TO ERADICATE SEXUAL OFFENCES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17698, 19 November 1925, Page 7

TO ERADICATE SEXUAL OFFENCES.

CH’CH SCIENTIST CONDUCTS EXPERIMENTS. WILLING TO TAKE PRISONER IN HAND. Interesting experiments by a Christchurch resident into the cause of sexual offences were mentioned by Mr Twyneham in the Supreme Court today, when he asked for leniency for Roland Ernest James Walsh, a young man who had pleaded guilty to indecent exposure. The trend of scientific thought, Mr Twyneham said, was to ascribe offences in that class to impulses over which the victims had no control. It was believed that the impulses could be held in check and that they might be eradicated. A gentleman in Christchurch was conducting experiments on those lines. He had carried them on for the past three years with a victim who had managed, up to the present at least, to keep out of trouble. The gentleman, who was of high scientific attainments, had seen Walsh, and he ascribed Walsh’s trouble to “compulsion neurosis,” which meant that, although Walsh might have been aware of what he was doing, he had no control over the impulse that caused him to commit the offence. If Walsh was admitted to probation, the gentleman mentioned would take him in hand in the same way as he had taken the other man in hand. “This is in a class of offences that always gives a great deal of anxiety when sentence is imposed,” Mr Justice Adams said. “But it is the Court's duty to protect the public. The prisoner is on probation for a similar offence committed last year. It is impossible to accede to counsel’s plea for probation. The proper course is to impose a sentence of reformative treatment. That will leave the case entirely in the hands of the Prisons Board, and will make it possible for the prisoner to be treated in the way suggested, if the board, after inquiry, considers that that is desirable. In order that an opportunity may be given for a fairly full trial of the experiments, the prisoner will be detained for reformative treatment for a period not exceeding three years.”