Circles Of Support; Monitoring, mentoring, cuts risk, group says
10-22-2007 Canada:
TORONTO - In the dank office of a downtown church, a page sealed in plastic and stuck on the wall reads: "Every human being is worth more than the worst thing they do."
It is a hopeful message that goes beyond mere platitude in this context. It is the driving philosophy and was the inspiration for Circles of Support, an organization that began in 1994 when notorious child molester Charlie Taylor was due to be released from prison into the Hamilton area.
The Circles of Support philosophy runs counter to everything society thinks about child molesters -- that they are repeat offenders, unable to be reformed, deviant -- to surround them with support rather than shun them. In fact, those who support the program see it as the most common-sense response to the problem.
Consider the Taylor case: With the community railing against having such a loathsome offender in its midst, and prison officials with no other option for someone who had served every day of his sentence, a Mennonite church accepted the infamous sex offender into their congregation, agreeing to meet with him regularly.
They called themselves Charlie's Angels, and until his death, acted much the way a family or friends would have -- had any of those remained when he was released.
When Taylor died in 2005, perhaps one of his only accomplishments was that, after prison, he lived for 11 years without committing a new sexual offence.
Dr. Robin Wilson, a clinical psychologist who has treated up to 7,000 sex offenders and is a long-time consultant with Circles of Support, applauds Taylor's reformation.
"That's pretty remarkable given that when he was released from prison the risk rating that he was given [by Canada's National Parole Board] was 100% chance of re-offending in seven years. He beat the odds by four years."
The group's research indicates that of the sexual offenders who have taken part in the program, there has been a 70% reduction in sexual offence recidivism.In a survey of 24 offenders who sought and committed to the group's support, two-thirds said that alone they would have had difficulty with relationships and would have returned to crime.
Ninety per cent of the respondents said they would have had problems readjusting to the community.
When child molester Wray Budreo died last month, his funeral service was attended by about 35 people, all of them contacts made through Circles of Support. Convicted of 20 sex crimes between 1963 and 1988, he was one of the first offenders embraced by the program when he was released from prison in 1994, amid a public clamour that included noose-waving demonstrators and screaming headlines. He inspired the program to keep going because he never sexually reoffended.
"This is a very simple concept. All we have to do is think of ourselves. We do well in life because we have people who care about us," said Dr. Wilson, who now runs a Florida prison for violent sexual predators.
"If you're a long-term sex offender and everyone in the community hates your guts and nobody wants to look at you, never mind spend any time with you, who's there to point you in the right direction when you make bad decisions?"
The Circles of Support program, which has grown enough to become partly funded by the Correctional Service of Canada, relies on a relationship approach that surrounds an offender, or core member, with a circle of volunteers, and an outer circle of professionals.
It is the inner circle that drives the program, which is administered by a Mennonite group here in Toronto. They are ordinary citizens who, in the language of the organization, agree to walk with those cast out by society, meeting with offenders on a daily basis.
There are to be no secrets between the core member and the volunteers, and there are strict guidelines about confidentiality versus keeping secrets, and about empowering the offender versus creating a dependency.
"The one thing about offenders that has probably struck me the most is just how exactly similar they are to the rest of us; that there is no tattoo in the middle of their forehead; there is no glaring difference between them and us that we can readily see," said Dr. Wilson.
"That dirty old man with the long greasy hair and dirty fingers in the park with bags of candy and a trench coat -- he doesn't exist. Your average sex offender looks a lot like me; your average sex offender looks a lot like [the Prime Minister;] your average sex offender looks a lot like the next parent of a victim.
An understanding of child molesters goes a considerable distance to helping the problem be contained, he said.
"If we hide our heads in the sand and try and legislate them into non-existence, we're fooling ourselves ... They're part of our community, and the only way that we're going to get our heads around this is if we treat [the problem] as if it's a community issue."
BACK STORY:
Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) are intended to assist sexual offenders released at the end of their sentence. Their risk of re-offending is considered so great that they cannot be safely supervised in the community. Many are high-profile cases with no social support. - Offenders must sign a "covenant" to live offence-free and notify COSA immediately if they have difficulty doing so. The non-legally binding document allows volunteers to receive confidential information from therapists and other professionals. - COSA members are primarily faith-based community volunteers who "walk daily in friendship" with offenders also help them with everything from basic banking, using public transit and doing laundry to getting counselling and applying for dental care and car insurance. - After an initial series of meetings in the community, volunteers are encouraged to have the offender over to their home, but only if the entire group decides that the visits do not pose a risk to the core member and to the community. - If notes are subpoenaed for a court appearance, volunteers are encouraged to "record only defensible facts and avoid opinion when writing notes." - COSA will break confidentiality with an offender -- a key reason for its success -- if a child is at risk or a law or a condition on a court order has been violated or is about to be violated. - COSA members are advised never to contact victims. Instead, offenders who wish to do so are to be "strongly encouraged" and re-directed to the accredited Victim Offender Reconciliation Program. ..more.. Source: Correctional Service Canada, Zosia Bielski, National Post. krook@nationalpost.com
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