22-05-2025
Chemical castration is vengeance masked as justice
There are moments in the life of a nation when it flirts with a dangerous kind of righteousness – one that masks vengeance as justice. The recent proposal by David Gauke, the former Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, to chemically castrate sex offenders is one such moment. It is a step not towards justice, but towards irrevocable cruelty. I speak as someone who has felt the full weight of false accusation and the slow, often brutal machinery of British justice.
In 1987, I resigned as a Member of Parliament amid a scandal that ultimately led to my conviction over matters that would no longer be considered criminal today.
But it was in 2015 when I was falsely accused by Carl Beech of the most grotesque crimes imaginable – including rape and murder of children – that I truly confronted the fragility of the justice system.
Operation Midland, now widely discredited, destroyed reputations and lives. I was never charged, because there was no evidence – only the word of a liar and fraudster who himself was a paedophile. Yet the damage was done.
I am not alone. There is the case of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in prison for a rape he did not commit – DNA evidence, ignored for years, eventually proved his innocence.
More recently, there is Peter Sullivan, who was jailed for the 1986 killing of 21-year-old barmaid Diane Sindall. Sullivan, known as the 'Beast of Birkenhead', spent more than 38 years in jail in what is believed to be the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history. Both cases are recent and tragic reminders of how deeply flawed the system remains.
These are just two cases among many – there are countless others whose stories have not reached the headlines. How many others languish behind bars because of false allegations levelled against them?
Against this backdrop, the Government's consideration of chemical castration is chilling. It presumes infallibility in a demonstrably fallible system. Chemical castration is not metaphorical. It is physical, invasive, and irreversible. Once done, it cannot be undone – no compensation or apology could make a wrongly accused person whole again.
And yet, where is the caution? Where is the humility? As a Member of Parliament, I once advocated for the return of the death penalty. I believed it was a necessary deterrent, a just response to the most heinous crimes. Life's vicissitudes changed my mind.
Since becoming President of Facing Allegations in Contexts of Trust (FACT), I have seen first-hand how our justice system gets it disastrously wrong. This reveals a disturbing reality: miscarriages of justice are not rare anomalies – they happen far too often.
When we allow the state to exercise irreversible power over the body of the accused, we cross a dangerous moral threshold. We begin to measure justice not by what is fair or proportionate, but by what is punitive and popular. That is not civilisation; it is regression.
If we are to entertain such irreversible punishments for sex offenders, should we not consider equivalent consequences for those who knowingly make false accusations? Or for the officers, judges, and ministers who perpetuate injustice through negligence or political expediency? The very idea is, rightly, abhorrent.
But that is the logical mirror we must confront if we are to endorse irreversible punishment as a principle. Justice must be tempered with restraint. It must be aware of its own limitations. And above all, it must never forget the fallibility of those who administer it.
We must not let the abhorrence of a crime blind us to the possibility of error. In our zeal to punish the guilty, we risk punishing the innocent – and that is a sin no civilised society should commit.
Harvey Proctor is the president of 'Facing Allegations in Contexts of Trust' (FACT)
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