No Kidding!

"The only way to get a pedophile to stop," Ann Landers used to observe sweetly, "is castration."

The Economist now reports ("The end of innocence," January 21, 2006) that this common notion that pedophiles can never reform is pure urban legend. The reconviction rate for all offenders is 60%. For pedophiles, it is 17%. And the vast majority—about 93%--of those reconvicted pedophiles were not reconvicted for pedophilia.

Pedophiles, in other words, are far less likely to reoffend than almost any other sort of criminal.

This is the very reverse of what we have been told.

For more evidence of this fact online, see this from Free Republic.

Or this. It includes a lot of cautious hedges about the accuracy of the data, it concludes child molesters reoffend at about half the rate of the general prison population.

Here is the US Bureau of Justice Study cited in the Economist article:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/rsorp94pr.htm

And here is a Canadian metastudy which claims to summarize all theresearch to date, and again, concludes that child molesters are lesslikely to reoffend than the general prison population:

http://www.johnhoward.ab.ca/PUB/C24.htm

This suggests some interesting truths:

1. The idea of tracking convicted pedophiles after their release and announcing their presence publicly in their neighbourhoods is unjustifiable. It is hysterical, it is persecutory, and it is cruel and unusual punishment.

2. The Catholic Church was perfectly justified in reassigning priests suspected or accused of pedophilia, and trusting that, even if guilty, they would likely not reoffend—-even aside from the religious obligation to forgive. The current rap against Catholic priests and the Catholic Church is a witchhunt, and religious persecution.

3. If pedophiles can change their behaviour, and so easily, it probably follows that homosexuals can too. The idea of our sexual preferences being "hardwired" is a myth, and a silly myth. Accordingly, there is no justification for treating homosexuals as if they are a race apart, with special rights due to their sexual "orientation." Homosexuality is a behaviour, with no more call for constitutional protection than, say, smoking or driving without a seatbelt.