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LadyEllen -> The Castration Cure (7/6/2007 4:11:58 AM)
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Last night I watched a fascinating programme titled “The Castration Cure”. Featuring a number of sex offenders in California and Texas, it looked into the possibility of using castration (both chemical and surgical) as a means of preventing re-offending upon release.
Note – others may also have seen this programme at some time and will know the sexual offences concerned. I want to keep this away from those particular offences as otherwise the thread might be removed or ramble off topic, and I think it’s worth talking about.
The offenders concerned had undergone surgical castration or were on a programme of chemical castration. All reported that this had cured them of their offending behaviour and motivations; whereas before even so little as the mention of their particular preference had been enough to provoke them, they now felt no arousal whatsoever. What had been an overriding, irresistible compulsion they claimed was now gone.
There remain however serious concerns about these claims and the procedure itself, which is variously seen as a means of exacting revenge, a breach of the convicts’ human rights or unproven. Few surgeons will perform the surgical castration, and the one surgeon who had and was interviewed, seriously questioned its efficacy in removing the risks involved in releasing such offenders – indeed his view was that sex offenders should be incarcerated for life regardless of castration. The chemical castration method meanwhile incurs potentially serious health risks.
Now as someone who is chemically castrated – though for entirely different reasons I hasten to add, I can identify with the results that these convicts report. Even at the fairly low dosage of testosterone blockers I’m on due to health risks associated with other medication, I have found that sex as such just isn’t that important anymore (though it wasn’t that important in the first place!). But more than that, and what concerns me with using the same methods on sex offenders, is that my sexuality isn’t gone but has changed – although given the other side of the hormonal treatments I’m on, which the offenders are not, perhaps that isn’t relevant. My concern is that whilst we might tame a monster with such treatments, we may produce a different one.
The overriding concern in all this is the protection of potential victims. But at the same time, we treat sexual offences as criminal matters with rehabilitation as the goal. If we are to make the argument that nothing can rehabilitate a sex offender and the public can only be protected by lifetime imprisonment, then what of other dangerous offenders – do we also lock up for life the repeat offender whose record of violent muggings is lengthy?
In my view, I’m happy that these sex offenders have been apparently purged of the demons that drove them to their crimes by way of castration, but even so I really cant see me ever accepting them out on the streets again one day. The potential destruction of even one more life should castration not have proven a cure, is just too much risk to take. And that just goes right against my notion of giving people a second chance, but when it comes down to it, I wouldn’t want one of these people anywhere near me and mine.
E
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