The Prague Post Online: News: Prison castrations raise concern

December 1st, 2008

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Prison castrations raise concern

Government defends surgery for serious sex offenders

By Hilda Hoy
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 25th, 2007 issue

Officials are brushing off concerns from an anti-torture watchdog body about the policy of castrating some of the country’s worst sex offenders.

The Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), which forms part of the Council of Europe’s human rights directorate, published a report this month expressing its “serious reservations” concerning the use of surgical castration on some men convicted of serious sex crimes.

Castration is performed under the aegis of the current Health Care Act and is done only with the patient’s consent and after an extensive approval process, the Health Ministry retaliated. Statistics show the procedure significantly decreases the likelihood that a serious sex criminal will re-offend.

“The Czech School of Medical Sexology is renowned the world over, especially because of its results in protective sexology treatment,” the government’s required response to the CPT said. Both were published on the CPT Web site July 12.

The CPT was careful not to come out swinging, said Marco Leidekker of the CPT Secretariat. He was part of the monitoring team that toured five Czech psychiatric hospitals last March, April and June.

“We’re not so much opposed” to castration itself, he said. “But we say we have grave doubts … about the voluntary nature of the intervention,” Leidekker said. “It’s in a prison setting. … If people choose a surgical castration, what is the reason they agree? Is it because they want to be released as soon as possible? If that’s the case, is it still a voluntary decision?”

Castration is part of national health policy, a carefully considered procedure for men in “imposed sexological treatment,” said Health Ministry spokesman Tomáš Cikrt. This means they’ve been convicted of a sexually motivated crime and have been diagnosed with sexual deviancy by a psychiatric professional, he said.

According to statistics from the Justice Ministry, the number of men undergoing such treatment — either on an inpatient or outpatient basis — hovers around 200 per year. Of those, only a small number receive surgical castrations, usually those who have committed the most serious crimes, such as sexually motivated murder.

The actual number of men who are castrated is somewhat fuzzy. There’s no centralized source of statistics, and the government’s response report to the CPT contained only incomplete numbers from the five hospitals. In 2005, fewer than 10 men were surgically castrated, those numbers indicate. In addition, at least 40 received testosterone suppression drugs that year, a procedure often referred to as chemical castration.

This procedure is temporary, while surgical castration is permanent.

An effective treatment

Both physical and chemical castrations are safe, effective ways to treat sexual deviants, and benefit both society and the offender himself, said sexologist Ondřej Trojan, who runs a private clinic in Prague 5.

“As a professional sexologist who takes care of dozens of deviant sexual offenders, I can’t agree with criticism of castration in general,” he said. “I’m sorry to say so, but we have no better treatment [than castration] for serious sex offenders, namely rapists, sadistic sexual murderers or even pedophiles,” Trojan said.

Without treatment, about 75 percent of convicted sex offenders will re-offend, he says. Long-term psychotherapy lowers that to 20 percent. “Surgical or properly done chemical castration brings us to a re-offending rate between 2 percent to 5 percent,” he said.

The only real alternative to either form: “Long-term, even lifelong, detention in specialized wards with very limited access to the rest of community,” he said.

Chemical castration is used widely in Europe, in such countries as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany, in addition to the Czech Republic, Trojan said. While it’s less drastic than surgery, it’s only a good option if the patient is willing and reliable, he said.

As far as he’s aware, the Czech Republic may be one of the only Council of Europe members to practice surgical castration on its criminals, Leidekker said. “We know this happened in a lot of countries in the past. But, as far as I know, [the CPT] hasn’t come across it.”

Trojan denied this. Slovakia currently has a policy in place similar to the Czech Republic’s, he said.

The Health Ministry plans to amend the Health Act this year, which will include updating the section that regulates castration, ministry spokesman Cikrt said.

This legislation will more explicitly lay out the conditions under which the surgery can be performed, but won’t strike it as a treatment option, he said.

Now that the issue’s been raised, the CPT will closely monitor it and may elevate its level of concern in the future, Leidekker said. “The committee has not, in this report, taken a clear stance against the measure, [but] this may or may not happen at some point,” he said.

— Naďa Černá and Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

Hilda Hoy can be reached at hhoy@praguepost.com

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