by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

If you're charged for a sex crime in Montreal, chances are that Edouard Beltrami will have a say in deciding whether you get locked up or go free.

The Montreal psychologist and sexologist writes 100 reports a year for courts analyzing the psychological tendencies of the accused and appears another three or four times testifying as an expert witness in high-profile cases.

But Beltrami says that our legal system has serious problems determining guilt or innocence in sex crimes. "I was reading about a guy in Grenoble who used computer intelligence to find out the exact spot where Christopher Columbus entered America hundreds of years ago. Well, the field of sexual abuse is nothing like that. There's not enough money or research dedicated to making things better. If I won the lottery I'd put a lot of money into improving it."

The penis gauge

But one can't accuse Beltrami of not trying to shake things up. In 1998, Beltrami was asked to help determine whether a man accused of molesting a three year old was guilty. So Beltrami attached him to what's known as a penile strain gauge, a device that measures arousal by monitoring blood flow in the genitals. He then monitored what aroused the man.

"It doesn't require a complete arousal," he says. "The machine is so precise that it can sense what the person finds exciting. If the person is unable to control himself in front of dangerous materials, it will detect it."

Beltrami testified that the man wasn't aroused by child pornography, but the usage of the instrument was declared invalid by the Supreme Court in November 2001. "The device isn't perfect, but it's the best procedure to determine if somebody is a sexual delinquent or not. So instead you'll have a social worker who shows a drawing by the boy or girl that has allegedly been sexually abused and they'll say that the sun is the father and the little girl is below, which means that the father was on top of her. Yet meanwhile, they say that the gauge, which is a very serious instrument, is not valid."

Other obstacles Beltrami sees in sex-crime justice include defence attorneys that ignore or deny evidence that their client is a dangerous pedophile. And Beltrami also believes that juries can too easily misunderstand or be swayed by prosecutors. "Juries, in my opinion, are very dangerous," he says.

Beltrami also disagrees with assumed guilt, which he says is practiced by the Department of Youth Protection (DYP). "A democracy is based on the idea that you are innocent unless somebody proves that you are guilty. But with cases involving the DYP, you're considered guilty unless somebody proves you are not. An accused could go to prison just because an adolescent is acting out or is brainwashed," says Beltrami.

He believes false sex accusations to be relatively common, citing a mid-1990s University of British Columbia study by John Yuille that found that half of all claims of sexual abuse made in divorce cases were fabricated.

Hidden victims

Yet Beltrami believes that many other sex crimes go unpunished and devastate their victims. "You probably know at least five people who are pedophiles but you don't recognize them. It's a big number, probably much higher than we think," he says.

Beltrami says that up to 55 per cent of Quebec women were sexually abused, "and I'm not talking about those stories like, ‘I was walking on St-Denis and two guys whistled at me.' Statistics that include those sorts of complaints are terrible." Beltrami says victims of abuse suffer serious psychological harm that often manifests itself much later in life.

Beltrami supports the creation of sex-crime registries. "When I counsel pedophiles, I tell them the first thing they should do is to tell people from their neighbourhood about their past. Because it often happens that a neighbour will leave their kids with one of these guys and then he'll abuse them and say, ‘I just couldn't help it.'"

Many pedophiles, Beltrami ruefully notes, remain unrepentant. "The first thing we try to teach pedophiles is that what they're doing hurts people. Some will go on the Web and say that the children are very happy and they love sex and it's good for them, but that's crap."