Jakarta. Legal plans for the use of chemical castration to punish pedophiles would not address the root causes of child sex crimes as they should be approached psychologically in the first place, an activist has warned.

Claiming the number of child sex abuses has reached extraordinary levels, the Indonesian government has completed the draft of a regulation in lieu of law, known as a perppu, stipulating such penalty, and plans to issue it soon.

The additional punishment would involve injecting convicted pedophiles with a hormone that the government says could tamp down their sex drive, thus reducing their likelihood of re-offending.

But this approach relies on enforcement and fails to take into account the psychological dimensions of such cases, says Supriyadi Eddyono of the Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

“All forms of violence against children are basically a manifestation of desires to control and dominate children. A psychological approach [to the perpetrators] becomes very important in such cases,” he said on Friday. “In several cases, the perpetrators are also victims of sexual assaults as children. The government should focus on this.”

He said chemical castration was not the right solution, and with its plans for the perppu, the government was avoiding its “actual responsibility” in addressing child sex crimes.

Indonesia has seen a string of headline-grabbing cases of child sex abuses in recent years, many of them involving cases of serial pedophiles.