No desire to enforce castration

"PAEDOS TO BE CASTRATED!" screamed Thursday’s red-top headlines. "MANDATORY DRUGGING OF PERVERTS!" Hmm. “Up to a point, Lord Copper,” as the editor in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop was wont to say when his proprietor went over the top on a story.

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It’s almost certainly the case that if you took a snap opinion poll on castrating rapists and child sex offenders, there'd be an enthusiastic thumbs-up from the substantial majority.

But the “castrate the lot of 'em” story doesn’t really stand. For a start, the source — a recommendation by the Independent Sentencing Review, published this week - is talking about chemical castration, not the wielding of scalpels to sex criminals' gonads.