Punishment or therapy? The ethics of sexual offending treatment

The claim that sex offender treatment is a form of punishment and as such cannot be covered by traditional ethical codes is a controversial one. It challenges the ethical basis of current practice and compels clinicians to rethink the work they do with sex offenders. In this paper I comment on Bill Glaser\u27s defence of that idea in a challenging and timely paper and David Prescott and Jill Leveson\u27s rejection of his claims. First, I consider briefly the nature of both punishment and treatment and outline Glaser\u27s argument and Prescott and Levenson\u27s rejoinder. I then investigate what a comprehensive argument for either position should look like and finish with a few comments on each paper