ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996 TAG: 9609100012
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GINA KOLATA THE NEW YORK TIMES
The California solution for child molesters sounds so simple - just castrate them, or make them take a chemical that takes away their sex drive, and they will offend no more.
The plan comes at a time when both political parties are vying to see who can be toughest on crime. And it targets the criminals Americans find most disgusting.
But, mental health experts who treat sex offenders and legal experts who deal with them say that, alas, it's not so simple.
Leaving aside the question of whether this legislation can overcome constitutional challenges, experts say that virtually everything being assumed about child molesters and about castration, chemical or surgical, is a myth, a leap of faith, or just plain wrong.
The bill's supporters, for example, assume that child molesters are more likely than other criminals to repeat the crime. Assemblyman Bill Hoge of Pasadena, the chief sponsor of the bill, said that child molesters, when released from prison, ``will repeat this crime again at least 90 percent of the time.''
His bill would require any pedophile convicted of a second offense to undergo surgical castration or to take a drug that reduces testosterone levels to prepubertal levels. The same fate would befall a man whose first crime was sufficiently terrible.
A 90 percent recidivism rate? That is a gross exaggeration, legal and medical experts say.
It is ``a folk belief,'' said Frank Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. ``The recidivism rates of child molesters are lower than in other crimes,'' he said. ``They are in the teens or 20s, depending on how long you follow up.''
In contrast, said Dr. Marvin Wolfgang, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a large study conducted by the Department of Justice found that 46 percent of all felons were convicted of a felony again within three years after they were released from prison.
Although the percentage of American men who are child molesters is unknown, in Canada, said Dr. Ronald Langevin, a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto, they make up about 1/20th of 1 percent of the population.
But even so, why not stop them from their heinous crimes? ``Why not give these people a shot to calm them down and bring them under control or, alternatively, give them the option of going under the knife?'' Hoge asked.
The problem, some say, is that there is no good evidence that drugs, or even castration, prevent child molestation. Both methods have been tried on a voluntary basis but neither has been put to a scientific test and no country has made these treatments mandatory.
As it stands now, it is difficult to tell if men who received treatment subsequently commit fewer crimes because of the treatment itself or because they were motivated enough to ask for it.
Of course, most men do not want the treatment, said Langevin. He attempted a study at the Clark Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, asking 100 child molesters if they would agree to be randomly assigned to take anti-testosterone pills or placebos.
``Only 18 agreed to take the pills for three months,'' he said, and after three months only 12 remained in the study, one of whom confessed that he had been flushing his pills down the toilet.
Langevin said the medications can reduce thoughts of sex, at least temporarily, but men can still have erections. He added that not everyone responds to the drugs and that some who initially respond eventually become inured.
The drugs can make men grow breasts and can make them gain weight. In the long term, said Dr. William Bremner, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, the drugs can make men more like old women, causing them to lose bone and muscle and to suffer premature osteoporosis.
Which raises another problem with anti-testosterone drugs. They can be counteracted with shots of steroids like the ones used by some body builders. ``It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to get androgens to crank up their sexual functioning,'' Bremner said.
Another complication, said Dr. Raymond Rosen, professor of psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., is that only about 60 percent of men who have sex with children are motivated by uncontrollable sexual urges.
Others, he said, are ``acting out aggressively with women or children,'' while others ``are criminal types who will break society's laws in any way they can.''
He added that there is no evidence that drugs or castration will be effective against the antisocial or aggressive criminals and, in fact, he said, most studies of the drug ``did all they could to screen these people out.''
Langevin said that most sex offenders are alcoholics - as many as 76 percent of sex offenders sent to a Toronto penitentiary over a three-year period abused alcohol, he found, and about half committed their crimes when drunk.
Maybe the California legislature should require antabuse, the anti-alcohol drug, he said, only half-facetiously, adding that it also reduces sexual urges.
The lack of good data on the effects of castration or drugs on recidivism among sex criminals, and the fact that no one has ever done a scientific study to show these treatments help solve the problem, makes the California bill alarming, Zimring said.
``What you are looking at is the dynamics of ignorance in action,'' he said. ``This is `don't bother me with the facts' legislation.''
Decades ago, Zimring said, when social scientists started dabbling with eugenics, sterilizing criminals and the insane, ``the horror was what we would do in the name of science.'' But, he said, as terrible as that was, he considers the current movement worse. ``This is a celebration of not needing any scientific information or controls on punishment policy,'' he said. ``And that naked aggression is much scarier.''
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