Pedophilia is classified as a psychiatric disease and its practice ends up directly reaching and offending children and pre-teenagers, being an extreme relevant social issue. This paper aims to analyze the ethics of chemical castration as a tool to avoid pedophilia, problematizing its triple nature: punishment, medical treatment and scientific experiment. It is a bibliographic review, through analyzes of specialized literature on bioethics, chemical castration, pedophilia, medical treatment and ethics in research. It is concluded that the three meanings do not exclude themselves: chemical castration as punishment, medical treatment and scientific experiment are, actually, archetypes which are intrinsically linked, despite each one has their own ethics connotations. This paper had the merit of expanding the hormonal treatment for pedophiles, given the lack of bibliography in the Brazilian context.
Bioethics; Pedophilia; Psychiatry