Chemical Castration Of Sex Offenders

“Traumatized people suffer damage to the basic structures of the self. They lose trust in themselves, in other people, in God…the identity they have formed prior to the trauma is irrevocably destroyed.” (Herman, 56). This is what victims go through when they are sexually assaulted; they are traumatized, scarred, and silenced and they feel so insecure because sex offenders continue to commit rape on more and more people everyday. More importantly, the cause of all this is due to the lack of efficiency in the treatments available for the offenders. Some of the treatments include castration, pharmaceutical prescriptions, and psychological treatments all of which contain flaws. Whether it’s ineffectively preventing the violence, issues surrounding
In other words, it simplifies to the idea of ‘an eye for an eye’ (Heim, 281). To this day, castration or even chemical castration is still used in parts of America and some European countries around the world but the question of its effectiveness remains. One can argue, castration removes the sexual drive of the offender but it simply cannot cleanse their state of mind, “Chemical castration assumes that sexual offenders, after losing their sexual drive, will stop molesting. Anyone who has taken Psychology 101 can tell you that there are many other reasons why sexual offenders commit acts of molestation. These are not individuals looking to score on a Saturday night. These are not individuals who want to find physical pleasure with adults but are thwarted in their attempts. These are individuals who like molesting children for the sake of molesting children. They are sick, not desperate. Reducing their sexual drive does not necessarily solve the problem.” (Kanter). This indicates a huge weakness that doesn’t necessarily benefit the offender, which leads one to wonder what would happen if they resort to other sorts of
In fact, some studies have shown therapeutic treatments to have no effect at all but rather it causes further recidivism. Comparing offenders who went through treatments and those who have not, a larger percentage of these individuals committed another offense, “Outcome data, as Marshall et al. (1991) reported, revealed no therapeutic benefit, with 38% of the treated and 31% of the untreated men being convicted of another sexual offense in the 6.5-year (average) follow-up period.” (Harris and Rice, 520). Within a small duration of time, many offenders have committed another sexual offense and this is only for the offenses that have been reported to police. Not only that, but the frequency that offenders commit another offense is beyond unreasonable further proving the uncertainties of psychological interventions. Studies also show that, “when the results of 18 men who had shown a statistically significant improvement in their deviant sexual age preferences were compared to the outcomes of their yoked controls, no positive effects of treatment were found. Similarly, subjects who had received social skills training and/or sex education recidivated as frequently as subjects who had neither.” (Harris and Rice, 515). The results raise the question of whether or not therapy can actually drive offenders away from the