British men have been volunteering for chemical castration for years – is there a case to make it work?

Independent

23-05-2025

Ryan Yates was 30 years old when a judge told him that he may never be released from prison. He was jailed more than 15 years ago, in April 2010, at the High Court in Glasgow, where Judge Lord Pentland ordered him to serve at least 10 years, and imposed a life-long restriction order on Yates: he was 'an exceptionally high level of danger to women and society', the judge said.
Six months earlier, in October 2009, in a tree-lined park in Aberdeen, Yates had tried to murder a 60-year-old woman during an attempt to abduct and rape her two granddaughters, aged eight and two.
As part of his sentence, Yates agreed to be chemically castrated. It was voluntary: after the judgement was passed, the serial offender – who carried out his attack just days after he was released from custody for an assault with a sexual element – was administered leuprorelin, a testosterone suppressant which reduces sexual drive and arousal. At the time, public response to the decision was positive – the 'twisted paedophile' would face something that looked more like 'real justice', then, many said.
Did it work? Difficult to say: in December, Yates died in custody at HMP Glenochil, aged 44. Yates was the last publicly reported person in the UK to undergo chemical castration – the use of anaphrodisiac drugs to reduce libido and sexual activity – yet the practice remains a topic of hot debate.
This week, justice secretary Shabana Mahmood announced plans to expand the use of chemical castration for serious sex offenders, including a proposal for mandatory treatment, as part of a broader sentencing reform aimed at reducing prison overcrowding.
The practice – not to be confused with surgical castration – has been legally available on a limited, voluntary basis since 2009, when a pilot at HMP Whatton in Nottinghamshire began. Within just a few years, around 100 prisoners had participated in the programme, which a spokesperson at the Ministry of Justice said at the time was being 'used in conjunction with other approaches to managing the risk of sexual offending'. Now, as a result of the independent sentencing review published this week, the government is set to roll out the pilot for sex offenders in 20 prisons across the country.
Mahmood said she is 'not squeamish' about the decision to use 'medication to manage problematic sexual arousal', adding that she is 'exploring whether mandating the approach is possible'.
What was once a rare, voluntary treatment may soon become a formalised tool of sentencing reform, aimed not only at rehabilitation but also at reducing the strain on a chronically overcrowded prison system. In theory, it could mean that men like Yates – sexual predators deemed a 'menace' to women and children in society – would automatically be subjected to chemical castration in an attempt to control the population of sex offenders in England and Wales.
Some say it's a necessary evolution. Physical punishment like this, or like corporal punishment in prisons, is the antidote to a soft justice system too preoccupied with the human rights of those it deals with for its own good.
When public figures like Nigel Farage make inflammatory calls to reignite debate on the use of the death sentence in the UK, you can usually find conversation about compulsory castration not far behind. When it comes to dealing with serious offenders – especially when faced with the despair of their victims – there's a tendency to be very simplistic: we want an eye for an eye. But there are also studies that show success rates of chemical castration.
One trial of a drug named degarelix in Stockholm, Sweden, reported on by Sky News, found that just two weeks after the first injection, men living in the community had a significantly reduced risk of committing child sexual abuse. However, how this was measured exactly is not fully clear – and the study was conducted on just 52 men, a tiny pool to pin decisions with such high potential repercussions on.
Others say that chemical castration offers rehabilitation and support to long-term psychological therapies and, when undertaken in the correct way, voluntary castration even 'empowers' perpetrators to take responsibility for their own behaviour. It is, these advocates say, a way of allowing offenders back into society with 'less risk' when offered as a condition of early release. And – crucially, let's not forget – it's much cheaper than rehabilitating them in prison.
Yet, there's something instinctively troublingly intimate about the state altering a person's body chemistry – even with their consent; critics of the practice question how 'voluntary' consent really is inside a prison.
It's not a new concept, of course – during a particularly dark period in the mid-20th century it was used as a form of punishment for homosexual acts, notoriously in the case of Alan Turing, a pioneering codebreaker during the Second World War who was convicted of 'gross indecency' due to his homosexuality in 1952. He took his own life two years after choosing the option of imprisonment or chemical castration – the science around it is still shaky.
Violence and harm can't be attributed to a simple hormonal imbalance; misogyny and an impulse to control women can't be medicalised
A lot of the studies are lacking in long-term follow-ups and don't account for important variables like the natural decline of libido with age, or even what other tools – like therapy – are being used alongside the medication, which generally consist of two drugs: anti-androgens, that reduce testosterone, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs – such as Prozac, citalopram and sertraline; common antidepressants). They're taken alongside psychiatric work that reportedly targets other causes of sexual offending – like the desire for power and control.
And it's the latter that really feels like the point. Libido alone is rarely, if ever, the cause of sexual offending – not all crimes are driven by desire. Violence and harm can't be attributed to a simple hormonal imbalance; misogyny and an impulse to control women can't be medicalised. Sexual violence in society isn't contained in science – it's in deeply embedded attitudes. To suggest otherwise could be the beginning of a dangerously slippery slope.
Similarly, formalising chemical castration puts other forms of medical intervention into the frame too, potentially leaving doors open to tiptoe towards ideas like forced sterilisation for those with severe mental illnesses, or medicine as a punishment.
In the long term, this type of castration causes many side effects like weight gain, increased cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis – what's more, the effects of some of these drugs, particularly SSRIs, can induce depression and suicidal ideation. Though it's deemed 'reversible', it can leave lasting damage to fertility.
Britain is hardly the first to wrestle with this dilemma. In parts of the United States, chemical castration is either encouraged or required for repeat offenders. In California, it's a condition for parole.
Poland introduced mandatory chemical castration for child sex offenders in 2009, prompting criticism from the European Union, while Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway take a more therapeutic approach. Chemical castration is available, but only as part of comprehensive therapy, and never mandated. Human dignity, they argue, must come before public retribution.
Chemical castration is no longer a footnote or a quietly ongoing trial in Britain, but a political statement. As the proposal is debated, uncomfortable questions are likely to be raised. Yates – who told police that he had gone out that day 'looking to find some children to have sex with' – was 'prepared to try anything to overcome his problems, which have blighted his life,' his barrister told the court, 15 years ago. Was it chemical castration that could have prevented his heinous crimes? Shabana Mahmood wants us to think about that and the answer may be more complicated than first thought.