This piece is to describe my experience in Sex Offender Treatment Programs (SOTs), ending eighteen months ago. My point of writing this is to share it with certain people in my life. I would like to publish it and would like suggestions on doing so. I also would like to send it to the SOTs I attended (knowing it would get back to my old po, etc.) and wonder if that sounds like a really bad idea.

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Mark McHarry wrote a piece, Sex Predator Laws (Z Magazine, Nov. ’01), describing the civil commitment procedures being utilized against sex offenders in many American states. It speaks to the problems and affects of SOT participation.

This summer, through involvement with a message support board for pedosexuals, it dawned on me that nearly all of the men charged with child molestation that I was around through SOT programs and twelve-step sexual addiction groups were fundamentally not like me in any way.

Now I understand why the SOT made such a big deal of my being a “pedophile”. It didn’t make sense at the time.

It is fundamental that pedosexuals and “situational child molestors” (FBI term) – men who typically have no response to sexual stimuli about children – are as different from each other as cats and dogs. Of two hundred men I knew fairly well (sex offenders all), less than a dozen were pedophiles.

We pedophiles typically do not break the law – of the dozen I knew, nearly all were convicted for possession of child pornography, not sexual contact with minors.

It has been staggering to realize how much of everything I’ve believed about my sexuality has nothing at all to do with me.. Nothing. Nearly every incidence of child molestation is perpetrated by a heterosexual male having marriage problems and turning to their children, or step-children, or nieces and nephews.

In SOT we were all tested with penile plythsmograph to determine sexual attractions (credit to Ethical Treatment for All Youth):

The penile plythsmograph (PPG) is a device that was used in the early 1900s to diagnose homosexuality. It is still used today to measure sexual deviance among males. It is connected to a male's genitals to directly measure his sexual arousal while he is shown suggestive or pornographic photographs or made to listen to audio-taped descriptions of sex acts. These photographs or audio-tapes may involve children, teenagers, or adults.

It was rare for a sex offender to respond to child stimuli. Going through SOT I did not understand what this meant.

Even the thoughts situational child molestors and pedosexuals have about children are fundamentally different.

McHarry in his article notes regarding SOT programs:

Another practice that has not changed but that has gotten more thorough is thought control

It was so pervasive (and I was genuinely committed to treatment) I never would have questioned it until it failed to work in my life. That is where I am at. It has failed to work, and I have to find a way that does work.

The essence of the SOT perspective on how to live as a sex offender is summarized in the Relapse Prevention document a participant prepares before leaving (common to most SOT programs). Some common things for everyone are:

Identifying Risks for Relapse - Emotions, Events, Behaviors, Distortions

Some of my identified distortions in my final typewritten, twenty page, peer-proofed and approved RP Plan include:

“Fantasizing about molesting children doesn’t mean I’m going to do it, it’s just a thought”

“Sex with children doesn’t hurt them”

“Child pornography is wrong because it increases my risk of molesting a child, not because it is victimizing children in and of itself”

and

“They’re out to get me”

These were the fundamental issues in my therapy, and I was polygraphed over fifty times in a four and a half year period on what my beliefs on these particular issues were, and if I was accurately completing my “fantasy logs” – every single sexual thought I had. I was confronted on these “distortions” for four and a half years.

Before SOT I never believed sex with children was wrong. I thought if a person ever did that they would force the child into secrecy and shame about it and cause them serious harm.

That I could choose not to be sexual with children was a fundamental point of contention with my participation in SOT. They never believed I hadn’t done more than I told them. Even passing polygraphs on it they didn’t believe me, and I was very much more likely to fail a polygraph telling the truth than pass it on a lie. The polygraph makes me nervous, it is an anxiety-filled procedure. I would guess I gave twenty percent false failures which were retested.

The way the SOT had you define sexual contacts in your life led me to disclose many “victims” in my adult life that no rational person would think that way about. For example, I slept with a girl who told me she was 19 when I was about 22 or so. I suspected she was younger, but she did have a driver’s license with her age on it (she looked about 13 but some people look young, and she just didn’t have a chest).

During polygraphic verification of this portion of my sexual history I kept failing the poly – it turned out it was in my head wondering about her age. So she was defined as one of my “victims”.

Also, any child friend I had was defined as a “victim” by the completely non-sexual contact I had with them. They were all extensively and invasively questioned by specialized law enforcement, which led to my complete rupture from all of their lives.

I never did anything wrong as an adult. It is ridiculous that possessing pictures is a crime.

Coping with Risks for Lapses

This is the portion of an RP plan with the road map for living. It is essentially:

Heavy involvement in AA/NA and sex addiction 12-step programs

Continue therapy

A whole list of common sense things for addicts

Control sexual fantasies – no fantasies about children

Avoid children completely

This last for me included only shopping at Wal-Mart (as it is open twenty-four hours) and only shopping after midnight Monday through Thursday by force of law.

In a five year period I saw less than a dozen children, period, and nearly all at Wal-Mart in the middle of the night.

I have only fantasized about adults a handful of times in my life, and most of those involved my wife. I do not have the ability to eliminate my sexual fantasies. It is patently absurd.

And it is equally absurd that because I have sexual fantasies about children that I would necessarily act on them. Every Monday night in the fall I am aroused by the prelude to the NFL’s football presentation, and enjoy some mindless fantasy about playing professionally. This logic indicates I will with “EXTREMELY HIGH RISK” attempt to walk onto an NFL team’s linebacking corp. They are both about as patently absurd and solely in the realm of fantasy.

I made my mistake with child pornography (CP) and certainly paid the price for any conceivable crime it might be. I would encourage others not to do the same.

A SOT program depends on severe coercion to achieve its ends. For the situational child molestor it presents an effective means of living life in a sexually balanced manner. They teach life and coping skills that most sex offenders (and likely most people in general) are deficient in.

The situational child molestor frequently has other sexual compulsions in addition to sexual contact with children. These can include voyeurism, fetishism, compulsive affairs, anonymous sex with strangers, and hiring prostitutes. The SOT is effective in reigning their behavior in to their core hetero or homosexuality, expressed in healthy adult relationships.

For the pedosexual it offers nothing in the way of a plan for living that works. It serves only to suppress a pedosexual’s true self and further their confusion about themselves.

To understand the effect of coercion in creating thought control in SOTs, it is helpful to look at the impact of those with the “Stockholm Syndrome” for parallels. This is the psychological results experienced by captives in a Swedish bank theft. The offender in SOT is similarly captive and experiences the same shit.

At the start of this syndrome, a captive begins to identify with his captors. It is at first a defensive mechanism, based on the (often unconscious) idea that the captor will not hurt the captive if he is cooperative and even positively supportive.

The captive often realizes that action taken by his would-be rescuers is very likely to hurt him instead of obtaining his release. The very people who can offer guidance to a pedosexual person in SOT – other pedosexuals – are necessarily dangerous and avoided.

Long term captivity builds even stronger attachment to the captor in the Stockholm Syndrome. It can result in feelings of friendship and love on the part of a pedosexual for the people who appeared to care about him – even when it is visible to all parties that the SOT staff do not act in his best interests.

Coercion

My state has a SOT program for incarcerated sex offenders, and requires outpatient SOT treatment for the duration of probation. Pedosexual sex offenders here face serious risk of never regaining their freedom. If none of the local SOT outpatient programs accept an offender (seven programs, who all overlap in personnel and professional relationships), it is a violation of the offender’s probation.

Sex offenders in my state are subject to the “revolving door” rule. Anyone else who commits a felony crime and serves prison time gets out with “backup time”, or the good days they earned, and a period of probation. If such a felon violates his probation and serves out his original sentence, he is then free of the legal system.

So a lot of people violate because they fail at the terms of their probation, usually for financial reasons ($400/month for supervision now), and finish their sentence in a department of corrections facility.

However, sex offenders only restart their probation term fresh after a violation which is sentenced off a standard guideline. You have to complete probation to ever get out of the system.

It is standard procedure to fail offenders identified as pedophiles from SOT programs prior to their anticipated completion date so as not to reflect badly on the program if that person reoffends. In my case in both SOTs it happened two weeks before my scheduled completion dates.

It is also standard procedure to violate offenders identified as pedophiles on probation at the end of their probation term. In my case I was two weeks from being off probation and they filed a motion to violate me as a danger to society. The judge denied their request. I was that close to never regaining my freedom, and I worked the program fully and with motivation.

I didn’t cross the street against a red light once those years. I didn’t break a single rule anywhere, anytime, didn’t even try to skirt thirteen items in the express lane. I was scared to death I would never see freedom, and thought control produces an effect on a person that destroys who they are.

I asked a close lifelong friend to write about his observations of me while I was on probation and in SOT:

I've watched this person head off into the unknown several times, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. Each time the person who returned was a little bit different from the one who had left, if only for the difference some time and some new experiences can make. One time, in particular, though, a completely different person returned.

After getting in some trouble with the law (I won't go into what about - I believe that's a private matter), going through the subsequent trial, a period of waiting then several years of incarceration, I wasn't sure what to expect of my friend - or even if I'd ever again have much contact with him. I was pleasantly surprised by the semi-regular visits I began receiving from him after his release - but I was also surprised in another, even less expected way. The difference between the person the system inhaled and the one it later expectorated seemed to be not one of degree, but of kind. It was as though the guy who came knocking on the door after several years' absence was a completely different person. I want to compare the change to someone who had been lobotomized, undergone shock therapy, or was on heavy psychoactive drugs like placidyl, thorazine or lithium, but the change was more extensive even that that. It was as though I was talking to someone I had never met before - a complete stranger.

So those are the tools of coercion utilized by the outpatient SOT program. The program for incarcerated offenders had the following coercion:

Sex offenders in my state have a “public danger” designation attached to them while incarcerated. This means that regardless of the institutions they would normally be sent to based on their guideline security level, they can only be housed in High or Maximum security facilities. I was incarcerated for a year prior to the SOT program in a maximum security penitentiary. Most of the men there were serving life or near-life sentences. Penitentiary is a difficult thing to survive and it is also nothing to commit suicide over.

The year and a half I was in the SOT for incarcerated offenders, I was held at my State’s facility that housed the SOT program and Drug Abuse programs (offenders given time off for completing the DAP). Sex offenders are ineligible for the time-off if they complete DAP, another institutional discrimination.

There was a high rate of turnover among the general population in the DAP program. They had a high failout rate and many returned to other institutions. We all knew each other – we shared activities in common such as the rec yard, jobs, eating, etc.

The duration of my time at the SOT/DAP facility I was never aware of any violence or fighting. I had decent friends among the general prison population.

The risk absolutely was that if you were discharged from the SOT program and had some period of time left on your sentence, you would be returned to penitentiary and undoubtedly recognized by someone from the DAP program as a “baby-raper”, and life would be unbearable in that circumstance. Penitentiary is a dangerous place to be a known pedo at. The SOT made a point of telling us this a number of times as a warning.

The SOT in my State determines an offender’s registry level, which affects how extensive the notification an offender will be subject to. It is of serious concern. They also determine the terms of your probation. Their recommendation to place an individual in the highest category brings a magnitude of consequences, some of which make maintaining an individual’s freedom difficult while on probation.

As an example, mine required:

Supervised Depoprovera Treatment (“chemical castration”)
Frequent (weekly) unannounced job site and home visits
Large time commitments (20-40 hours per week) to treatment
Frequent urinalysis
Daily check-in, including holidays
Door-to-door community notification
Maintaining a detailed travel log of every movement between physical locations

It was effective coercion for everyone I knew, that life or death power over you. It would be an exceptional human being who could resist.

Both programs shared a common feature in being ran by egotistical men who abused their authority and were supported in so doing by the nature of the problem they were fighting. Which is to say absolute power corrupts, and they held our lives.

The first task at hand for new participants in SOTs is to “break their denial”. Much, nearly all, energy was focused on this as new people joined established therapy groups.

It is an amazing and dramatic occurrence to see months of psychological manipulation from the SOT erupt in the confronted situational offender, sitting alone in the middle of the room, torn up by as intense and competent an interrogator (the program head) as any depiction on TV crime shows, and surrounded and prodded by other sex offenders concerned about their own status and freedom. It culminated always in a true heart confession: “Yes I did it.”

And the answer was always to come over to our side, work on your rationalizations, submit completely, and challenge the next person in denial. I have always held the chains that bind me, in my own hand.

Funny thing about pedophiles, they confess all their shit right at the start from my observation. The SOT gives the way to do it so you’re not charged. Paeds aren’t in denial. They’re there to find others like them initially.

And rapidly they find survival is predicated on adopting a belief system that defies their experience in life (from those that I knew). In any case the pedosexual person, like myself, is desperate for answers on how to live with their sexuality. They desperately lack good, factual information about themselves and others like them.

The essence of who they are, the most important features of their personalities, are denigrated and ridiculed in SOT.

For the pedosexual, the SOT offers nothing in the way of a plan for living that works. It serves only to suppress a pedosexual’s true self and further their confusion about themselves.

Just as it has been so confusing to me to understand that almost all men who molest children are not pedosexuals, so it has been difficult for me to understand my sexuality in relation to women and men. I lack completely any inhibition to sex with other human beings. I am attracted to people emotionally at times and sex is an expression to me of warmth and friendship, and emotional connection.

This phenomena occurs all the time in prison. Heterosexual men lower their inhibitions to homosexual activity and engage in sex with other men. It is an established phenomena. It is also very easy to confuse with having a true sexual identity, such as heterosexuality. It is fundamentally not the same. The SOTs do not have any interest in sharing their knowledge of this phenomenon because it is in conflict with their core value of pushing sex offenders into “healthy adult sexual relationships” as a coping mechanism.

I am a pedosexual human being. It is the core of my perspective on the world and everything else I am – father, husband, friend, employer or employee, social animal. I have lived my adult years without acting on my true sexual desire with others. Many, maybe most, pedosexuals are doing this. So there is a road map of a way to live for pedosexuals.

Just Say No.