Bury my balls at Wormwood Scrubs
Gonads and strife
I doubt he remembers it, but me and Tom Harwood go way back. I met the GB News presenter at a youth voting event back in late 2014, when we were both but callow youths.
I recall that on the sidelines he made some bleeding heart complaint about the lack of British news coverage over a travesty in South America. Cutthroat hack that I was, I pointed out that readers tend not to care about news from the other side of the planet, however morally worthy.
The exchange is a contrast to Harwood’s present hard-nosed image. Having vaulted to political fame as a snarky participant in student politics, he later became a reporter for political blog Guido Fawkes, which tends to be equally unsympathetic to most of its subjects, foreign or otherwise.
Trans rights advocacy aside, I don’t think Harwood goes in much for squishy progressive concerns these days, which is how he ended up at GB News. Perhaps I therefore shouldn’t be surprised that he is now calling for chemical castration for sex offenders.
“Evidence from Scandinavia says chemical castration can cut sex offender re-offending rates from 40% to just 5%,” he tweeted. “Only 120 people are on that sort of treatment in the UK whereas almost 100,000 people are on the sex offenders register. Should be a condition of release from prison.”
It’s enough to send shivers through your ghoulies, assuming you still have them. Sex offenders may not be terribly popular, but it comes to something when a national broadcaster says we should start chopping their balls off.
That’s not because I think it wouldn’t work. Harwood doesn’t cite his sources, but it’s believable that some medical intervention would reduce the likelihood of rapists re-offending. Turning them all into eunuchs would at minimum create some practical obstacles.
More broadly, as our understanding of brain chemistry improves we may be able to tinker with it to reduce the likelihood of all crimes. Dialling down impulsivity might calm a potential shoplifter, for example.
On the physical front, Sharia law already mandates hand amputation for thievery, which must make re-offending more challenging. And few punishments are more effective at stopping further crimes than lethal injections, even if they don’t always work the first time.
The objection to such corporal and capital punishments is rarely that they don’t prevent further crime. It’s that maiming and killing people in the cause of rehabilitation is more monstrous than locking them in a cage.
That also applies to messing with somebody’s brain chemistry, which is the intended aim of chemical castration. As evinced by those who suffer significant brain injuries, there is no division between your brain and your personality.
What Harwood offers is effectively a lobotomy for delinquents. The comparison to the Ludovico technique from A Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist undergoes aversion therapy against violence, is obvious and sinister.
No doubt some would argue that criminals might be free to choose whether to be caged or castrated, absolving the rest of us of responsibility. Harwood goes as far as saying even for the wrongly convicted that “being out of prison with low sex drive is probably kinder for the edge case of a convicted innocent than them being locked away in prison for a most of their lives.”
I’m all for cold logic, but I think our modern aversion to cruel and unusual punishments is well founded. It does not merely degrade the victim of such treatment, but the state that carries it out. Harwood’s proposal is bollocks.