Sweden hunts antidote to paedophilia
No one would choose this, it’s obvious,” says Anders who has unwanted sexual thoughts about children.
He is at the forefront of a unique scientific study underway in Sweden to see if drugs can prevent paedophiles from acting on their urges.
Anders, who agreed to be interviewed using a pseudonym, says he has never abused children but sought help because he knew his sexual fantasies were “not normal”. He hopes the ground-breaking trial will halt his “improper” urges.
At Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, patients like Anders who have sought help for paedophile fantasies, but have not acted on them, are being given a drug normally used to treat advanced prostate cancer to determine if it reduces the risk of them sexually abusing a child.
“The goal is to establish a preventive treatment programme for men with paedophiliac disorder that is both effective and tolerable so that we can prevent child sexual abuse from happening in the first place,” says psychiatrist and lead researcher Christoffer Rahm.
Various types of chemical castration are used around the world on paedophiles convicted of actual sex offences, but the treatment is not used preventively.
“What we introduce with this study is a way of shifting perspective from being reactive to proactive,” Rahm says.
In the clinical trial, half of the 60 subjects receive an injection of the drug Degarelix and the other half get a “dummy” drug, or placebo. Subjects who receive Degarelix will have non-detectable levels of testosterone after three days, an effect that lasts about three months. Testosterone is involved in several of the most important risk factors for committing child sex abuse, including high sexual arousal, diminished self-control and low empathy, Rahm says.
Anders does not know if he has received the real drug or the placebo, and will only find out when the study is completed in two to three years.
“I have noticed that my sex drive has been sinking lately but I don’t know if it’s attributable to the medicine,” Anders says.
Subjects will also undergo brain scans while they are looking at computer-generated pictures of partially-clothed people of all ages, to see how different areas of their brains react.
“We’re trying to establish objective markers to determine the risk of the patient actually committing child sexual abuse,” brain scan expert Benny Liberg explains.
He described the three regions that were activated on Anders’ brain scan during the experiment: that responsible for controlling sensory perception; the region that monitors one’s own body; and that which inhibits unwanted behaviour responses.
“This is the type of behaviour we’re very much trying to affect with the pharmaceutical intervention,” Liberg explains
Using the drugs together with the brain scans and patient counselling, Rahm and Liberg hope they have devised a formula that will enable scientists to accurately assess the risk of a patient sexually abusing a child. But the drug alone will not be a miracle cure.
During the three-month period with low testosterone levels, “you can start up more long-term treatments, such as social interventions and psychotherapy,” Rahm says.
