Concern as sex offender walks free with no treatment

IN 1995 he was sentenced to 238 years imprisonment, the longest sentence in Irish legal history, today he walks free.

Joseph McColgan, one of the country’s most notorious sex offenders, terrorised his children, subjecting them to serial rape and abuse for over 20 years. Yet he will be freed without having received any treatment.

After pleading guilty to 26 token charges of physical and sexual abuse against his children, in a case where the sheer depravity of the abuse shocked the nation, McColgan should have spent the rest of his life behind bars. However, because the sentences ran concurrently, he will be released from Arbour Hill prison today after just nine years behind bars, less than half the sentence of abuse he imposed on his children.

Speaking on the eve of McColgan’s release, one of the country’s most senior psychologists urged more treatment for sex offenders.

Olive Travers, senior clinical psychologist with the North Western Health Board (NWHB), said child sex offenders can be treated to stop abusive behaviour in the majority of cases. Research showed treatment reduced the rate of re-offending and played a significant role in child protection, Ms Travers told RTÉ’s Marian Finucane show yesterday.

“A six year follow-up study of child molesters showed that one-in-five who were treated re-offended compared to a much higher statistic of three-in-five among those not treated. It is possible to treat the majority,” she said.

However, Ms Travers, who heads Cosc, the NWHB’s sex offenders treatment programme, said there was a minority of sex offenders for whom “when people say lock them up and throw away the key, yes for some men I think that is the only way society can be protected”.

Ms Travers, who did not refer to McColgan, saying she “could not comment on individual cases”, said the most dangerous of child abusers, the sociopathic sex offender, was untreatable.

“I think there is a case to be made for indeterminate sentences for men whom we can’t show are safe.

“The dangerousness of that person possibly comes from their sense of right, the fact that they have ownership...their family is like a possession and that they can treat them and do to them whatever they will. On the rare occasion we’ve met men like that, we find them not amenable to treatment.”

Ms Travers said it was not fair, however, to classify all sex offenders as recidivists.

“It just isn’t accurate to say none of them show remorse and that they are all recidivists,” she said.

There are only two community-based treatment programmes in the country, the Cosc programme and the Granada Institute, a privately-run unit. Arbour Hill has a waiting list for its eight-place programme. A second prison programme in the Curragh ended with its closure.