A Corrections’ Psychological Service pilot treatment programme for high-risk rapists will be repeated in April next year following its successful conclusion.
Nine of the 10 long-term prisoners at Auckland Prison who started the pilot graduated in November from the intensive eight-month programme.
Project Manager Dr Nick Wilson said the results were very pleasing, especially as most were high-risk serial rapists who had personalities that often made it difficult to share and work as a group.
The prisoners underwent 275 hours of treatment, including group sessions three times a week with psychologists Laura Braid and Cecil Wiehahn.
Sessions covered analysis of their crimes and the causes, behavioural and other life skills and development of “safety plans”. The programme also included individual sessions with psychologists once a week.
Prisoners who completed the programme have shown positive behaviour changes related to sexual re-offending, prompting the decision to run another course at the Auckland prison in April next year for a similar number of high-risk offenders.
“We hope the course will halve sexual offending recidivism,” said Dr Wilson.
The recidivism rate for those committing sex offences against adults has traditionally been relatively low at 14-15 percent - compared to 21 percent for child sex offenders. As a result, priority has been given to treatment programmes for other serious offenders, including child sex offenders. However, Dr Wilson says more recent research shows 50-60 percent sexual recidivism among high-risk rape offenders.
While there were some attempts to run group treatment of rape offenders in New Zealand in the mid 1980s and the late 1990s, these were low intensity programmes, typically based on material used for child sex offenders. Other treatment of rapists has been individual sessions with a psychologist, programmes with mixed groups of child sex offenders and adult rapists, or placement on general violence prevention programmes.
Corrections initiated a study into the establishment of an experimental treatment programme in 2004. Meanwhile, the Safer Communities Councils, in consultation with 15 agencies, had identified a gap in treatment services for adult sex offenders.
Dr Wilson says the new tailored programme has been developed based on recent literature, including findings from treatment at Clearwater Prison in Canada which resulted in a twothirds reduction in sexual offending recidivism. He says the first group responded very well to the structured programme that he and his project team developed for the New Zealand environment following consultation with Maori stakeholders among others.
Treatment encompasses 275 therapy hours over eight months, and involves participants in role play, sharing ideas and information, learning new skills, and finishing with individual presentations to the group for each of the three programme phases.
Corrections staff can request a copy of Dr Nick Wilson’s paper, The review of the treatment of high risk rape offenders, from the Head Office Information Centre - email: infocentre@corrections.govt.nz
Dr Wilson presented a paper on the programme at a conference of The Australian and New Zealand Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abuse in Australia last month (November, 2006). This paper is available from Dr Wilson.
A full report evaluating the programme will be completed in June 2007.
Dr Nick Wilson
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