Penile Plethysmograph - Ethics and Legality of Use

Ethics and Legality of Use

Robert Todd Carroll writes, "More objectionable than the questionable scientific validity of the device, however, are the moral and legal questions its use raises." Carroll and others cite the legality of the depictions of minors, as well as the constitutionality of requiring PPG for admission to jobs or the military, or in custody cases. In Harrington v. Almy the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found that a PPG ordered to be administered by William O'Donohue as a precondition of employment was a violation of plaintiff's rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In a 2009 report led by Robert Clift on use of the device on adolescent offenders, the authors acknowledge in their conclusions that PPG tests "are problematic ethically and should be used only after therapists have carefully weighed the benefits versus the negatives." The Minister of Children and Family Development closed the program examined in Clift's report in 2010 following complaints by civil rights groups. The principal manufacturer of the device stopped making them in the 1990s.

The EU's leading human rights agency, the Fundamental Rights Agency, has criticised the use of phallometric tests by the Czech Republic to determine whether asylum seekers presenting themselves as homosexual were in fact gay. According to the Agency, the Czech Republic was in 2010 the only EU country to employ a sexual arousal test, which the Agency said could violate the European Convention on Human Rights. In 2011 the EU commission issued a statement calling the Czech practice illegal, saying "The practice of phallometric tests constitutes a strong interference with the person's private life and human dignity. This kind of degrading treatment should not be accepted in the European Union, nor elsewhere."