Treatment for Irish sex offenders `inadequate'

The way the Irish penal system deals with sex offenders is inadequate and unsafe, a leading American expert on the treatment of sex offenders told a conference in Dublin yesterday.

Delivering his lecture entitled "New Frontiers in Sex Offender Treatment", Dr James Tanner said it was of little use to think in terms of "cures" and then release prisoners back into the community where they were likely to reoffend.

The number of convicted sex offenders is 10 times higher in Colorado, where Dr Tanner practises, than in the Republic, despite the populations being similar in number and broadly similar in culture.

"I don't think we are that different", he commented, and asked whether there was a reluctance in the Republic to report and acknowledge sex crimes. Dr Tanner's experience in the US includes operating residential sex offender treatment programmes, secure detention facilities, halfway houses for juveniles and adults, day reporting centres and intensive treatment programmes.

He quoted a US survey of 411 sex offenders which showed that on average, over a 12-year period, each offender had attempted 581 sex crimes, completed 533 sex crimes, had 336 victims and committed an average of 44 sex crimes a year.

Of the offenders who were only known to have child victims in official records, 77 per cent later admitted to having adult victims.

Similarly, of those known only to have had adult victims, 50 per cent later admitted to having child victims.

Of the child sex offenders who were permitted supervised contact with children, 60 per cent experienced deviant fantasies.

Shockingly, almost 100 per cent of children who had reported a molestation by a relative answered "No" when asked if they would report the incident again. A very large proportion of abusers had themselves been abused as children, Dr Tanner added.

Polygraph results indicated that 86 per cent of sex offenders were still engaging in new high-risk behaviours and/or new crimes after more than a year in treatment.

Dr Tanner acknowledged that many treatments concentrated on teaching the offender to resist the impulse to offend, but said this was not working. At present, Dr Tanner is running a programme for convicted sex offenders in Colorado which accepts that the impulse can get weaker in time, but will always be there.

His programme involves residential treatment and monitoring before moving back to the community where treatment and monitoring continue throughout the offender's life.