Does psychological treatment for adult sex offenders work?
Psychological treatment for adult sex offenders can reduce reoffending rates but does not provide a cure, say experts in an editorial in this week’s BMJ. Sexual offending is a public health issue and a social problem. Psychological treatment is widely used and is often mandated in the sentencing decision for sexual offenders. But just how effective are psychological treatment programmes? Are they too readily accepted uncritically? Specialists in psychology and criminology review the evidence from published studies. In an analysis of randomised controlled trials on behavioural treatments, they found that most studies were too small to be informative, although statistically significant improvements were recorded across some groups of offenders. The largest, longest trial compared group therapy with no group therapy for 231 men guilty of child abuse, exhibitionism, or sexual assault. During the subsequent 10 years, a greater proportion of those allocated to group therapy were re-arrested,
