Properly implemented, foster family care may represent a uniquely appropriate placement/treatment alternative for young children with pronounced or dangerous sexual behavior problems. A few programs have reported preliminary but promising results with such children in fostering environments specifically designed to address their special problems. This study details the salient components of one such program that has proven successful over the past six years with most of thirty youthful clients referred to it facing few alternative placement options. Rankings by program staff and program parents of the relative importance of ten program components to client success are reported, and updates on previously published outcomes with the first six clients to enter the program are offered. Subjective but important ''lessons learned'' by staff and parents about working with this difficult population in the fostering environment are also discussed.KEY WORDS: Foster care; Children; Sexual behavior problems.Social work professionals are increasingly recognizing both the reality of serious sexual behavior problems among pre-pubescent clients and the special dilemmas that surround the appropriate treatment of them when they are removed from their families and referred for placement. Older youth presenting the same problem behaviors have historically been directed by the courts -advisedly or not-into secure, institutional treatment. But secure congregate care facilities, with or without cogent special programs for sexualized or offending clients, are clearly not viable for 8-and 9-year-olds. Also, because these children often present a threat to other children, group residential care of any kind is not an appealing option. (Nor is it, we would point out, with similar adolescent clients for the same reason.)The management and efficacious treatment of these children within the foster family framework has not been widely attempted. However the past half-decade has seen the emergence of several efforts on this front and the occasional publication of their early results. Social work professionals in the UK have tended to explore the fostering alternative with these clients more aggressively than has been done in the US (Farmer & Pollock, 1998, 2003. There has been gathering recognition here in the US that foster care may present numerous and significant advantages over residential or institutional care for these special clients for reasons of intervention quality as well as cost (Barth, 2001). One of the first studies here to report specifically on the effects of a foster care program for young children with problem sexual behaviors concerned itself with the global behavior progress of its clients rather than with their sexual behavior-specific improvement (Ray et al., 1995), but that study opened a conceptual door.More recently, Ownbey, Jones, Judkins, Everidge, and Timbers (2001) have reported the effects of a specialized program of foster care on both the frequency of problem sexual behavior and foster care giver estimates of the...

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