SEXUAL PERVERTS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 13 June 1924, Page 5

SEXUAL PERVERTS.

QUESTION OF TREATMENT.

PENALTIES FOR, OFFENCES

(by telegraph—press association.) AUCKLAND 1 , June 12. At the mental defectives’ commission Dr. E. H. B. Milsom, representing the British Medical Association, said it was extreqiely doubtful how far a surgical operation would alter the mentality of sexual perverts. It might be beneficial before adolescence. Whether they should be segregated depended upon the cost of such a. scheme. If these perverts were in sufficient numbers to put a serious burden on the State the more sporting method would eventually evolve itself. Society, he continued, should protect itself by very long sentences in all cases of sexual offences, especially against young girls. Mental defectives should be segregated -to prevent their breeding. As to the ethics of surgical procedure to prevent procreation, it appeared to him that no more could be said in justification of this than of euthanasia in the case of the permanently insane who commit murder. The fact that they are insane should be an additional reason for the death penalty rather than for a reprieve. J. C. Johnson, professor of biology, said the crux of the matter Jay in the trail smissibility of abnormal characters. Environment might improve an individual. but most workers in heredity denied that it would improve the next generation. Further research in internal secretions was urgently required, especially in abnormal sexual cases. As regards treatment, segregation was indicated with every opportunity for an uplift in environment. Properly organised institutions and not homes should be provided for those suffering from abnormal sexuality. The Rev. Jasper Oalder, as a social worker for the last fourteen years, said liis experience showed in several cases that- v'rongness was the result of accident rather than the product of subnormality. He said a half-way house was being established in a farm of about sixty acres some twenty miles from the •city, while the nearest hotel was six miles away. Professor Anderson, of the Auckland University College, giving evidence concerning mental tests and results of exin other lands and in the United States army, expressed the opinion that nothing should be done to interfere with the normal educational outlook in favour of the pathological outlook. . “We want,” he said “to keep education on the basis of hopeful endeavour for definite attainment.” There was just such an interference w’lth the proper and normal educational outlook when ordinary methods of mind testing were used, quite apart from any. psychological supervision, and when it was made- the initial basis of classification. The tester in that case' was getting away from the child’s individual interest in his work. The initial classification into very superior normal, border line, feeble-minded, imbecile or idiot seemed to him thoroughly mischievous.