Sexual Rehabilitation In Prison Essay

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Pages: 5

Several years ago, a professor of mine was on jury duty during a sexual assault case. He explained that the man on trial had been assaulting his fourteen-year-old niece periodically for several years. However, the court revealed that the defendant had been similarly abused by a family member at that same approximate age. This raises an important mitigating question. What should be done with an attacker who was also a victim? And should a guilty verdict of a prison sentence include treatment?
While this case is horrific in every way, it is sadly very common for aggressors to have experienced trauma during their development (Widem 189). Is it reasonable to consider, that perhaps if the defendant had received help, the violence he enacted upon his niece could have been avoided. Is he not a victim in his own right, who at the age of fourteen was himself, and from that point forward, not given the necessary resources to cope and repair healthily?
With the
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Ho, a consultant forensic psychiatrist and clinical research lead at Secure Mental Health Services in England (SEPT), claims that sexual rehabilitation in prison has not been proven to be effective. He believes the public is under a false impression and deserves to know there is no evidence of a decrease in likelihood of recurrence upon prison release. Ho explains that while there is some overlap between sexual disorders and crime, this is not a complete overlap, and raises the question of whether “sex offending is even a disorder in need of treatment.” As a physician he raises the question about whether it is fair to implement treatment or to reassure the public of treatment’s effectiveness without proven efficacy. He claims that “most treatment programs follow a syllabus that will be the basis for which parole boards evaluate whether sex offenders may qualify for early release”, and makes the case that “physicians have a duty to weigh in on this practice of treating” without “robust research” (BMJ