Sex Offenders: Does Rehabilitation Work? Essay

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For those convicted for sex crimes, the common sentence is jail time which is normally accompanied by a treatment program in form of rehabilitation that is designed to discourage the re-occurrence (recidivism) of these crimes. Be that as it may, rehabilitation of sex crimes is still surrounded by many questions regarding its effectiveness. This is mostly due to the difficulty experienced in designing and carrying out good research to check on rehabilitation. Thus, there is still no evidence that proves the ineffectiveness of rehabilitation of sex offenders in terms of reducing recidivism.

Rehabilitation entails more than just the delivery of social work help to offenders. As noted by Clear and O’Leary (1983,18), it is more about changing the offender’s attitude towards criminal activities, produced by the intervention of the state and resulting in the offender’s willingness to keep criminal activities. To Clear and O’Leary, intervention may derive from numerous factors which motivate the offender to refrain from further crime, including the fear of being caught and punished again, receiving insight into any emotional causes of criminal behavior, and gaining access to social legitimate opportunities. Simply put, rehabilitation implies that when placed in a similar situation as before, the offender chooses not to engage in further offenses.

Unfortunately, even with the numerous studies carried out to check on the effectiveness of rehabilitation, little evidence exists to show that this measure actually helps to change the behavior of sex offenders (Finkelhor, 1986, 137). Finkelhor also notes that there is little difference, if any, in the rates of recidivism among offenders who have undergone rehabilitation and those that have not. This, therefore, means that none of the studies on recidivism has satisfactorily shown strong results to favor the rehabilitation programs. Apparently, the current rehabilitation programs for sexual offenders have no empirical support and their success or failure is judged on moral grounds, which is determined by the emotions of the society.

For instance, among the rehabilitation methods recommended for sex offenders is psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is the widely used method to rehabilitate perpetrators of child sex crimes and the most common approach to this method is the use of group therapy. Group therapy however tends to over-rely on disciplinary, confrontation and unsystematic combination of psychoanalytic ideas and as such, there are no theories to support the program.

The lack of evidence to dispute or confirm the effectiveness of rehabilitating sex offenders can be attributed to the difficulty in carrying out good research studies. The ideal study would entail a close follow-up of sex offenders who have been released into society after serving their sentences and comparing their recidivism rates with those of offenders who have gone through the best rehabilitation programs available. Thus, the study would be comparing a treated group and a control untreated group.

The best way to carry out such a study would be to subject some sex offenders randomly to rehabilitation before releasing them to society while releasing others without passing them through rehabilitation programs. This however would present the research team with numerous challenges, especially on legal and ethical grounds. The question of the morality of releasing untreated sex offenders is likely to come up and trigger public outcry which in turn could result in the filing of lawsuits on negligence grounds. Therefore, the studies available today may not have any control group, and the results gotten by such studies simply reflect the percentages of re-occurrence of offenses for offenders treated at different time periods.

In conclusion, the effectiveness of rehabilitation in preventing the reoccurrence of sex crimes is still an issue that remains to be solved. This article has shown the lack of evidence to prove the effectiveness of rehabilitation programs and also shown a weakness in the study programs. Therefore, until a better program is developed to examine the effectiveness of rehabilitation, there is no way to tell if rehabilitation works for sex offenders or not.

References

Clear, T & O’Leary, V. (1983). Controlling the offender in the community: reforming the community supervision function. Michigan: Lexington Books.

Finkelhor, D. (1986). A sourcebook on child sexual abuse. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.

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