Juvenile sexual offenses appear to be on the rise. This contributes to harm and trauma to the victims and the community at large. For many years the major interest in sex offender treatment has been directed toward assessment and treatment of the adult offender in spite of the reported large proportion of all sex crimes committed by juveniles (Uniform Crime Reports, FBI, 1985). Our article addresses three uses of Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT): 1) in group and individual therapy, 2) in work with the offender's family, and 3) in staff training. The issues of the client's faulty learning and cognitive distortions is critical in the habilitation and rehabilitation process and may include such messages as: 1) I am powerless to control my sexual arousal, 2) I won't get caught if I am careful, 3) Masturbating about little kids is OK, 4) I need to feel better and when I am sexual with someone I feel better. This article will describe how the theory and practice of REBT (Ellis' 1984) is applied with juvenile sex offenders. A key feature is its use with the offending juvenile in the teaching of a rational belief system as well as ways to reduce emotional disturbances.Juvenile sexual abuse has developed into a major criminal justice and public health care issue. The Florida Task Force on Juvenile Sexual Offenders (1995) reports that juvenile sexual abuse in the community is on the rise.

Investigated auditory word discrimination skill in children diagnosed as having minimal brain dysfunction (MBD), a heretofore unexplored topic in the study of MBD. A lack of auditory discrimination skill seems relevant to learning deficiency in language acquisition, a typical sign of MBD. The present study tested the hypothesis that phonemic aural discriminations would be difficult to make for boys diagnosed as having MBD. Errors and nonresponses made while Ss performed an extended auditory word discrimination task were compared between a group of 26 boys diagnosed as having MBD and a matched normal group. As expected, the MBD group had a significantly higher error rate than the normal group even when Ss were discriminating easy word pairs composed of dissimilar items (e.g., reading, math). These and other results suggested that the MBD group was very susceptible to fatigue even while motivated to perform well and while able to improve with practice. The relatively inferior performance of the MBD group was interpreted as resulting directly from a lack of auditory discrimination skill and indirectly from fatigue and its accompanying attention loss.

No abstract