The Right to Castration

This morning's NYT is reporting on a fascinating debate in Europe echoing through chambers of the European Parliament, Council of Europe, the media, and millions of European households. At the center of the debate is the following question: should European courts mandate, allow, or prohibit the increasing practice of castration for repeated sex offenders. The Council of Europe's anti-torture committee has argued that this constitutes a cruel punishment which takes away the human right to reproduce from sex offenders. The opponents of the practice argue that sex offenders should be locked up, treated, monitored, but that state's flirtation with biological remedies to a social problem leads to the dangerous path towards eugenics. The proponents of the practice point to a Danish study of 900 sex offenders in the 1960s which showed that a rate of repeat offense after castration dropped from 80 to 2%. They also point to testimonies of (former) sex offenders themselves who after being castrated say with relief that they can finally lead happy lives no longer a threat to society.

Czech Republic has offered the procedure although hospitals point out that it is a very rare form of medical practice which is always safe and painless. After some pretty gruesome murders of children by pedophiles, Poland is also preparing legislation which would allow the courts to impose hormone-blocking drugs on repeated sex offenders.

It might surprise you that despite my decidedly liberal convictions, I am supportive of the voluntary castration measures. To allow castration is in itself a liberal value. If Europe is a haven of liberalism, it will allow the procedure to continue and even increase if that is what sex offenders desire. If the state mandated the procedure it would ignore the lack of public consensus on the issue. It is pretty clear that European public(s) are divided on this issue so for any state to take an interventionist role in this would be unethical and unconstitutional. The argument that the state has the obligation to protect the society from sex offenders does not apply here since the state already has a wide range of tools available (prison, home monitoring, psychiatric treatments, etc) to carry out this obligation. But to mandate this would be to overstep the boundaries and take a position in a public debate which has not been resolved. On the other hand, for the state to prohibit the procedure would be as equally unethical since it would once again, ignore the lack of consensus. Prohibiting or mandating castration would be tantamount to prohibiting or mandating abortion. The main reason I am vehemently pro-choice is because there is no societal consensus (is a fetus a human being, does woman have sovereignty over her womb,etc) on the issue so the choice has to be left to the individual.

It is the same case with sex offenders. They may have committed horrendous crimes and for this the state has a complete authority to take away their freedom by putting them in prisons for long time, mandating that they undergo lifelong psychiatric treatment, or monitoring their lives (or all of the above). But it is equally clear that the state has no mandate to impose biological solutions to this problem. On the other hand, if the individual sex offender voluntarily submits to the procedure, the state has no right to deny this to him/her just like it has no right to deny a terminally ill person to end their life or a woman to have an abortion.