I think that we should think of pedophiles as people who have a disease. Does anyone else wonder why there isn’t a medication to help pedophiles curb their hunger for molesting young kids.
They have drugs for almost everything else so why not for that? It could save a lot of lives from being ruined, the children and even the molesters themselves.
I would see it being like this; The potential child molester could go to his own family doctor or a confidential doctor to get the drug and that visit could not be used against him in any court cases or perhaps if a person was convicted of molesting a young child he could have the option of taking the drug and being let off the registry after a few years if his condition showed signs of improvement and he agrees to be under the supervision of a psychologist to make sure he is taking the drug.
I think the drug would work by limiting the sex hormones that go to your brain and other chemicals that may be present in people with “uncontrollable tendencies for Young Children”. As far as I know nobody has studied the difference bewteen a pedophiles brain and your avergage person but it deserves to be studied. Maybe I will be the one that makes that drug.
There is such a thing as “chemical castration” already in existence. Taking the drugs has all the effects of normal castration without having to cut off the offender’s balls. I believe several states use it as a condition for paroling sex offenders.
Same reason there are no drugs that prevent murder, armed robbery or driving your truck at 90 mph, perhaps? Not everything can prevented by a taking a pill.
I believe that you can look at the urge to have sex with children as three distinct parts. The urge to have sex, the urge for it to be with an unwilling participant, and the urge for that unwilling participant to be a child.
While the first one is somewhat regulated by hormones, I’ve seen no evidence that the latter two are. Take away a pedophile’s ability to penetrate them with his body, but those other two urges are still there. Short of doping them up to their eyeballs, I don’t see medication being a viable route to making pedophiles “safe”.
Not necessarily when it comes to pedophilia. Rape is about power, control and harming someone. But pedophiles are another catagory-a lot of them truly believe their acts were consentual. No doubt there are some who do get off on the power, domination thing, but not all of them.
START, actually, there HAS been an attempt to medicate pedophiles, with shots that decrease their sex drive (AKA chemical castration). The problem is, it’s not entirely effective. Some will still go on to molest children because, well, they’re complete bastards.
It depends on the type of pedophile. ‘Fixated’ pedophiles are pedophiles because they enjoy power and control. They view the little girls (they almost always are focused on girls) like grown up women that they can dominate. ‘Regressed’ pedophiles are individuals who view themselves as children and relate to their victims as if they were children themselves.
Pedophilia is not inborn but I don’t think there have been any successful attempts to ‘cure’ pedophiles. The only thing you can do against them is to take away the sex drive.
Well one thing to remember is that drug research is very hit and miss. i think one in a million drugs makes it from start to FDA approval. The human body is pretty complex and not all the pathways are understood. So there’s the scientific aspect.
The other is demand. While trying to cure cancer, MS, or leukemia are all easy to gather people to rally behind, trying to get public support for ‘curing’ pedophiles isn’t as easy. Some people don’t think they deserve to be ‘cured’ and very few of the ‘victims’* of this disease (the pedophiles) think there is anything wrong with them. Heck, that’s very true of many mental disorders. Most folks are willing to admit they have Parkinson’s, but there’s still some stigma attached to mental disease.
*No matter how I spell that word, it looks wrong. Maybe I could get a pill…
The sexual urge is very strong, perhaps the strongest urge humans have.
The object of ones sexual desires, for one reason or another may be fixed. In most cases it is a willing member of the opposite sex, in some it is a willing member of the same sex, and there are more options including unwilling and children. It would seem very difficult and beyond the scope of medication to change the object of sexual desire.
There are drugs for that, in fact california and the UK are looking into nutritional therapy to lower the risk of criminal activity in prisons.
There are drugs for sex offenders. They use depo-provera, which is a birth control drug. They use it because it has progesterone, which is what is needed to reduce sex drive.
The thing about pedophilia is that it’s a little more complicated than simply hormones gone bad. The causes behind pedophilia aren’t entirely physiological, which means that a drug won’t necessarily be enough to stop them from molesting children. Plus, a drug may be able to treat pedophilia, but not “cure” it.
There is a drug called Androcur (mostly used to treat prostrate cancer, also for male to female sex change) that is prescribed to serial sex offenders in some countries. See link below.
I think the real problem with this is that it is very difficult to force someone to take a medication once they are released from prison. And as soon as they stop taking it their sex drive will start to reappear.