Forensic psychologist’s considerations about the new law regulation in cases of sexual crimes

The article comments, from the perspective of a forensic psychologist, the changes which have been recently provided to the law regulations on sexual crime and the treatment of the sexual crime perpetrators. It appears that the new law regulations follow the right path, because they create the conditions for holistic and complex solutions in the sexual crime treatment matter. Unfortunately they are still rather incomplete and inconsistent. Their practical implementation is difficult because of the very demanding qualification criteria to the psychotherapy of sexual crime perpetrators, the existence of law criteria to the therapy, the narrow frame of the therapy goals and unclear rules of therapy constraint. Moreover, in Poland there is a lack of complex therapy models of sexual perpetrators, we have little experience in this kind of therapy and there is a deficiency of qualified specialists. Finally the relationship between the treatment of this kind of criminals in prison conditions and ambulatory therapy conditions isn’t very clearly precise. On the other hand, a lot of improvements have been provided, such as: continuing the treatment after leaving prison, not only pharmacological treatment but also psychotherapy, the system of prevention. Despite of the strong attempts to promote the special role of pharmacological treatment of sexual crime perpetrators („chemical castration”), the new solutions promote a complex and interdisciplinary approach to this problem. In this article, the author described the current Polish experience in the therapy of sexual crime perpetrators and listed several rules of preparing the forensic-psychological expertise according to the described problem in context of new legal regulations.