Today a Brighton man, Kevin Hazelwood, was sentenced for raping a 9 year old girl while on probation for paedophile offences. What to do with people like this? Clearly the system is not working. As a psychiatrist, I am happy to offer an answer: give them an effective pharmaceutical treatment. No reason why not. It is not perfect, but is better than nothing - and that is what the probation service offers, more or less.
Medroxyprogesterone is a drug routinely given to girls for contraception. The Home Office offers a completely spurious case against hormonal treatment. But then government (and by this I mean the civil servants who increasingly can be seen to be driving policy) will never have anything that is not hammered out on its own anvil.
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I abhor paedophiles as much as any normal person, but this case has totally overlooked the mother's role in failing to protect her child. I know the family personally. Despite press reports to the contrary, the mother knew of Hazelwood's previous convictions and continued to send her child to him for sleepovers. In my mind that makes her just as guilty.
What decent mother WOULDN'T question the motives of a 40 something year old man who constantly volunteered to babysit overnight for a child who had no family ties to him, who, as the mother was fully aware was not allowed unsupervised contact to his own son, and who's daughter didn't persistently beg not to be left there?
As I said, Paedophiles deserve severe punishment, but the blame doesn't always lay exclusively at their feet. To commit such an act requires opportunity, and in the case of Kevin Hazelwood, it was handed to him on a plate.
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