Abstract:
This study analyses research and legislation on the treatment of sexual offenders, particularly those considered dangerous, in the United States of America, the Netherlands, and Germany. These countries have been selected for the analysis due to their exemplary character in the dominant approach towards controlling and treating of sexual offenders. The analysis concentrates at first on the historical and the current social backgrounds of crime policies regarding sexual offences and offenders. In a second step the analysis tries to assess the latest state of research on sexual offenders, with particular emphasis on the efficacy of treatment endeavours and measures respectively the amount and conditions of recidivism. In a third step the analysis concentrates on the current situation in the selected States, regarding crime policies and concrete legislative acts on dangerous respectively recidivist sexual offenders. Special emphasis is put on the question whether at all and, in the positive case, how far the legislators took empirical research on sexual offences and sexual offenders into consideration. In that realm legislative reforms in the 1990ies in the selected States are scrutinized and evaluated in a comparative manner. As the German situation is concerned some particular federal laws are being analyzed in detail, like the 6th Act on the reform of the Penal Code (1998), the Act on combating of sexual offences and other dangerous offences (1998), the Act introducing the possibility of secondary preventive detention (2002), the Act on reforming the section on Sexual Self-Determination in the Penal Code (2003), and the Act introducing the possibility of conditional preventive detention (2004). Those Acts are then compared with the relevant legislation in the U.S.A. and the Netherlands. Legislation and court decisions are taken into consideration until September 2004.