child, it would not necessarily predispose him to become a predator himself.
"Most people who are abused do not become abusers," Davison said.
"One has to be very careful about excusing people for their behavior as adults because of things that happened to them as children."
ricardo.alonso-zaldivar@ latimes.com
