Swedish scientists want research funds to test what they see as preventive treatment for potential paedophiles. They plan to use a British crowdfunding website to finance full-scale scientific trials of a drug treatment that could, they hope, reduce the likelihood of child sexual abuse.
The volunteers in the trial would be 60 Swedish men who have sought help; half would receive injections of a placebo. The other 30 would be treated with a hormone therapy called degarelix, used in the treatment of prostate cancer, which blocks the production of the male hormone testosterone.
The reasoning, says Christoffer Rahm, a consultant psychiatrist and researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is that testosterone is an agent in three factors connected with child abuse: high sexual arousal, disturbed self-regulation, and lack of empathy.
The approach – sometimes called chemical castration - is likely to be controversial, and raises obvious questions of medical ethics and confidentiality, the researchers concede.
“This issue is hard to deal with but we must, because it affects all of us. Child sexual abuse causes a lot of suffering for the victims and their relatives. It also costs society enormous amounts of money,” Rahm said.
“It also has negative consequences for the perpetrator, who risks becoming totally isolated, depressed and sentenced to imprisonment. Up until now most of the attention has been on how to deal with the perpetrators once they are detected, by the police or by the authorities, but by this stage children have already been harmed.”
So the aim of project Priotab (Paedophilia at Risk – Investigations of Treatment or Biomarkers) is to act before a crime is committed: it is not generally known, he argued, that many men with paedophilic disorder actually want help. Preventell, a Swedish helpline based at the Karolinska hospital, gets calls from around a hundred men each year. And part of the project will look for biological markers – genetic or neurological – that might indicate that some people were more at risk of paedophilia than others.
The researchers already have some Swedish research money, but formal “gold standard” clinical trials are costly, and they need more. They are using British science crowdfunding platform Walacea to raise the remainder.
Crowdfunding scientific research may seem an unusual step. “The internet has enabled people with common interests to connect using social media and email,” Walacea founder, Natalie Jonk explains. “This connectivity means people with common interests can directly support scientists working in areas they care about. This is great for scientists as it gives them direct access to funders, and great for the public as they see progress in research that is important to them.”
“What’s being discussed isn’t a cure for paedophilia, it is not even a treatment for paedophilia, it is a treatment for sexual arousal, and trying to assist men to manage that arousal,” said Donald Grubin, emeritus professor of forensic psychiatry at Newcastle University.
“It would be great if we had biological markers that were indicative of risk, of arousal, of what’s going on inside the brain, sexually.” But, he said he did not think there would ever be a screening test that could identify paedophiles in a population. The most such a study could hope to identify was risk.
