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Michael Burvill is pleased but not complacent that none of the 47 sex offenders so far released on parole after completing an intensive rehabilitation program has re-offended. He knows that eventually someone will, which will bring the predictable scrutiny.
by Nick Carne
“Completing the program cannot guarantee a person won’t re-offend or even that he’s low risk; it just lowers the chances,” he said. “I keep reminding the staff that we’re in a honeymoon period.”
Honeymoon or not, feedback from police, the judiciary and offender support groups has been positive and after a near three-year trial the state government has provided ongoing funding, starting with $1.7 million for the current financial year. Half of this is dedicated to sex offenders and the rest to similar programs dealing with violent offenders and Aboriginal offenders. Burvill, a clinical and forensic psychologist and manager of the Rehabilitation Programs Branch (RPB) within the Department of Correctional Services has the job of making all three work.
Helping him is a team of 20, including seven clinical or forensic psychologists, two social workers, two evaluators and five Aboriginal program officers. All are well trained and pretty well paid by public sector standards, reflecting the need to attract people who are both able and willing to spend much of their working day talking in detail about how and why men commit rape or molest young children. And talking is what it’s largely all about.
While a number of approaches are being tried around the world to deal with deviant sexual behaviour, Burvill says “cognitive-behavioural group-based approaches that tackle known risk factors such as thinking errors or cognitive distortions, or attitudes, or general emotion management and so on are considered the most effective”, adding that it’s far from the soft process some might suspect. “What we’re asking these people to do is much harder than doing nothing. It’s not a warm, fuzzy, kaftan-wearing thing with people sitting around saying it’s been so tough for you and we forgive you. It’s a very difficult and challenging process for these people to go through and they learn a lot about themselves.”
Others learn a lot about them too. The program is based around group sessions, with about 10 per group but a rolling membership that provides for a mix of newcomers and old hands. One-on-one sessions are included occasionally if an individual’s motivation or presentation of the facts is in doubt. Each person signs on for up to four two-and-a-half hour sessions a week for six to nine months. All are considered moderate or high risk in terms of re-offending.
The aim is to make them acknowledge what they’ve done and its impact (some start off denying the offence or claiming all kinds of justifications), convince them of the need to avoid it happening again, and teach them how. Making this possible requires an understanding of how they think and what changes thought into action.
“It’s fairly acceptable in the human condition that people have all kinds of fantasies about sex and for most people these go well beyond anything that they will actually do,” Burvill said. “But sometimes something happens. I’ve interviewed offenders who’ve had deviant fantasies about children or rape for years and done nothing about it because they’ve had the internal control mechanisms that have stopped them. But then some event occurs – for example they get depressed or lose their job or a loved one, and perhaps begin abusing drugs or alcohol – and before long they’re offending.
You have to acknowledge that for some people you will never take away what really turns them on but if what turns them on is illegal then it’s their choice to decide to manage that or not. All we can do is give them the tools to be able to manage that.”
The program takes offenders through a series of modules, assisted and challenged by other participants and two facilitators. Modules include self-management (which starts with an autobiographical session), empathy and victim awareness, relationships, social functioning, emotion management, and deviant sexual fantasies and arousal.
Most sessions involve one Aboriginal facilitator, and in Port Augusta up to 60 per cent of participants may be indigenous. Aboriginal offenders’ stories are “often more extreme,” but while everyone is sympathetic there is little leeway given to those who try to use this as a justification. “No-one can deny that Aboriginal people living in certain communities are more exposed to violence and abuse and that influences the likelihood of them becoming an offenders of some kind,” said Burvill, “but the Aboriginal facilitators will reply ‘I had some of those experiences but I’m not in this group’.” To date the program has dealt only with urban Aboriginal people, but the challenge of dealing with more traditional issues is about to begin, courtesy of the Federal Government’s current interventions and the findings of the Mullighan Inquiry. “We are beginning to see more offenders from the Aboriginal (APY) lands trickling down into the justice system,” said Burvill.
South Australia has based its program on a Canadian model considered among the best and certainly the best documented; training is rigorous and the treatment manual runs to 4000 pages. The Canadians also have done the most detailed analysis of impact, collecting data on more than 40,000 offenders from around the world and producing what Burvill calls compelling results. “All the doubters have to do is look at the research – there’s substantial data showing that those who are treated re-offend at about one-third the rate of those who aren’t.”
That does raise the question of why it’s taken SA so long to do this (in Australia, only Tasmania was slower). The answer, Burvill suspects, may in part be that it’s not really a vote winner. “Funding programs to help paedophiles and other sex offenders doesn’t have a great ring to it, but I’m sure that if you asked the average person if they wanted these people treated in prison so the chance of them re-offending when they get out is lessened they’d say ‘yes’.” Some would no doubt argue they should never be released at all, but that’s largely wishful thinking despite the new provisions of section 23 of our Criminal Law Consolidation Act, which allows for an indeterminate sentence to be given to sex offenders who are deemed “unable or unwilling to control their sexual urges”. “That is for very high risk offenders – there are only six such offenders in prison now who fall into that category,” Burvill said.
The new program does give some guide to an offender’s ability and willingness to change and allows the Department of Correctional Services to give more detailed advice to the Parole Board than in the past. It can’t, however, stop offenders being released when their time is up, unlike in New Zealand, where courts now have the power to increase the sentence of those deemed not suitable for release. “We’ve had a couple of nasty characters lately who refused treatment and were refused parole but then served their full sentence and walked out of jail with no supervision, no accountability and no-one to report to,” Burvill said.
A related development is South Australia’s decision to commit to the Australian national Child Offender Register (ANCOR), which will be implemented in a matter of weeks. Offenders will be listed for varying time periods, depending on the seriousness of offences and risk levels. “Police will be taking more of a monitoring role and in South Australia they have a very positive attitude,” Burvill said. “We’ve been working closely with them and they are really trying to understand and engage with offenders rather than taking a jackboot approach.”
It is tempting to suspect some offenders may sign up for a program simply because they are unlikely to get parole if they don’t; despite this, Burvill says very few are just going through the motions. “It’s pretty hard to fake it,” he said. “If you have experienced therapists running a group you know when someone is paying lip service or just intellectualising or feigning responsibility.
It’s part of the skill of the work. Challenging is one of the keys to group therapy. Initially offenders are encouraged to just talk about it in their own words. You’ve got six or nine months – so we don’t jump on thinking errors and justifications straight away. The challenging can sometimes come later. But it needs to be non-aggressive. The person needs to feel they are in an environment where they feel safe. That said, the other group members will often be a bit blunter. They may just come out and say ‘you’re full of it’.”
Currently the sex offender programs are run in Yatala and Port Augusta prisons and Adelaide Community Corrections, while maintenance / relapse prevention programs (sometimes a condition of parole) are offered in Adelaide, Mt Gambier and Port Augusta. The aim is to expand the reach and provide the opportunity to as many as possible of the 200 or so sex offenders in South Australian jails at any one time. Of concern is not only that some will refuse to participate, but also that some are incapable because of poor cognitive functioning or active mental illness. For those offenders the options remain somewhat limited.
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