Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The Crossing of Sexual Boundaries

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.


Once a week I work in a prison with offenders who have committed various crimes. With sex offenders a common thing they talk about is the fear of committing the same or similar crime when they get released. There might have been an element of pleasure in whatever crime they committed before they ended up in prison but for most of them the thought of once again facing arrest, a court of law and a heavier prison sentence is a very real fear. For some, even the thought of re-committing the act itself can be riddled with anxiety.
This fear of committing the same crime again doesn’t fit with most people’s ideas of sex offenders. Yet the people I see have elected to seek therapy because of it. They have also come because the stress of being in prison, or 'doing the time', is getting to them.
I am not offering them a State-run sex offender’s programme where they are forced to attend as part of their court sentence. Nor are they promised the chance of early release for attending. The treatment I offer them is not set out into modules where they learn to accept what they did, train their minds not to do it again and learn to identify and avoid risk situations. But before I go any further, perhaps a little reality might be useful.
The most recent statistics suggest that sex offenders avoid official rehab programmes. In September, Government figures revealed that only a tiny fraction of convicted sex offenders in Ireland are completing rehab. Just 42 of the 578 sex offenders released from prison in the past five years have completed the Sex Offender Rehabilitation Programme.
Now that has to be a very worrying trend. Is it something in the programmes themselves? Or is it something in the offenders? It could be a bit of both. One very real problem is the fear sex offenders in prison have of being identified by the ‘ordinary decent criminals’. Signing up for such a course could bring the risk of this happening a little closer. And if it happens it will lead to a beating or worse.
Or it could be that serious sex offenders - by which I mean unrepentant, serial offenders - don’t believe they have a problem. Some child abusers, for example, are characterised by their full belief and willingness to proclaim that the enjoyment of children for sexual purposes is natural and that they are doing nothing wrong. They are also characterised by their unwillingness to submit to therapy, which may lie behind the disturbing statistics mentioned above.
The low uptake of official rehab is indicative of another characteristic. Predatory sex offenders gain their power from allowing their victims believe that is was ‘they’ who were somehow at fault. Signing up for rehab is, among other things, an admission of guilt. Sex predators and those with sexual perversions thrive on other people’s sense of guilt so that their own remains untouched.
The men who come to me are prepared to submit themselves to therapy even though they are promised nothing tangible in return. They are not being forced to be there. They come in the hope they can somehow make sense of what it is they have done and what kind of person they are to have done it.
It is a different mind-set and it indicates a desire for treatment which no-one else had to put into their heads. They are not preached at, or indoctrinated or ‘mind-trained’ in any way. But they are helped analyse their crime, their lives up to the point of the offence, the impact on their victims, their own belief systems when they were breaking the law and, hopefully, their own ways and means of avoiding a repeat offence.
When someone elects to undergo that kind of therapy, it is not to try and ‘beat the system’. If they are it eventually becomes easily distinguishable from those who genuinely want to change their lives. In therapy, particularly psychoanalytical psychotherapy, there really is nowhere to hide.
And we must be mindful that not all crossing of sexual boundaries ends up in a prison sentence. I spoke with someone recently who described an early sexual encounter that left little doubt but that they had been raped. Yet this person told themselves for years that it was a genuinely consensual encounter.
I met a woman recently who had a man touch her under the table throughout a meal at a social occasion. She had been too shocked to say anything about it to those present. And now she felt angry and upset.
When sexual boundaries are crossed by those who know what they are doing, the acid test is the confusion the perpetrator leaves behind. The victim is always left confused and compromised by what took place. It is one of the reasons why so many rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.
Similarly, the acid test of whether social sex pests and the more serious sex offenders are genuine about changing their ways is when they make the choice themselves to seek therapy and remain in it no matter how challenging it gets.

1 comment:

starbright said...

Thank you. Excellent blog and interesting how people, women & men both can feel guilty, confused, unclear when they have been a victim/target of a sexual deviant assault by another.