Germany asked to stop offering castration to sex criminals

[lyssna]

Berlin (CNN) -- Europe's top human rights watchdog has urged Germany to stop offering sexual offenders the option of surgical castration.

The Council of Europe's anti-torture committee said in a report issued Wednesday that the practice, which aims to help convicted sex criminals rein in their sex drives and lower their risk of reoffending, could

Comments

[mingemonster]

torn between human rights concerns and...

wait, no i'm not. there is not a single fuck that i am prepared to give when rapists are treated badly

[anolinde]

Especially since it's completely optional.

[mirhanda]

Yeah, this is pretty much where I fall too. It's not like that's the only sentence there is, the rapist has to choose it over conventional penalties, so...

[sakuraberries]

Plus it's completely optional. I'm just not seeing the issue here.

[anolinde]

When they say "surgical castration," do they mean that they actually cut everything off? I've heard of "chemical castration," so now I'm a bit confused.

[entropius]

Has this been shown to have substantial benefits over hormonal treatments?

[entropius]

So long as the "conventional" sentence is no harsher than it should be absent the option of castration, so long as the procedure is truly voluntary, and so long as the procedure is done in the least traumatic way (i.e. the use of chemical rather than surgical means so long as they're essentially as effective), I fail to see how this is a problem.

Everyone gets what they want. Society gets protection from the criminal; they get the option to choose a sentence which they consider less onerous.

The danger is that this will be used as an excuse to increase conventional prison sentences to "cruel and unusual" levels, on the grounds that there is always the option of castration. At that point it becomes coercive.

[rex_dart]

Yeah, it's not a scientifically sound statistic because the two groups of offenders were self-selecting.

[the_glow_worm]

But presumably the people who actually wanted to be castrated were trying not to offend in the first place, but ultimately unsuccessful. It seems to me that going so far as castration is the move of desperate men who have tried everything else.

[mingemonster]

yeah, it would have been better to compare with a time period where sterilization wasn't offered

[anolinde]

+1

And I'm sorry to hear that. =( I hope they're doing as well as they can under the circumstances.