Juvenile Sexual Offending by Gail Ryan & Leversee Tom F. & Lane Sandy

Author:Gail Ryan & Leversee, Tom F. & Lane, Sandy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

INTEGRATED SPECIAL EDUCATION DAY PROGRAMS

An example of a successful mixed-diagnostic program is a special education day school. Oftentimes, sexually abusive youth do well in an educational setting. Such a setting is highly structured and can limit opportunities for students to be out of sight of staff. In such a setting, many youth who abuse sexually are behaviorally compliant (that is, they can move through the school routines with relative ease without disruptively acting out), and they are often educationally advanced in comparison to other emotionally disturbed clients. Therefore, they may provide positive role models for other students in an educational setting while themselves benefiting from the normalized social interactions.

An educational environment generally focused on emotionally neutral subject matter with a highly structured setting seems to help these youths regulate their oversexualized lifestyle and preoccupation with sexual issues. Leisure time and residential environments such as bedrooms and common living areas may aggravate these issues.

Finally, school can serve as a bridge between residential placement and a return to the community for youth who will need to be able to cope with both their own sexually abusive histories and a nonabusive community population. Within the structure of the school, they can practice prosocial community behaviors and new skills, in an environment that includes male and female peers and teachers. If the staff has been specially trained to work with sexual abuse issues, they can confront any abusive or sexual behaviors and work on them immediately.

Thus, a mixed-diagnostic category day program can provide the type of structured environment suited to helping youth move along the care continuum toward more normal independent living.

Minimally, all residential, day program, and educational staff should be provided with extensive training in the management of sexual abuse issues. In addition, these programs should be provided with sufficient resources for consultation and supervision by qualified treatment specialists and for one-to-one staffing of abusive youth during initial assessment periods and times of crisis. Without such basic safeguards, the placement of sexually abusive youth in residential and other community-based programs that have not been designed to serve them raises serious legal and ethical issues should another client be sexually victimized while in treatment in these same sites (Freeman-Longo & Ryan, 1990).

The lack of adequate resources or other administrative or political realities may prevent the implementation of the entire service delivery system at any one time in every rural community, but a minimum commitment of resources allocated for training can facilitate the initiation of specialized interventions and abuse-specific evaluation and treatment planning in residential programs and outpatient clinics where personnel trained in general assessment and group treatment techniques already practice.

In the past decade, many communities have implemented standards for treatment and management of these youth. It is important for standards, policies, and programs to be continuously in touch with new advances in the field and willing to update practices.

In order to create all of the components of the care continuum, many states need only to redesign portions of their existing delivery systems. By allocating

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