Sex offender Rehabilitation

Sex offender rehabilitation has been questioned for years in that nobody can actually prove that it works. It is extremely hard to rehabilitate a sex offender because in a nutshell you will have to brainwash them to think differently than they do now. Many ways of rehabilitation have been introduced but they all have their pros and cons.

Aversion therapy is a form of behavior modification that employs unpleasant and sometimes painful stimuli in an effort to help a patient unlearn socially unacceptable or harmful behavior. The first recorded use of aversion therapy was in 1930 for the treatment of alcoholism, but by the 1950s and 1960s it had become one of the more popular methods used to "cure" sexual deviation, including homosexuality and sex offending.

Of the handful of methods psychoanalysts employed to treat sex offending, aversion therapy was arguably the most inhumane. Treatment involved presenting offenders with images of conventionally attractive targets geared toward there preferences. Sometimes patients were asked to provide these images themselves, and were encouraged to submit photographs of their idea of attractive. Aversion therapy involved projecting the image of the inappropriate sexual object onto a screen, and administering a noxious stimulus at the same time. It was believed that by replacing sexual arousal with noxious stimuli, the patient would rid himself of their sexual deviation and develop "normal" desires.

Initially, aversion therapy employed chemical emetics. Apormorphine was the most common drug used. Injected intramuscularly, it caused nausea and vomiting. Timing the effects of the drugs with the presentation of images proved difficult, however, and patients often built up a natural resistance to the drug. Chemicals were soon replaced with electric shock since it was perceived to be easier to control.

Ideally, aversion therapy was administered two or more times a day over a two-week period. According to the literature, many believed that physical and mental fatigue improved the chances of a cure. However, the regularity and intensity of treatment typically depended on whether or not the patient was residing in a hospital or prison or was being treated on an out-patient basis.

The California Sex Offender Treatment and Evaluation Project(SOTEP) is a controlled,

longitudinal study focusing on the effectiveness of treatment in reducing recidivism rates in rapists and child molesters. This project was mandated by California state legislature in the early 1980’s. This appears in the same legislation that repealed the state’s Mentally Disordered Sex Offender commitment (Offenders would go to prison rather than a hospital). The goal of this project is to provide the state’s governor and legislators with outcome data to base future public policy regarding sex offenders. SOTEP is an experimental design that includes random assignment of volunteers with treatment or no treatment conditions. SOTEP is an intensive cognitive-behavioral inpatient treatment program for prevention of relapse with sex offenders. Treatment is a one year program in the community. SOTEP is a comprehensive assessment of in-treatment changes and long-term treatment effects. This includes a follow up period for measuring recidivism rates with treated and untreated participants for 5 years or more.

Types of Participants/Groups in SOTEP are: Treatment group: Sex offenders who volunteer to participate and are randomly assigned to treatment at Atascadero State Hospital in California, Volunteer Control Group: Sex offenders in prison that participate but are not randomly selected for treatment, Nonvolunteer Control Group: Prisoners who qualified for the project but chose not to participate.

The selection Process of SOTEP starts with the staff going to prisons in search of rapists and child molesters convicted within the past 18-30 months. They are matched on age, criminal history, and type of offense. One member of the matched pair is then assigned to the treatment group while the other remains in the volunteer control group. Matched offenders for the third group were later selected also at random from the other amounts of inmates who did not volunteer for the study.

Stage 2 of SOTEP, the treatment Phase: A 2 year program directed by Craig Nelson, Ph.D. at Atascadero State Hospital using cognitive-behavioral treatment to prevent relapse where participants often use a prescriptive approach to maintain behavioral change while coping with the problem of recidivism. The main tools of this phase include motivation and accepting responsibility of your personal actions. Participants try to understand how their past crimes were set up and planned to help prevent relapse by knowing their patterns. Courses that the participants take include Sexual Education, Human Sexuality, Relaxation Training, Stress/Anger Management, and Social Skills.

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