July 10, 2015

"People accused of sex offenses have taken the assessment and used favorable scores to obtain therapy instead of a criminal conviction."

"Convicted sex offenders have found the conditions of their probation or parole—for example, how often they must check in with a probation officer—affected by whether the test found them to have a 'sexual interest' in children. Judges have calculated the lengths of sentences partly on the test, and prosecutors have used it to guide the terms of plea deals.... Some psychologists argue that since the test has not been rigorously validated, it should not be used at all.... The stakes are high; a poorly designed test, coupled with overzealous clinicians and trusting judges, would be a recipe for railroading innocent people into being judged as high-risk pedophiles.... At the same time, if the test can be easily beaten by actual pedophiles, who study how to control the length of time they linger on each image, then it could put children at risk. Another issue is that not everyone who has a sexual attraction to children acts on it...."

From "The Sex-Offender Test/How a computerized assessment can help determine the fate of men who’ve been accused of sexually abusing children."

13 comments:

rhhardin said...

It's click bait trading on hysteria.

gerry said...

They're born that way, aren't they?

Lewis Wetzel said...

Justice Kennedy would like to know how he can help these unfortunates get the dignity that they deserve as Americans.

tim maguire said...

We could avoid all this by punishing people based on what they do instead of what they might do.

Anonymous said...

Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

The Godfather said...

And this differs from preventive detention how?

JCC said...

"They're born that way, aren't they?"

I'm with jerry. Possibly some are (born, not made), or so they claim, but most would seem to be conditioned, just as those who sexually abuse the elderly. These offenders suffer from an inability to deal with their own peer group, and prey instead - by choice - on those unable to resist - the young or the very old - and at some point the deliberate choice for convenience becomes the preferred for other reasons, out of habit perhaps. Call it a conditioned response.

There also seems to be another agent at work in some cases, which is an desire for the untouched or unspoiled, although these may be expressed as a desire for the adolescent as opposed to the very young. Repeating...a choice.

Maybe they're born painfully shy or overly awkward around other adults, but born pedophiles?

wildswan said...

It seems we now have two identities - our software identity and our personal identity and the Big Centralized Scientific government is likely to prefer to deal with our software identity. Knowing this, act accordingly.

I am not a robot today - I am a monkey looking back through the keyhole.

MikeR said...

I would guess that most men have a sexual attraction to young girls, at least those that have reached puberty, long long before the age of consent. What do they mean by "children" in this test: 6-year-olds or 13-year-olds?

Levi Starks said...

This whole story fall flat In that it fails to give women the equal treatment they deserve in every aspect of life.

Sammy Finkelman said...

"They're born that way, aren't they?"

JCC> .....I'm with jerry. Possibly some are (born, not made), or so they claim, but most would seem to be conditioned, just as those who sexually abuse the elderly.

Or homosexuals, who aren't born that way either.

Whatever is true, is true for all paraphilias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paraphilias

Some well known paraphilias are not on this list because they have good lobbies.

Manty Five said...

> These offenders suffer from an inability to deal with their own peer group, and prey instead - by choice - on those unable to resist - the young or the very old

If your theory that the attraction was to the defenselessness of the target or the otherness of the peer group were true, wouldn't we see a significant overlap in elder abusers and child abusers?

Manty Five said...

> What do they mean by "children" in this test: 6-year-olds or 13-year-olds?

They could design a test with 17-year olds and lock up half the country's population.