The passage by the Kaduna State House of Assembly and the subsequent signing into law by Governor Nasir El-Rufai of a bill approving surgical castration for adults convicted for raping a child has continued to draw reactions.
Some of the reactions include questions whether castration is the best way to end rape cases in a society. Dateline Nigeria looks at some countries that allow castration and samples experts’ opinion.
What Kaduna law provides for:
“Whoever commits rape of a child below the age of fourteen (14) years shall on conviction, be punished with Surgical Castration and death.
“Whoever has sexual intercourse with a male child below the age of fourteen years shall be punished with surgical castration and death.
“Where a female adult is convicted for the offence of rape of a child, the Court shall punish the accused with Bilateral Salpingectomy [removal of fallopian tube] and death.
“Where the victim is above fourteen years, the Court shall on conviction sentence the accused with a punishment of surgical castration and life imprisonment.
“Where the convict is a child, the Court shall order as appropriate under the Children and Young Person Law Cap 26 Laws of Kaduna State 1991.
“Where the victim is a child, the Court shall in addition to the conviction, order that the convict be listed in the Sex Offenders Register to be published by the Attorney General.
“Where the Court is trying the offence of rape involving a child below the age of fourteen years, corroboration of a medical report shall be necessary.”
According to Governor El-Rufai, “these drastic penalties are required to help further protect children from a serious crime.”
However, some people are already asking why the state will commit resources to castrating people when they are going to be executed or condemned to life behind bars.
Chemical, not surgical, castration
Chemical castration is done via the use of drugs, whether to reduce libido and sexual activity, or to treat cancer and so on. Unlike surgical castration, where the gonads are removed, chemical castration, which is more common, does not remove organs, nor is it a form of sterilization.
According to Wikipedia, “Chemical castration is generally considered reversible when treatment is discontinued, although permanent effects in body chemistry can sometimes be seen, as in the case of bone density loss …”
In 2016, following the gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, signed a decree authorizing chemical castration for convicted child sex offenders and requiring those released on parole to wear electronic monitoring devices.
He said sexual crimes had undermined the development of children and therefore had to be handled in an extraordinary way.
According to the New York Times, several American states have legal provisions for chemical castration. On June 11, 2019, for instance, the American state of Alabama enacted a law that would require, as a condition of parole, that some convicted child sex offenders undergo “chemical castration”.
Also, Ukraine’s parliament in 2019 had approved measure to chemically castrate rapists forcibly.
But Czech Republic offers voluntary surgical castration to violent sex offenders. The law was introduced in 1966. According to official figures, 85 people underwent surgical castration in the Czech Republic between 2000 and 2011.
However, like El-Rufai, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has suggested measures, including surgical castration, to stop the rape epidemic in his country.
Khan, who had earlier canvassed for public hanging, said rapists and child molesters should “undergo chemical castration, or surgery be performed so they cannot do anything in future.”
Castration does not eliminate sex drive
According to Lawandeen Hussaini, a human behaviour expert, the Kaduna State law will be beset by lots of limitations, because it failed to even consider the motivation or the drive for people to commit sex offence.
“You see rapists, or sex offenders, are mostly driven by a feeling of dominance, not by sexual desire as often thought by many. Some are just perverts. I have had the chance of listening to a man who finds it compelling to insert his fingers into the private parts of small girls, but he can’t even get an erection.
“In cases like this, it would be useless to castrate this man. Perhaps, the Kaduna State government saw this limitation which may explain the provision for death in addition to castration. So the government should also consider reeducating sexual offenders,” Hussaini said.
Also, according to experts, surgical castration, also called orchiectomy, involving the physical removal of the testicles, which produce 95 percent of a man’s testosterone, can diminish sex drive but does not completely eliminate it.
This is because the small amount of testosterone still produced by the adrenal glands could be enough to allow some sexual function to remain.
According to one study from the 1960s of about 1,000 German sex offenders who had been castrated, 65 percent men immediately felt their libido plummet, but 18 percent were able to have sex 20 years later. A small percent of sexual offenders who are surgically castrated repeat their crime, experts say.
Rape crisis workers also say that violence, not sex, is the real problem, which castration fails to address. “This misfocuses the issue and feeds into the myths about rape,” said Denise Snyder, executive director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center.
“Sexual assault is a crime of violence and aggression . . . not the product of an uncontrollable sex drive.”
“The problem is often in the brain, not the testicles,” said Barbara K. Schwartz, director of the Sex Offender Treatment Program at Twin Rivers Correctional Center in Monroe, Washington. A rapist who has been castrated “could still be a phenomenal danger.”
