Castration in Europe

The New York Times has an article on the debate over castrated sex offenders in some European countries:

Whether castration can help rehabilitate violent sex offenders has come under new scrutiny after the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee last month called surgical castration “invasive, irreversible and mutilating” and demanded that the Czech Republic stop offering the procedure to violent sex offenders. Other critics said that castration threatened to lead society down a dangerous road toward eugenics.

The Czech Republic has allowed at least 94 prisoners over the past decade to be surgically castrated. It is the only country in Europe that uses the procedure for sex offenders. Czech psychiatrists supervising the treatment — a one-hour operation that involves removal of the tissue that produces testosterone — insist that it is the most foolproof way to tame sexual urges in dangerous predators suffering from extreme sexual disorders.

Surgical castration has been a means of social control for centuries. In ancient China, eunuchs were trusted to serve the imperial family inside the palace grounds; in Italy several centuries ago, youthful male choir members were castrated to preserve their high singing voices.

These days it can be used to treat testicular cancer and some advanced cases of prostate cancer.

Now, more countries in Europe are considering requiring or allowing chemical castration for violent sex offenders. There is intense debate over whose rights take precedence: those of sex offenders, who could be subjected to a punishment that many consider cruel, or those of society, which expects protection from sexual predators.

Doug Berman, at Sentencing Law & Policy, addresses some interesting wrinkles to the story:

I find both remarkable and annoying that the only "study" on this topic cited in this Times article comes from the 1960s.  Can we imagine any other field in which leading research in the field is nearly half a century old?  Of course, I am sure there are more modern studies that the Times might have mentioned, though I am not confident that there have been many (any?) rigorous modern assessments of sex offender castration in the United States, even though chemical castration as a form of alternative punishment has been considered (and used?) widely throughout the nation for well over a decade.

I often stress to my students that modern research on sentencing and punishment is often incomplete and partisan, in part because few people with the interest and energy and money to conduct research in this field are willing to explore ideas and data that may not confirm their pre-existing beliefs.  Though I usually stress this point in conjunction with death penalty research, the apparent lack of data concerning forms of sex offender castration likely also reflects these problematic dynamics.

It certainly is odd that there hasn't been all that much research has been done recently regarding castration, especially given that at least nine states in the U.S. authorize the punishment. Then again, despite the incredible number of sex offenders in America, the studies of recidivism are few and far between.

Comments

[Laurie]

What a fascinating subject! It's depressing that this subject (castration or chemical castration) hasn't been studied or analyzed. In psych class discussions of rape and desires, it's often pointed out that rape is a crime of dominance and violence, not really of passion. Therefore if you castrate a rapist, they will still have the desire to commit the crime, but they'll just use something other than a body part to rape. Now I'm not so sure this is true. Maybe the removal of testosterone would be enough to remove the desire and action? Why are we still chemically castrating if we don't know if it will work?