UNITED STATES
TheMediaReport
David Pierre
***TheMediaReport.com SPECIAL REPORT*** Who Am I To Judge? In 1992, Boston Globe Touted Therapy Treatments for Sex Offenders, Then Excoriated the Church Years Later For Actually Using Them
When the Boston Globe excoriated the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002 for relying on therapists to treat abusive priests from the 1950s to the 1990s, the paper somehow apparently forgot that in 1992 the Globe itself was enthusiastically trumpeting the psychological treatment of sex offenders as “highly effective” and “dramatic.”
In a front-page article on June 18, 1992, the Globe opened:
“A new generation of treatment programs for sex offenders is proving highly effective, dramatically reducing the percentage of cases in which offenders repeat sex crimes, research shows.
“Recidivism rates declined from 9 percent for untreated offenders to 5 percent for those who underwent the new treatment in one study, and from 38 percent to 6 percent in another.
“While there is no complete ‘cure’ for sex offenders, the new findings indicate that many of them can learn to manage their aberrant sexual impulses without committing new crimes. The promising new treatments focus on helping these offenders control the complex cauldron of social inadequacies, distorted thinking, and deviant sex fantasies that prompt them to rape women, molest children or exhibit themselves in public.”
By this very article the Globe confirms that the Church’s then-practice of sending abusive priests off to treatment was not just some diabolical attempt to deflect responsibility and cover-up wrongdoing, but a genuine attempt to treat aberrant priests that was being widely promoted by secular experts in the field.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.