Cruel attachments : the ritual rehab of child molesters in Germany

There is no more seemingly incorrigible criminal type than the child sex offender. Said to suffer from a deeply rooted paraphilia, he is often considered as outside the moral limits of the human, profoundly resistant to change. Despite these assessments, in much of the West an increasing focus on rehabilitation through therapy provides hope that psychological transformation is possible. Examining the experiences of child sex offenders undergoing therapy in Germany—where such treatments are both a legal right and duty—John Borneman, in __Cruel Attachments__, offers a fine-grained account of rehabilitation for this reviled criminal type. Carefully exploring different cases of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders, Borneman details a secular ritual process aimed not only at preventing future acts of molestation but also at fundamentally transforming the offender, who is ultimately charged with creating an almost entirely new self. Acknowledging the powerful repulsion felt by a public that is often extremely skeptical about the success of rehabilitation, he challenges readers to confront the contemporary contexts and conundrums that lie at the heart of regulating intimacy between children and adults. In every culture intimacy between adults and children is subject to regulation, but it is most often only a taboo. In the last half-century in the West such taboos have become explicit objects for legal regulation. In much of the West, however, the focus has shifted from punishment and healing to “rehabilitation” through therapy. In Germany treatment is in fact a legal right and a personal obligation. “Cruel Attachments” is an anthropological account based on ethnographic research in Berlin, Germany, of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders through therapy, often accompanied by short-term imprisonment. Therapy is charged with creating a person who not only avoids a repeating the crime but a self capable of reflection, introspection, and transformation. Through an explication of this modern secular ritual of rehabilitation, John Borneman theorizes the complex relation between a legal system that demands a change of self, a transformation of the inner state of a person, and a public that is extremely skeptical of the success of rehab rituals. Using select case studies, he follows offenders as they experience a sequence of events--from accusation to admission of culpability, through arrest, trial, imprisonment, treatment, release from prison, and either social reincorporation or indefinite surveillance. Tensions and problems in the relationship between law, therapy, and a skeptical public notwithstanding, the author argues that the turn to therapy within the German mode of rehabilitation of child sex molesters presents a more effective alternative to a punitive model such as is practiced in the United States There is no more seemingly incorrigible criminal type than the child sex offender. Said to suffer from a deeply rooted paraphilia, he is often considered outside the moral limits of the human, profoundly resistant to change. Despite these assessments, in much of the West an increasing focus on rehabilitation through therapy provides hope that psychological transformation is possible. Examining the experiences of child sex offenders undergoing therapy in Germany - where treatments are both a legal right and duty - John Borneman offers a fine-grained account of rehabilitation for this criminal type