Why Did They Do That? 3

One of the most challenging areas of probation work is our involvement with sex offenders. It was interesting to see that the subject was tackled by the Yorkshire Evening Post in their third article about the work of the West Yorkshire service. Since the introduction of accredited programmes some ten years ago, the Sex Offender Treatment Programme has been adopted by all services and many prisons as the preferred method of 'treating' such male offenders. It is only men because amazingly it has only been in fairly recent time that women have been recognised as being capable or likely to commit sexual offences at all. Numbers are still small though, so work has to be undertaken on an individual basis.

I have said before and I repeat that I have the greatest difficulty with the nomenclature associated with SOTP, in fact the whole notion that something is 'done' to these men and as a result they stop offending. Being the age I am, my experience of sex offenders was in a very different groupwork setting where we developed a loose and flexible agenda that adapted to the differing nature of each group. On the other hand the accredited programme is rigid and enforced by the video recording of each group leaders performance. After each session the recordings are monitored by so-called treatment managers for any deviation from the set agenda. Of course this represents almost the complete antithesis of what I and my colleagues were doing prior to the arrival of SOTP and explains why we reluctantly declined to cease working with groups of sex offenders. The reasons are not just philosophical they are practical. 

It is interesting to note from the YEP's article that victims are referred to, but readers would be forgiven for thinking that they were a completely different group to perpetrators. In fact experience and evidence points to the fact that they are often the same people. I well recall that some of the most scary and dangerous sex offenders that we worked with had been victims themselves in early life. But because this was never dealt with in terms of the victim being believed, a successful prosecution or counselling, each man had great difficulty coping with the subsequent anger and hate that was played out in the form of sex offences in later life.

It was quite common for a theme of hate to be directed either at themselves or in many cases against society in general. We found that in order to be able to start trying to address their offending, we had to help them go over painful experiences from their own childhood. Ideally this should be undertaken individually by the tutors, but as far as I am aware this is not possible as part of the current accredited SOTP programme and therefore represents a significant omission in my view.

It is a sad fact that many victims of sexual abuse can in turn become perpetrators through their inappropriate and deviant sexualisation. There is a cycle of offending and therefore it is very important for perpetrators to understand this. To put it bluntly, in the absence of dealing with perpetrators as victims first, I fail to see how the current SOTP programme can be as effective as the claims made for it. But it's possible that I'm still irritated that our methods were abandoned with the move to accreditation. I know we achieved some significant changes in some very damaged men who would have been deemed as simply not suitable for SOTP. 'One size' does not and never can fit all.