Sorry for the misunderstanding. Please elaborate on your point.
The problem is this:
When people think about sex offenders, they think primarily of the stereotypical perverts who cannot control their sexual urges and assault or sexually exploit children because of these urges. These people (so it is argued) cannot be safely released into society, and should rather remain in some kind of mental health clinic until they either die of old age or get better (the former being more likely).
But in truth, there's a broad range of people who commit sexual offenses - ranging from the above perverts to the more mundane types and even people who commit stuff that's mostly a paper offense. For some of these people, this treatment is unnecessary because they're not actually mentally ill - they choose freely to commit their crimes and need to be punished for them, but there's no need to humiliate them with such treatment. Others (a minority of 'sex offenders') should probably not be in prison at all.
With juvenile offenders we run into the additional issue of them not being fully responsible for their acts - that's, after all, why we have ages of majority at all. With adults, there's the assumption that they're responsible for their crimes and that we can force them into this treatment as response. If I sat a fifteen-year-old down at a desk, attached electrodes to their genitals, and then showed porn to them, I would go to prison and become one of these sex offenders myself, even if the person consented. I'm not entirely clear why the state should be able to confr
Of course, even having perverse sexual urges is not itself proof of being unable to avoid acting on them. There's plenty of erotic story archives on the Internet with plenty of readers that detail a variety of sordid –
really sordid stuff, and the readers never act on it.
Further, weren't there a lot of professional critiques about the scientific value of these treatments?
I'd like to know more before I come to a conclusion.
