It's good enough for me and my clients. I don't deal with paedophiles specifically, but I see no reason why it can't work.
TBH I am not that bothered about the existence of evidence via studies. Feel free to google it if you feel you need to know.
The bottom line for me is that I know that my clients' issues are dealt with.
Just one article quoting two studies. One controlled and one not.
I am not so sure: the offenders I spoke to - who were both at the end of the SOTP - were still speaking in a muddled way about their crimes. In the case of Joe, even the basic narrative of his offence contained factual contradictions.
A Home Office study in 1998, however, claimed to find that the programme is effective in reducing the rate of sex-offending. Offenders were tested before and after the SOTP (and again nine months later), and virtually everyone claimed to have fewer distorted thoughts about children and a better understanding of the effect abuse has on kids. But worryingly, even by the end of the programme, very few of the men were giving test answers that were in line with the responses from your average man in the street.
The study also found that those who had been released into the community had rapidly deteriorating "relapse prevention skills" - which means, in everyday language, that they were finding it hard not to go out and abuse another child.
The Home Office research used no control group - a flaw that plagues the academic literature on sex offenders. Because it had nothing to compare its results to, we do not know how a group of similar men who did not go on the SOTP changed during that time. As a result, the study and many others like it are of very little value - yet our practitioners and policy-makers rely on its findings.
In contrast, a unique study was conducted with a control group. The psychologist J K Marques and three colleagues wrote about the findings for the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour. They monitored paedophiles who were part of a very extensive programme of both individual and group treatment and, after they were released, of a year-long aftercare programme. These offenders were given the highest-quality treatment known for paedophiles, and it might have been hoped that there would be impressive results.
Yet the treatment made no difference at all. Those who had been through the programme were just as likely to reoffend as those with no treatment at all.
It seems, on this evidence, that Sigmund Freud might have been right after all when he judged paedophilia to be an intractable sexual orientation, entirely unresponsive to treatment. In the mid-20th century, we moved away from this view towards a belief that we could treat paedophiles sufficiently to release them into the community. There were honourable experiments conducted by people like Jan Evans. But judging by the available evidence, these experiments are shown to have failed.
Most paedophiles are, as the child abuse expert Dr W F Glaser of the University of Melbourne argues, "long-term recidivists. The oldest offenders in the clinic where I consult are in their eighties . . . Burglars, car thieves and brawlers all appear to give up in their thirties, but paedophiles just keep on offending." Combine this with the knowledge that sex offences against children have a negligibly low detection rate, and it becomes clear that the stakes, when a paedophile is released, are unusually high.
Some on the hard right, especially in the United States, have argued for a very different approach to treatment. They advocate "treating" paedophiles with drugs that drain them of sexual desire ("chemical castration"), or even actual castration. Yet study after study has found that these "treatments" never stop sex offenders. Shorn of the ability to maintain an erection, the molesters simply continue their abuse by using objects instead of their *****.
The sad conclusion to which all this cold evidence leads is that paedophiles can never be released safely because the risk of recidivism is so great. Perhaps this disappointing statement could be twinned by a brave politician (David Blunkett?) with the less palatable, but no less true, assertion that almost all paedophiles have been sexually abused themselves. These are not satanic monsters, but tragic, pitiful figures.
Once we conclude that they can never be released, but nor are they evil, we could begin to talk about treating them humanely.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200203250009
PS This is not my writing just what I grabbed off google.
PS 2. I share this point of view unless shown otherwise.
