An article about sex offenders in today’s Washington Post cites an unspecified Danish study which found a recidivism rate of 80 percent among sex offenders who have molested children. According to the study, this likelihood of repeat offenses dropped to 2.3 percent among offenders who were subsequently castrated.
Judging from his web site, that’s not the kind of data that convicted sex offender, exgay activist and Exodus regional representative Bob Van Domelen seems to want exgay movement supporters to hear.
Let’s take a brief look at Van Domelen and what he has to say about the tendency of convicted child sex offenders to repeat their crimes.
According to Mark Pietrzyk, a contributing author at the Independent Gay Forum:
During his college years, Van Domelen struggled with his sexual orientation and frequented public restrooms for homosexual encounters. After graduating from college, Van Domelen became a teacher and married a woman. As a teacher, however, he developed the troubling habit of molesting his male students. Fourteen years later, in 1985, he was confronted by a former student who reported him to the police. Van Domelen was sentenced to five years in prison for first- and second-degree sexual assault against minors. [He served three years.] He spent his time in prison studying the Bible, which led him to repent and seek to overcome his homosexuality. When Van Domelen was released, he started his Broken Yoke ex-gay ministry. Today, Van Domelen says that he is mostly healed, but that he still has to say a quick prayer before entering a public restroom.
Most of these details are volunteered and clarified by Van Domelen in his undated autobiography, which seems to oversimplify and conflate the origins of both his sexual orientation and his past compulsion to abuse teen-agers.
After taking the reins of Broken Yoke, Van Domelen says, he was appointed by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson to serve seven years as a director on a Wisconsin state commission on child abuse, beginning during his final year of parole.
But beyond prayer, Van Domelen’s web site is vague about recommended treatment or punishment for sex offenders. He certainly does not recommend castration. And he seems to offer a false sense of security about convicted offenders’ likelihood to re-offend:
Van Domelen claims that unspecified “research” finds low recidivism — 13.4 percent — among sex offenders. Van Domelen neglects to cite any specific research study, though; he merely links to the home page of one low-profile prison-reform group in Alberta, Canada, as a general source for further information on recidivism.
Yet that organization, the John Howard Society, hosts numerous advocacy papers on criminal justice, among them a white paper on recidivism that cites recidivism rates of 61 percent among sex offenders — not the 13.4 percent that Van Domelen claims:
The 1996 study* by Hanson et al. looked into the difference between the recidivism of child molesters and nonsexual criminals, using the same group of child molesters as in their 1992 report. The study included 191 child molesters and 137 nonsexual criminals, 15-30 years after their release from a maximum security provincial institution. The authors reported that long term recidivism rates for the child molesters were substantial, but the rates for nonsexual offenders were even higher: 61% versus 83.2% respectively. Although child molesters had much higher rates of sexual recidivism (35%) than did the nonsexual offenders (1.5%), the overall lower rate of recidivism for child molesters challenges the assumption that child molesters are a particularly high risk group of offenders.
* Hanson, R.K. & Bussière. (1996). Predictors of sexual offender recidivism: A meta-analysis (No. 1996-04). Ottawa: Solicitor General of Canada.
(Perhaps Van Domelen’s confusion about recidivism results in part from his choice of source material: Even the John Howard Society white paper is confused in its distinction between sexual recidivism rates of 35 and 61 percent.)
Which are we to believe — Van Domelen’s unsubstantiated claim of 13.4 percent recidivism, Canadian government and advocacy-group findings of 35 to 61 percent, or a vaguely cited Dutch finding of 80 percent? More to the point, why is Van Domelen’s selective statistical claim about repeat offenses among child molesters so extremely positive, at the same time that his portrayal of homosexuality consists solely of filthy, unsafe, underage sex in restrooms? Is he seeking to redirect public outrage at sex offenders toward sexually responsible gay couples instead?
Furthermore, why does Exodus vaguely refer to Van Domelen as a “convicted sex offender” — as though he might have been arrested on a triviality such as public nudity? Why not use clearer language such as former molester or former pedophile? And why does Exodus grant a national soapbox to someone who, by his own acknowledgment, remains only partially cured of his attraction to sex with possibly underage persons in public restrooms?
I believe Van Domelen owes the general public — and not just those persons who pay to attend Exodus conferences — some clearer answers to basic questions that should not be glossed over with God-talk. wildly optimistic and oversimplified references to unspecified “research,” and bigoted insinuations about the private bedroom behavior of emotionally, socially and spiritually mature gay couples.
I went to Exodus’s website a few days ago. And in their section on news. It was filled with prurient items that had to do with males molesting boys. Information on recent NAMBLA activity and crime blotter reports on convicted sex offenders who had been paroled and reoffended with male children.
I see the same pattern here as with the priest scandal in the Catholic Church.
FEMALE victims of sex offenders, whether as children or adults, is virtually left out of the discussion.
When sexual predation against the young is rung out of ONE issue: suspected gay male sexuality, you’d think the only sexual predators out there ARE gay males.
Isn’t it straight men’s laws that are still on the books in some states that marriage to a female as young as 12 is still legal?
See what I mean?
Presumably STRAIGHT males get a lot of leeway when it comes to indulging THEIR proclivities.
But when a man is gay…well there is no way HE can be allowed. Even if it’s with another adult.
And straight people are allowed to marry their victims if they become pregnant.
I am so sick of the stupid standards by which male sexuality is researched and reported.
Conservative groups are doing society no service if too much emphasis is placed on the minority that gay males make up, and virtually ignore just how predatory STRAIGHT males are. Notonly on females, but on other males they think are weak.
I can tell you straight male on suspected gay male sexual assaults (with objects) runs at a distinct enough pace where gay males should be more wary, than the other way around.
An aggressor is an aggressor. And in the last several years when a child rape ended in murder-FEMALES were the victims.
This whole thing makes me wanna puke. No wonder nothing significant and meaningful regarding sexual has been done in a long time.
Even the Duke Univ. La Crosse team rape scandal wouldn’t have happened if these males hadn’t taken women and inappropriate entertainment for granted.
Even though apparently there is no evidence of a crime, I don’t feel sorry for them and the trouble they got into.
I’m supposed to believe these are decent guys?
Depends on what they think of women in general, or women who strip, or women who just don’t happen to be their mothers, sisters and daughters.
This isn’t news. This is exactly what many antigay endocrinologists have been advocating in the attempt to “cure” homosexuality.
Mike (and every XGW reader for the matter), have anyone here read Simon LeVay’s Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality?
I think it’s a must read for the subject of this blog. It contains a lot of the history of conversion ‘therapists’ over the course of the 20th century and the butchery of the endocrinologists.
Mike, I’d like to hear your opinon about chapter 4 and 5 of his book. It’s also interesting that he takes a more libertarian approach at the end and why he stands by it.
I wonder if researchers do go to law enforcement records for their information and conclusions.
Large city databases especially can interface into another. With the FBI or Interpol for example.
They have to because of the ease at which fugitives move around the world.
It’s wonderful really how technology has made preservation and examination of evidence, fingerprints and DNA so much easier.
And sharing this information as well.
The general public, in some ways is also enabled, to search out sex offenders.
But the problem is, they often can map a cluster of them in their area, but specifics are a little harder.
Because movement is erratic and frequent of these offenders.
Their immigration status makes it harder too.
But most people agree, sex workers are an international trade business and so is child abuse and porn.
On some of the incidents I personally went out on, the abuse of females within a single family would make your skin crawl.
I think research on how gays and lesbians are abused in the information arena is important.
Because the databases I studied, don’t square whatsoever with anti gay claims.
But, when I went to certain individuals with the recommendation they talk directly to peace officers and gather their information from the same data I got, I was dismissed.
You can lead a horse to water, but a horses’s ass won’t drink.
Has anyone done a criminal backround check on all these people, not just the big wigs like Dobson and Chambers but everyone who works there, or at least the ones who do the speaking and authoring? I think it would behoove us to have that information centralized for use.
I realize a misdemeanor shoplifting record wouldn’t create much leverage, especially if it were in their ‘before I was a Christian’ days, but what better way to change the subject whenever they do?
A: So exactly how would gay marriage affect your marriage?
B: Children need a mother and father…
A: I hear that you were arrested in college for being drunk and disorderly, care to comment?
B: What relevance does that have?
A: Exactly!
Maybe not the best example, but you get my point.
There’s gotta be some whoppers out there, or do they already thoroughly vet specifically to avoid what I’ve just suggested?
US Dept of Justice has a study on repeat sexual offenders and has found the rate to be 6 to 13% for sexual offenders to comment another sexual crime. Some of the high rates are attribuated to the offender being returned to prison the a non sexual related crime such as drugs.
Sepe, thanks, but due to the high number of anonymous people on the net who cite unnamed studies with no date, no publisher, and no link, we at XGW tend not to believe any research claim unless its backed up with the name of the study, where it was published, and preferably a link.
Perhaps it’s just an urban myth that child-sex offenders are largely incurable, but we wish to see that 1) documented and 2) confirmed by multiple studies.
For example, here is the recidivism entry in Wikipedia:
This meta-analysis (and this analysis of the meta-analysis) of various studies seems to be the main source of the 13.4 percent statistic.
The authors add this significant warning, which Mr. Van Domelen neglected to share:
In other words, combining the data from short- and long-term studies arrives at a false result for long-term recidivism. The 13.4 percent statistic does not describe average recidivism at all; it crudely describes recidivism defined differently by different researchers and tracked over just 4 to 5 years.
A Department of Justice summary of data limits its measurement of recidivism to one to three years after prison release:
The three-year FBI data, if clumsily averaged with a more thorough study over 10 years, would artificially and deceptively lower the overall recidivism rate by deleting reoffenses in years four through 10 while inflating the overall sample population that participated in the average.
In short, Van Domelen misinformed his readers with a 13.4 percent recidivism rate that he implied was true for the remainder of the offenders’ lives. In actuality, it was true according to a single crude analysis that averaged only 4 to 5 years in scope and excluded (naturally) a great many sex crimes that go unreported.
Xeno, I have not read Queer Science, but I’ve ordered a copy.