The Mad and the Bad: Sexual Deviancy and the Origins of Treatment Programs for Sex Offenders in Postwar Canada

‘Experiment is viewed as superior to precedent,’ proclaimed American sexologist Benjamin Karpman in 1948. ‘Old methods are readily abandoned, to give way to newer methods.’ Indeed, at war’s end psychiatrists had all but renounced somatic solutions to sexological problems. Drawing on the work of people like G. Stanley Hall in the United States, Sigmund Freud in Europe and George Stevenson in Canada, postwar sexologists elaborated on the role of culture, society, and the family in shaping the sexual self. However, not one of the experts knew how best to translate these theories into treatment. Experiment was not just better than precedent. In the atomic age, it was the only way forward.

This paper examines the origins of sex offender treatment in 1950s Canada. The proliferation of prison and hospital-based programs was not driven by any new discoveries in sexology, but by public demand for a meaningful state response to sexual assaults against children. Consequently, experiments in treating sexual deviation included everything from group therapy, sex education, and behavior modification to the administration of mind-altering drugs. To date, historians have provided detailed analyses of the way homosexuals were subject to these practices. More recent literature reveals a liberal progressive trend among some postwar sexologists. This paper pushes the narrative further by demonstrating how theories that enabled a liberal progressive position toward homosexuality simultaneously produced a much less progressive understanding of heterosexual assault. Narrowing our analyses to include only homosexuality limits our understanding of the full complexity of the postwar sexual landscape, and in particular, the history of sexual pathology and sexual danger. Moreover, broadening our lens to include the full spectrum of sexological thought allows us to gain new insight into how mid-century concepts continue to inform popular and medical constructions of the ‘repeat sex offender’ to the present day.