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This chapter looks at the nature of the “problems” for which the inmates are being treated. Initially, inmates tend to frame their problems in terms of immediate factors, alcohol or substance abuse, bad attitudes toward women, anger, and so on. These problems are almost always of long standing; these men demonstrate troubled lives usually reaching back into childhood. Over the course of the treatment, they begin to learn about the broader psychological framework in which their problems are embedded. They struggle with the concepts of cognitive distortions and thinking errors, and incrementally deduce the basics of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The chapter then presents a more detailed description of the CBT paradigm.

This introductory chapter recounts an inmate’s experience during a “high-intensity” treatment program for sexual offenders designed according to the principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in a Canadian therapeutic prison, wherein he was asked to provide his “autobiography.” His engagement with prison-based therapeutic intervention for sexual offending behavior exhibits an ongoing tension between subjective experience and personal agancy, on one hand, and a positivist, science-based “best practices” model of treatment on the other. The chapter then provides an overview of narrative theory, which has emerged over the last two decades as a major framework in psychological and medical anthropology, as well as the book’s outline and goals.

This chapter discusses moral habilitation. Moral habilitation refers to the process by which individuals are morally remade in the image of certain ideals regarding appropriate social and ethical conduct so that they become “fit” to be among other people. The first psychoeducational group that the men experience after orientation that starts the process of moral habilitation is Cognitive Strategies. “Cog” Strategies, as they typically refer to it, represent an introduction to the basic philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—an approach to helping participants change their behavior by correcting their errors in thinking. This includes an examination of how thought and feelings determine behavior. According to the Treatment Manual, Participants develop an awareness of how perceptions, self talk, and distorted thiking influence their offending behavior, and begin to change their distorted thinking patterns.

This chapter examines not whether but how therapy is efficacious within ritual rehab. It follows the ritual process of rehabilitation, beginning with the accusation of abuse, to arrest, imprisonment, trial, sentencing, therapy, and reintegration into the social. It then examines the case of a man twice convicted of molesting adolescent men as he explicates his acts and history in therapy. For a long time the offender resists introspection and appears uninterested or unable to comprehend what therapy might bring him. He shows an inability to empathize with his victims and is unable to write a letter of apology to them, as demanded by the therapists. Shortly before release from prison, there seems to be a therapeutic break in the external shell the offender presents to others. The chapter concludes that he had been exhibiting to the therapists a False Self to hide a more vulnerable and caring, True Self, a split he had developed in past experiences of persecution and in a non-reciprocal yet care-taking relationship with the law.

This chapter analyzes child sex abuse as both a real and phantasmatic phenomenon in the West that has become prominent in the last 40 years. It theorizes the secular ritual of rehabilitation of child molesters in its relation to the changing legal and social regulation of adult child relations. Arising from this relatively new phenomenon are a set of significant issues: defining and diagnosing paraphilia, transforming taboos into illegalities, including sex in anthropological concepts of incest, understanding anew the significance of parricide in the Oedipal complex, redefining intimacy and perversion in the changing lifecourse of men, recognizing disgust in the transference with the phenomenon of child sex abuse, overcoming obstacles to knowledgeability about child sex abuse and child sex molesters, creating untouchability in definitions of transgressive sex, acknowledging evidence of the efficacy of treatment of child sex offenders.