Relapse Prevention for Sex Offenders: Why spouses should be part of the treatment plan

Treatment of sex offenders that focuses intensely on the offender and the use of cognitive behavioral programs has been shown to have some merit. Treatment of sex offenders however, requires not only treating or managing the individual, but calls for social engineering techniques that modify the offender’s environment. One important aspect of the complex management of sex offenders is to examine, and perhaps modify, the home to which the offender returns. Our clinic chose to do just that. While our clinic ran a number of group programs for sex offenders, we found that therapy for spouses of offenders was seriously lacking. With this in mind, we started a therapeutic group for the spouses of sexual offenders, noting that such treatments were not widely documented in the literature. Our initial group could be best described as supportive and exploratory; it was conducted as a means of determining the needs and particular issues that spouses of sexual offenders face.

Five women attended the group for eight weeks. Four of the women were over 45 years, and one member was in her early 20’s. Of the women over 45 years, all had relationships ranging from 25-30 years in duration. The women’s commitment to their marriage was high, but their martial satisfaction, as measured by a marital satisfaction questionnaire, was low. The women all described a profound sense of social isolation due to feelings of shame and stigma related to their partner’s offense. They all described feelings of loss, depression, anxiety, diminished self respect, and low sexual self esteem. They were confused about how to best understand their partners, and struggled to accept that their spouse’s offenses may be indicative of an underlying deviant sexual preference.

We found that the women benefited from the supportive aspect of the group the most. They were able to use each other as a sounding board and to get advice from others in similar situations. It was very apparent the women derived much benefit from the normalizing influence that sharing and relating to others in the same situation affords.

We used a simplified version of cognitive behavioral therapy to examine the chain of events that transpired subsequent to the arrest of their spouses. The group was not highly structured, and so the women could spend time discussing and reflecting on the issues that seemed most important to them. A fair amount of time was spent reflecting on feelings of loss: the loss of trust in their partner and the loss of the ideal of their partner. They also spent a significant portion of their time together sharing experiences of heightened anxiety and low mood. These feeling states were clearly exacerbated by each woman’s decision to not share the commission of the offense with others, even those closest to them. These women tended to suffer in a state of silence and confusion. Their unwillingness to share their troubles with others (family and friends) seemed to stem from a desire to protect their spouse’s reputation and also a deeply felt sense of shame and self blame. One of the most taboo subjects to discuss for these women was the sense of sexual failure. There seemed to be a deeply felt sense that somehow they were to blame for the offense by not being enough, sexually, for their partner.

One of the issues that presented a notable challenge to the group process was the issue of perceived sexual inadequacy. One of the defenses the group used well was humor, which deflected the conversation away from this sensitive topic. Since the majority of the group was over 45 and well into menopause, humor was often injected into the conversation when it shifted too close to the taboo area of sexual decline and vulnerability. None of the women in the group had discussed the impact the offense had on their sense of sexual vibrancy with their spouse. It appeared that communication about sex in the marriages was not taking place and this dynamic also played out in the group. The spouses also had great difficulty discussing deviant sexual interests in their partners. The group seemed to serve a primary forum for ventilation as the spouse felt punished by her partner’s crime.

We noted there was a pressing need for both the men’s and women’s groups to examine the nature of the sexual communication, sexual satisfaction, how to live with sexual deviancy, and how a spouse could be an equal partner in the offender’s relapse prevention plan.