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The place of evidence in the treatment of sex offenders.

Controversy remains about whether sex offenders can be treated effectively, as shown by recent exchanges in this journal (Hickey, 2012; Ho and Ross, 2012; Mann et al., 2012) and elsewhere (Rice and Harris, 2003; Marshall and Marshall, 2007; Seto et al., 2008; Rice and Harris, 2013). The main areas of disagreement are on quality of evidence and its interpretation. The gold standard for evidence is considered to be the randomised controlled trial (RCT). Having recently completed Cochrane Reviews into psychological and pharmacological interventions for sex offenders (Dennis et al., 2012; Khan et al., 2014), confined to RCTs, we propose to examine the place of such ‘gold standard evidence’ in determining the role of treatment of sex offenders.