Great article. Pity that the online comments are now closed though.
I don't have any problem with it being an advert for a book, or that she talks about herself. It is a book about her experiences, not a defence of SO.
As for the point about having more stats, to convince people that reoffending rates are low, I'm not sure that would work on its own, because the first response of most people is an emotional one, not a rational one. There is a fantastic book, by Emily Horowitz, called 'Protecting Our Kids; How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us', which sets out the stats for reoffending and the fact most SO only offend once. But the book also contains real life stories, about how SO are affected by being on the SOR in America. It humanises the SO and even makes you feel sorry for them, which is important, because that appeals to peoples emotional brains, as well as their rational brains.
The comments on this article are a good mixture of emotional and rational. The people that can't think beyond their first emotional reaction, are the ones that say 'lock 'em up and throw away the key', while the more rational ones say 'yes, its terrible what they did, but we need to think beyond that and look at the reasons why they did it and how to stop them doing it again in future'.
Where I think that this book will be unhelpful, is that she mainly works with the very worst SO, the ones who committed the most serious offences. She probably doesn't meet the low risk SO, because they don't tend to get referred to the prison psychologist. As a result, her book will skew the public debate, by making people think that all SO are just like the ones she has treated. Their crimes are the hardest to understand, because they (in most cases) have caused the most harm. They will also be the ones with the most extreme mental health problems, like the sociopaths, who have no empathy for their victims. They are difficult to humanise, because they feel no remorse for what they have done and that makes people feel no sympathy for them, in return. But the public need to understand that these individuals only represent 1% of SO. They are not the majority.
If she can get that message across, then it might advance the debate.