Sex offender, treatment

Abstract

Sex offender treatment is a process aimed at preventing identified sexual offenders from reoffending. It is an umbrella concept, which can include cognitive behavioral therapy delivered in groups, individually, or both, and medications aimed at minimizing sexual arousal or urge states. Sex offender treatment began as a behavioral discipline where interventions used classical conditioning paradigms in order to eliminate sexual arousal to children or to violent themes and to replace it with sexual arousal to mutually consenting sexual behavior with adults. These behavioral techniques proved too narrow and were replaced with more comprehensive cognitive behavioral interventions, beginning with relapse prevention, and more recently expanding to include more positive psychology concepts with the introduction of the good lives model. There is currently controversy about the available scientific evidence for the effectiveness of sex offender treatment, how to define appropriate treatment targets, and the use of certain types of techniques and technology, for instance polygraphy.