For the children

I'm going to ask my readers to engage in a difficult exercise in a minute. Beyond difficult, really..."impossible" might be a better description. But let's give it a try, okay?

I'm going to give you a name--a Name In The News, as it were--and I would like you to imagine you are this person. You don't just look like him on the surface...imagine you are living his life, thinking his thoughts, believing his beliefs. Got it? Okay. Here's the name:

Peter Whitmore.

Hey! No fair jumping back into your own mind, there! I said this would be difficult, maybe impossible. It's certainly disturbing. But let's try it again.

You are Peter Whitmore. You are 35 years old. And you are a repeat child molester.

You've been jailed several times, but they keep letting you out. On some level you understand that the thoughts and fantasies you have are "wrong"--if only because they tend to result in your freedoms being temporarily curtailed--at any rate, you've demanded treatment, but haven't received anything meaningful.
At one point, you spent a whole year relatively free in the community and you didn't so much as touch another child, outside your mind, anyway. There should have been some kind of reward for that sacrifice, but there wasn't. No, everybody around you--those who aren't wishing you dead--are just waiting for the relapse. It pisses you off. Have any of them have gone a year without sex?
And you're waiting for the relapse, too. Of course you are. It's just plain unreasonable of them to require you to stay away from kids. "Oh, you can have sex," they say, "as long as it's with somebody close to your own age."
Yuck. How many times have you wanted to say to that big beefy prison guard that henceforth he can have all the sex he wants, so long as it's with other men? You'd get your block knocked off, sure, but it'd almost be worth it.
And they keep letting you out! Out to where the kids are! Sure, you've been banned from being with children under 14 for life, but "ban" is just a word. If you spell it backwards, you get "nab". And "nab" is want you want to do right now, isn't it?

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That unpleasant exercise in no way condones the molestation of children. I harbour quite a lot of disgust for Peter Whitmore and his ilk in my heart. But truth be told, I feel more than a little pity, too--which is something most people seem incapable of.

Peter Whitmore is incurable by conventional therapies. Incarceration also doesn't work: in fact, the only thing jail time does is permit lots of time to fantasize about ever more heinous acts. What does have a marked degree of success with this type of offender is castration, chemical or surgical. Chemical castration involves shots of (most commonly) Depo-Provera that must be kept up forever, so it would have to be monitored, but it is undeniably effective. Those who are chemically castrated are still able to have sex...they just don't want to.
Side effects include diabetes and blood clots, and anybody overly concerned with those two things has their priorities seriously misplaced, in my opinion. Regardless, physical castration has no such side effects and is at least as effective.

As of this writing, eight U.S. states have laws on the books either requiring or allowing castration for sex offenders. I say Canada should join them. It would surely be better than the revolving door we have on our prisons.