Antisocial behavior in children represents a serious and pervasive clinical problem. To date, progress in identifying effective treatments has been relatively slow. The purpose of the present article is to characterize the current status of treatment for antisocial child behavior, to identify promising approaches based on contemporary outcome research, and to note limitations and emergent methodological issues. A central purpose is to identify alternative models of treatment application and evaluation, including the high-strength intervention, amenability-to-treatment, broad-based treatment, and chronic-disease models. These models are designed to integrate findings regarding characteristics and prognosis of antisocial behavior with outcome research and to accelerate the identification and development of effective treatments.Antisocial behaviors include a broad range of activities, such as aggressive acts, theft, vandalism, fire setting, lying, truancy, and running away. Many terms-including acting out, externalizing behaviors, conduct disorder or conduct problems, and delinquency-denote antisocial behaviors. Two of the terms are worth delineating at the outset. For present purposes, antisocial behavior is used to refer broadly to any behaviors that reflect social-rule violations or acts against others. In this usage, antisocial behavior refers to such acts as fighting, lying, and other behaviors whether or not they are necessarily severe. Such behaviors are evident in clinically referred youths, but they are also seen in varying degrees in most children over the course of normal development. The term conduct disorder is used to refer to instances when the children evince a pattern of antisocial behavior, when there is significant impairment in everyday functioning at home or school, or when the behaviors are regarded as unmanageable by significant others. Thus, conduct disorder is reserved here for antisocial behavior that is clinically significant and clearly beyond the realm of "normal" functioning.The significance of conduct disorder as a clinical and social problem can be punctuated by highlighting major characteristics.Prevalence. The prevalence of conduct disorder is difficult to estimate, given different denning criteria and variations in rates for children of different ages, sexes, socioeconomic classes, and geographical locales. Nevertheless, estimates of the rate of conduct disorder among children have ranged from approximately