Unregulated Sex Therapy In Israel Abuses Women

The demand for sex therapy has never been greater, but with touch therapy and genital massages, the line between treatment and abuse keeps getting blurrier and the market has been flooded with untrained and inexperienced therapists, Shirley Gal reported for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Photo Insert: Experts are alarmed by that anyone can define themselves as a sex therapist these days, whether they finished a standard track of two degrees and an internship, a two-day tantra course, and so on.

Sex therapy is nothing new. It only became a real profession in the early 20th century. There are thousands of sex therapists working in Israel, some certified and others using a mixture of methods they developed or imported from abroad.

“Because sexuality is a meeting point between many realms of knowledge, treatment will often happen in multidisciplinary centers, where they’ll try to diagnose the source of the problem and coordinate treatment from the worlds of medicine, psychology, social work and more, as needed,” says Dr. Mijal Luria, director of the sexual health clinic at Hadassah University Hospital, Mount Scopus and deputy director of the Israeli Society for Sexual Medicine.

Statistics worldwide indicate that around 40 percent of women and 30 percent of men suffer from sexual dysfunction.

To call the sexual treatment field a wild west would be an understatement. Today in Israel, there is no law codifying what a sex therapist is, what sort of training they should have, their code of ethics, and whether there is any oversight in their practice. The immense demand has flooded the market with untrained and inexperienced therapists, and the fact that the state sets no clear guidelines only exacerbates the problem.

In an attempt to impose some order on this chaos, the Israeli Society for Sex Therapy was founded in the late 1980s. It accepts professionals who have completed a graduate degree in a therapeutic discipline and have also studied sex therapy and finished a three-year internship. The organization is still not recognized as a certifying authority by the state.

“Today, anyone can define themselves as a sex therapist, whether they finished a standard track of two degrees and an internship, a two-day tantra course, an NLP course or even no course at all,” says Lee Reuveni Bar-David, a certified sex therapist and director of the sex therapy clinic at the Meir Medical Center.

“There’s a reason that the market is flourishing, and that more and more people are getting into it who have a coincidental connection to therapy at best. Until the Health Ministry codifies it in law, we’ll continue to have a problem.” And one such problem is that the therapists resort to forcing clients to have sex with them as part of the “treatment.”

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