Castration: One mans worst punishment could be anothers best hope
by AJ Willingham
Headline News
10 March 2016
The act of castration has been carried out for millennia as punishment for crimes big, small, and imagined; by kings and civilians, courts of law and victors of war. The days of such extreme corporal punishments are long past in the Western world, but a new bill put forth by an Alabama lawmaker seeks to dredge up one of its less visceral, but still highly controversial applications.
HB 365 was proposed by Republican State Rep. Steve Hurst (
https://www.billtrack50.com/BillDetail/723500), and would allow for a court to impose mandatory surgical castration for certain convicted sex offenders who are older than 21, and whose victims were 12 years old or less.
Hurst's reasonings mirror the simple penal codes of centuries past: An eye for an eye, a seemingly brutal punishment for an unquestionably brutal crime.
"They have marked this child for life and the punishment should fit the crime," he told CNN affiliate WIAT (
http://wiat.com/2016/03/04/alabama-lawm ... tion-bill/).
To say the bill is new is not entirely accurate. This is the seventh time Hurst has proposed this type of legislation (
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/lawmaker-in ... n-alabama/), all to no avail.
Given its history, the bill is likely to fail again. The subject at hand is too fraught with problems of ethics and application. Even Hurst himself seems to see it as more symbolic than practical.
"If we do something of this nature, it would deter something like this happening again in Alabama and maybe reduce the numbers [of sex offenders]," he said (
http://wiat.com/2016/03/04/alabama-lawm ... tion-bill/).
This line of thinking makes some assumptions that are debated within the medical and scientific communities: One, that all child molesters are pedophiles who act on raw sexual impulse; two, that the prospect of castration by whatever means is wholly unattractive to those who live within the shadow of pedophilia.
There is also, at the core of these debates, a fundamental ethical problem: Does punitive castration have a place in the modern American justice system at all, and if it does, is it meant to be a true punishment or a rehabilitative tool that can help both criminals and the public at large?
Punitive castration in the United States
While the unlikely Alabama bill would make the state the first to impose compulsory surgical castration upon certain offenders, there are several states today who still offer the procedure (
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2006/rpt/2006-R-0183.htm) for inmates and parolees found guilty of similar crimes.
Florida, Texas, Louisiana and California all have laws that provide for the option of surgical castration. The procedure is rather straightforward -- the testicles are removed via orchiectomy -- but the desired effect may be misconstrued. Rather than render the genitalia useless, the procedure by nature reduces testosterone, which typically tamps down or outright extinguishes libido and sexual urges.
The more widely legislated, and commonly accepted method to gain this result is chemical castration, which entails a variety of typically reversible hormonal and non-hormonal methods to lower sex drive without physical surgery.
Eight states (
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2006/rpt/2006-R-0183.htm), including the ones mentioned above, have laws that allow for chemical castration via the administration of synthetic hormones. Some of these states offer the procedure as a voluntary part of a parole deal or required rehabilitation. Others allow courts to mandate the procedure for repeat child abusers or those who have committed particularly violent crimes.
By U.S. state laws, these punishments are reserved for what we may think of as the worst-of-the-worst; the serial offenders, the sexual batterers, the compulsive and violent and unrepentant.
For a different set of people, who may never have touched a child in their adult life, chemical castration represents a viable path to freedom.
An unconventional solution
Dr. James Cantor (
http://www.jamescantor.org/) is a psychologist and sexual behavior scientist who serves as an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Cantor works with pedophiles who seek treatment for their attractions. He says chemical castration is a therapeutic option that many patients -- patients who have not and do not want to act on their urges - are willing to explore.
"Chemical castration is really a nickname to describe a range of possible things we can do," he says. "What we really mean is medically-induced sex drive reduction."
Once the shock of the term is muted, some of the procedures Cantor outlines are not too far removed from other commonly-applied psychiatric treatments.
"Many anti-depressants can reduce sex drive," he suggests. "At the other end, the more powerful medications require injections."
It can be difficult to understand the idea that someone with pedophilia does not necessarily pose a threat to children. Cantor says it's because of a fundamental, and extremely damaging, assumption.
"The important part is to separate pedophilia from child molestation," he says. "A lot of people use them as synonyms, and they're not. Pedophilia is the actual sexual interest
nobody asks for what their sexual interests are, and [these people] are bound by it."
The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (
http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/Paraphili ... 0Sheet.pdf) classifies pedophilia, or pedophilic disorder, under Sexual and Gender Identity disorders. The APA had described pedophilia as a "sexual orientation" in an earlier version of the DSM's 5th edition, but they issued a statement changing (
http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/13-67-DSM ... 103113.pdf) the term to "sexual interest."
Child molestation, meanwhile, is the harmful application of these interests, but Cantor suggests the bulk of such criminal actions are not related to pedophilia at all.
This point is contradicted in other research (
http://www.journalismcenter.org/resourc ... -juveniles) which finds pedophiles committing the majority of reported child sex abuse cases. The disparity may lie in differing classifications of the term "pedophile."
"Most actual cases of child molestation are not committed by actual pedophiles," Cantor argues. "They are often in incest situations, they happen in chaotic households where emotional neediness or drugs and alcohol may be present, but the situation is not motivated by genuine desire."
Childrens advocacy groups have tried to hone in on the defining characteristics of sex offenders who are pedophiles, and those whose motivations lie elsewhere. A behavioral analysis published by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitiz ... 2NCJRS.pdf) splits child molesters into two categories: Situational and preferential. Though these typologies are helpful to law enforcement, they are not intended for medical or psychological use and cannot be used as a definitive way to categorize all perpetrators of abuse
When castration seems like the only way
The application of chemical castration has also been used to treat other paraphilias. In 2015, New York Magazine (
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/wh ... rated.html) interviewed a 62-year-old man who elected to undergo chemical castration to curb his hypersexuality. The man identified himself as a sex addict who compulsively cheated on his wife with prostitutes and "would have done anything to stop."
A psychiatrist set him on a course of monthly shots of Lupron, a hormone suppressant. He called the results "absolutely fantastic."
"I was willing to chop my testicles off for the marriage," he said.
There is an ocean between a pedophile's desperate search for treatment (or a husband's desire to save his marriage), and the foul crimes of a child molester. While, as Dr. Cantor mentioned, the motivations for sexual crimes against children may extend far beyond paraphilia, there are those whose criminal inclinations and natural urges form a deeply dangerous union.
In 1994, a Texas man named Larry Don McQuay confessed, in great detail, to a string of child sex crimes so putrid and prolific The Houston Press reported his prison counselor assumed he must have exaggerated the numbers (
http://www.houstonpress.com/news/the-tr ... ry-6572071) for publicity. McQuay, a former school bus driver, claimed he molested hundreds of children, up to and including physical penetration.
From a prison in San Antonio, McQuay spoke freely to the media (
I1K9OZRnHiU) while serving a twenty-year sentence for coercing the son of a woman he was dating into a sexual relationship. He begged the Texas justice system to allow him to be surgically castrated.
At the time no state had such provisions, but McQuay's case compelled officials to search for a solution. In 1997 Texas passed a law (
http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/D ... GV.501.htm) making them the first to offer sex offenders the option of surgical castration. McQuay underwent the procedure and was released in 2005 (
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas ... 552532.php).
"Between punishment and treatment"
While McQuay and a handful of other convicted offenders (
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998 ... sentencing) have outright requested such a procedure, the notion of castration, especially surgical castration, as a punitive measure is highly debated and widely condemned. Even when it is presented as optional, global voices argue that the option, when given under the duress of incarceration, can represent coercion rather than choice.
In 2009, The Council of Europe, a human rights forum,
turbo2011 (imported) wrote: Sun Mar 06, 2016 1:01 pm
criticized the Czech Republic for surgically castrating
convicted sex offenders (
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/02 ... .castrate/), saying the practice was "invasive, irreversible, and mutilating." While under Czech law, sex offenders have to request the procedure, the CoE's investigation found prisoners feared they would face further incarceration if they did not comply.
Similarly, when South Korea introduced chemical castration to its laws in 2011, a pair of physicians wrote a paper expressing concern that the procedure, while effective, was difficult to apply responsibly.
"Chemical castration reduces recidivism effectively when offered to sexual offenders within the context of simultaneous comprehensive psychotherapeutic treatment," Joo Young Lee and Kang Su Cho wrote in the Journal of Korean Medical Science (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3565125/). "However, chemical castration under the current laws is vaguely positioned between punishment and treatment due to lack of informed consent by the recipient, and so remains a problematic issue for medical ethics."
Following Florida's introduction of a chemical castration law in 1997, the American Civil Liberties Union condemned (
http://archive.law.fsu.edu/journals/law ... alding.pdf) any form of punitive chemical or surgical castration, calling it "cruel and unusual punishment" that was "constitutionally suspect."
Ethicists have some surprising things to say on the matter.
"Punitive chemical castration would be hard to justify ethically," says Brian D. Earp, a research associate in Science and Ethics at the University of Oxford (
http://www.neuroethics.ox.ac.uk/our_members/brian_earp). "It's such an extreme intervention, and is often attended with many side effects, so considered as a form of punishment forced on someone there should be great caution and skepticism." Earp says the side effects of hormone-based sex drive reduction -- gynecomastia (the swelling of male breast tissue) and bone density loss, to name a few -- render it "far from a precise intervention."
Ole Martin Moen, PhD (
http://www.olemartinmoen.com/), a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the University of Oslo, disagrees.
"First of all, chemical castration is, philosophically, not really a punishment at all, for a punishment is something inflicted in order to be a harm or a burden on a convict," Moen says. "Chemical castration, by contrast, is not done in order to make things worse for the convict; it is made for the sake of protecting future children."
Additionally, Moen rejects the notion that chemical castration is "cruel and unusual," as the ACLU has defined it. "Even if the castration is a mandatory response to his offenses, to me it seems pretty clear that repeat child sex offenders have forfeited their right to have their sexualities intact after repeat offenses."
Cantor says the emotional and cultural weight of both the act of castration and the unspeakable crimes that legally warrant it makes it difficult to see through to real solutions.
"Situations like this are so emotionally evocative that it has become an opportunity for virtue signalling," he says, referring to the recent Alabama bill. "It would be a bonus just to get people to think objectively and neutrally to remove the hysteria that leads to these laws."
"Making [castration methods] available for those who want it? Wonderful," he continues. "But using it as a punishment is unethical by every medical and psychological standard."
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