“Treatment” does not make child predators safe

For twenty-five years, the Ministry of Justice ran a national experiment on some of the most dangerous men in the country, and refused to admit, even to itself, that it was going wrong. The Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP) was marketed as the civilised answer to public horror about child abuse and rape: a rigorously accredited, “what works” course that would transform predatory men into safely manageable citizens. Governors were chided if they did not deliver it; parole panels were encouraged to treat completion as progress; inspectors praised those prisons that embraced it.

Behind that soothing story sat a harder truth. The evidence that SOTP actually reduced sexual reoffending was never strong. When serious analysts finally got to look at long-term reconviction data, the programme did not appear to work at all. On some measures, men who completed SOTP were more likely to commit new sexual offences than comparable offenders who never set foot in a treatment room.

The Core Sex Offender Treatment Programme was accredited in 1992 by what was then the Correctional Services Accreditation Panel. It became the default group-work intervention for men with sexual convictions in custody. Variants were developed for men with learning disabilities and for those deemed higher risk, so that by the 2000s “SOTP” described a suite of courses embedded in sentence plans and inspectorate expectations.

The early evidence base for this sprawling practice was notably thin

The scale was substantial. In the cohort later evaluated by the Ministry of Justice, 2,562 men started the prison-based Core SOTP between 2000 and 2012, across about one-sixth of male prisons in England and Wales. Completion of SOTP became a de facto badge of progress, influencing parole decisions and release planning, not to mention honours for evangelist officials. 

Yet the early evidence base for this sprawling practice was notably thin. Much of the optimism rested on small, uncontrolled or weakly controlled evaluations, with short follow-up periods and generous interpretations of any change in reconviction or test scores as a “treatment effect”. In almost any other policy field, that would have been recognised as an inadequate foundation for a mandatory national intervention.

Indeed, it should have been. The reckoning belatedly arrived in 2017, when the MoJ published a large-scale impact evaluation of the prison-based Core SOTP. Analysts matched 2,562 men who had completed the programme between 2000 and 2012 with 13,219 similar sex offenders who had not, controlling for 87 risk factors and following both groups up for proven reoffending.

The headline results were striking and not in a good way. Ten per cent of the treated men were reconvicted of a further sexual offence during follow-up, compared with eight per cent of the matched comparison group. For indecent image offences the gap was 4.4 per cent versus 2.9 per cent. On several key measures, the men who had completed SOTP were more likely to commit new sexual crimes than those who had never been near a treatment room.

The authors’ conclusion, framed in careful civil-service language, was that either Core SOTP did not reduce sexual reoffending as it was intended to do, or any true impact had not been detected; on the evidence available they could not conclude that it reduced sexual reoffending. The BBC translated that into a plainer summary: “Sex offender treatment in prison led to more offending”. In March 2017, Core SOTP was discontinued and replaced by new programmes before the evaluation itself entered the public domain.

What makes this more than a technocratic misstep is that the first serious warning came years earlier — and was sidelined. In 2012, an MoJ analyst, Kathryn Hopkins, completed an internal study using propensity score matching — a detailed like‑for‑like comparison of treated prisoners and similar prisoners who did not do the course — suggested that SOTP participants were more, not less, likely to be reconvicted of sexual offences than comparable non-participants. She presented her findings to the Correctional Services Accreditation and Advice Panel in June that year.

According to the subsequent employment tribunal judgment and investigative reporting, senior managers criticised her methodology, decided her research could not be used, and indicated that further work might be carried out once more data were available. Hopkins, who continued to raise concerns about SOTP and other issues, was later marked down in performance reviews and, the tribunal found, suffered from having made protected disclosures.

When the 2017 evaluation came out, it broadly confirmed the thrust of Hopkins’s earlier analysis: on the measures that matter most, SOTP was not reducing sexual reoffending and might be associated with slightly higher reconviction rates. Hopkins argued publicly that allowing the programme to continue in the interim, after internal data had raised red flags, was indefensible; the BBC and others reported her view that significant numbers of additional sexual offences would have been committed in that period by men who had gone through SOTP. Even if one is cautious about any precise estimate, the ethical indictment is difficult to escape.

Defenders of the rehabilitative orthodoxy that has built careers protest that one failed programme does not demand that we give up on the whole idea of treating sex offenders. They are correct in the narrow sense. Meta-analyses of sexual offender treatment more broadly do report small but statistically significant reductions in sexual recidivism for treated groups compared with untreated controls: roughly 10 per cent versus 17 per cent across mixed samples of rapists, child molesters and “mixed” offenders in one major review. On paper, treatment appears to achieve some modest effect.

The difficulties begin when you look at the offenders who most worry the public: adult men who have sexually abused children through contact. Bigger reviews still lump together many different programmes of varying quality, delivered to very different kinds of offenders, and the actual numbers of people who go on to be reconvicted are not large. Evidence that focuses specifically on long‑term, entrenched contact child abusers is very thin indeed. Some older treatment studies report impressive‑sounding reductions in reconviction for child molesters, but by today’s standards they are weak: they often lack proper comparison groups, use small samples or short follow‑up periods, and are vulnerable to bias in who gets into the programme in the first place.

Official proven reoffending figures for sexual offenders in England and Wales appear reassuringly low. Widely cited MoJ-based summaries suggest that, for every hundred individuals released after a sexual offence, only two or three will be reconvicted of another sexual offence within two years, and four to seven within five years. These numbers are real, but they are also heavily limited by how they are collected: they only count offences that lead to a conviction within a relatively short time after release, in a type of crime where many offences are never reported and many that are reported never reach court. Whistle-blowers on social media paint a terrifying picture of threadbare public protection resources and overwhelming demand when it comes to monitoring such offenders.

When researchers follow cohorts of registered sexual offenders over longer periods, a different picture emerges. One recent — albeit small — study of registrants in England and Wales found that 55 per cent committed further sexual offences during follow-up, with most  offending again sexual in nature. Assessments commissioned by the MoJ itself accept that risk is not spread evenly. They show that a relatively small subgroup of men who have physically abused children — with more deep‑seated sexual interests and other risk factors — pose a much higher long‑term danger than the overall averages imply.

Set against this, the modest and uncertain benefits claimed for psychological treatment look even less convincing. In the strongest meta-analyses, therapy reduces average sexual reconviction by a few percentage points across mixed sexual offender samples; in the worst-documented cases, as with SOTP, it appears to do nothing or even to increase risk. What we do not have is robust, contemporary evidence that therapy can reliably render high-risk adult contact child sex offenders acceptably safe over the long term.

The state’s first duty is to protect children

None of this means we should offer nothing at all to men who have sexually abused children. Chemical suppression of libido, tightly supervised release, intensive monitoring and practical support to reduce situational risk may each have a part to play. But the state’s first duty is to protect children.

The story of SOTP is a case study in what happens when institutional optimism and ideological fashion outrun evidence. For a quarter of a century, ministers and officials clung to the idea that a few dozen hours of group work could reliably defuse the appetites of men who torture and rape children. When an in-house statistician produced data that challenged that belief, she was marginalised and mistreated rather than thanked. When a later evaluation made the failure impossible to deny, the programme was scrapped and rebranded, but the underlying faith in “treatment” remained largely untouched.

There is, as yet, no robust, replicated evidence that entrenched adult contact child sex offenders can be psychologised into acceptable safety over the long term. Until that evidence exists, the honest position is simple: for a small but crucial group of offenders, the presumption must be lifelong coercive restriction and control.