- Jul 7, 2003
- 47,501
The great difficulty in dealing with sex offenders is the way they think about what they do.
A guy who breaks into your car to steal the stereo, say, knows it's wrong, but (typically) doesn't care because he wants the money to buy drugs.
A man who sexually abuses children, however, tends to have a completely different mindset- many of them don't consider what they do to be wrong, and just think about it as a normal sexual urge. Some of them actually believe that the children enjoy it, horrific as that sounds to most of us. Look at Gary Glitter: he appears utterly shameless on TV, but that's because he's convinced himself that his desires are normal, and it's ok to have sex with kids. It's the rest of the world that's wrong in his warped mind.
In the same way that an alcoholic has to admit he has a problem before he can start to dry out, you can't "cure" a sexual predator until you can convince him what he's doing is wrong.
Further argument, maybe, for longer sentences? I still wouldn't kill them though (incidentally, I'm sure there was some research from the US that showed a majority of families who'd had a relative murdered felt no sense of closure at all on hearing that the person responsible had been executed).
A guy who breaks into your car to steal the stereo, say, knows it's wrong, but (typically) doesn't care because he wants the money to buy drugs.
A man who sexually abuses children, however, tends to have a completely different mindset- many of them don't consider what they do to be wrong, and just think about it as a normal sexual urge. Some of them actually believe that the children enjoy it, horrific as that sounds to most of us. Look at Gary Glitter: he appears utterly shameless on TV, but that's because he's convinced himself that his desires are normal, and it's ok to have sex with kids. It's the rest of the world that's wrong in his warped mind.
In the same way that an alcoholic has to admit he has a problem before he can start to dry out, you can't "cure" a sexual predator until you can convince him what he's doing is wrong.
Further argument, maybe, for longer sentences? I still wouldn't kill them though (incidentally, I'm sure there was some research from the US that showed a majority of families who'd had a relative murdered felt no sense of closure at all on hearing that the person responsible had been executed).