Does sexual offender treatment work? A systematic review of outcome evaluations

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"The article reports a systematic review of controlled outcome evaluations of psychosocial and organicsexual offender treatment. A comprehensive search of the literature in five languages revealed 80independent comparisons between treated and untreated groups of sexual offenders (N= 22,181). Themajority of studies confirmed a positive treatment effect. Overall, 11.1% of treated offenders and17.5% of controls showed sexual recidivism (37% difference). Findings for violent and generalrecidivism were similar. Studies on surgical castration showed the strongest effect; however, this wasconfounded with methodological and offender characteristics. Hormonal medication, cognitivebehavioural,and behavioural approaches also revealed a positive effect. Non-behavioural treatmentsdid not show a significant impact. Other moderators such as small sample size, authors´ affiliation withthe program, program completion versus dropout, or type of outcome measure had a significant impact.Methodological study characteristics explained the largest proportion of effect size variance. Overall,findings are promising but more differentiated evaluations of high quality are needed."