Rehabilitation of Sex Offenders

Originally posted in 2008 

Comment on this has come in by request from a regular reader.

Updates in 2024 in italics

My father molested a girl of about 14 with another man when I was four. And another when I was six. I didn’t know the details until recently, when my brother took a newspaper search service and got the news stories.  My mother never gave us details, my father gave him the general outline and he told me. 

I also know professionally any number of sexual offenders. I don’t like to offer much opinion on their recidivism, because I don’t have complete followup information on any of them. Some I know for certain to have reoffended. A very few – two in particular – I am quite sure have not reoffended, up to twenty years later. A few others I consider probable nonoffenders. Of those few who seem to be doing well, about half are no longer seriously attracted to their previous victim population, the other half remain attracted but have strategies to minimize both attraction and opportunity.

Statistically, sexual offenders who don’t reoffend don’t exist. It’s an odd feeling to know people who don’t exist. And to wonder if I am not seeing something.

It is the overwhelming recidivism rate which drives our legal and emotional conflicts about where to settle sex offenders in the community once their sentences are finished. We don’t like to punish people beyond their sentences in America, and have taken great care to structure our laws so that we don’t keep piling on just because we are angry or appalled. On the other hand, we take very seriously our responsibility to protect the vulnerable, especially children. These two values are in direct conflict when a sex offender’s sentence is up.

The intensity is driven in part by our extreme disgust at adults who take sexual advantage of children. I only partly understand this. Physical harm of children or neglect of them would seem equally bad to me. While we certainly disapprove of those as well and try to consequate and discourage those behaviors, there is not quite the animus around those unless they are extreme. Perhaps this anger is in counter-reaction to the minimizing of the damage that perpetrators try to sell us. Perhaps it is driven by instinctive taboos. But the energy is great.

If sexual offenders reoffended little more than the general population, it is likely that our American value of not punishing forever would win out legally. The enormous controversies about where previous offenders could live would recede. We don’t have bank-robber registries or check-forger registries. None of us wishes to live near dangerous drivers/violent drunks, but we bring less institutional power to bear in keeping them away from us.

We are exceedingly cautious around previous offenders for good reason: they have enormous rates of reoffending over time. While claims that none of them will ever be safe are inaccurate, the idea is not based on nothing. Convicted sexual abusers of boys may average over two hundred victims each. Abusers of girls have fewer victims, but are more numerous. In the face of such numbers it is common for people to picture offenders as psychologically all the same. I have not found this to be true, and many researchers find important differences in the population. In particular, the intellectually limited seem to have personality differences compared to those offenders who are average in intelligence and above. This makes an intuitive sense. A developmentally disabled 23 year-old man who wants 10 year old boys as friends and starts to become sexual in the friendship is different from a 30 year old middle-school teacher attempting to seduce. The behavior as experienced by the victim may be equally traumatic over time, but the perpetrators are constructed differently.

As an anecdotal example, I had a 19-year-old developmentally disabled boy who had had sex with a 13 year old boy. The younger boy was of above-normal intelligence and had a considerable juvenile criminal record already, including the sexual victimization of children younger than himself. So which is the victim? Yet the behavior of the older boy cannot be ignored and swept away. He must, simply must learn that sexual interaction with boys younger than say, sixteen, is bad and can get him in serious trouble.

I wish I had solutions. I have only conflicting values to put before you.