Juvenile Sex Offenders: A Case Against the Legal and Clinical Status Quo

Abstract

The past two decades have seen a movement toward harsher legal sanctions and lengthy, restrictive treatment programs for sex offenders. This has not only been the case for adults, but also for juveniles who commit sex offenses. The increased length and severity of legal and clinical interventions for juvenile sex offenders appear to have resulted from three false assumptions: (1) there is an epidemic of juvenile offending, including juvenile sex offending; (2) juvenile sex offenders have more in common with adult sex offenders than with other juvenile delinquents; and (3) in the absence of sex offender-specific treatment, juvenile sex offenders are at exceptionally high risk of reoffending. The available data do not support any of the above assumptions; however, these assumptions continue to influence the treatment and legal interventions applied to juvenile sex offenders and contributed to the application of adult interventions to juvenile sex offending. In so doing, these legal and clinical interventions fail to consider the unique developmental factors that characterize adolescence, and thus may be ineffective or worse. Fortunately, a paradigm shift that acknowledges these developmental factors appears to be emerging in clinical areas of intervention, although this trend does not appear as prevalent in legal sanctions.

The Effective Treatment of Juveniles Who Sexually Offend: An Ethical Imperative

“…Although the CBT-RP approach represents the standard of care for juvenile sexual offenders in the United States (Letourneau, 2004;Letourneau & Miner, 2005), the limited research literature provides tentative support, at best, for this treatment approach when delivered in outpatient settings. Of three studies comparing CBT-RP with other intervention groups, one reported no between-groups differences in posttreatment recidivism rates (Lab, Shields, & Schondel, 1993), while two reported limited positive effects on recidivism for CBT-RP (Guarino-Ghezzi & Kimball, 1998;Worling & Curwen, 1998).…”

The Fallacy of Juvenile Sex Offender Risk*

“…The accumulated literature would support interventions more generally focused, such as Multi-Systemic Therapy (Curtis et al, 2004). The data provided by Zimring et al, as well as the other research available on juveniles who have committed sexual crimes (Letourneau and Miner, 2005;Parks and Bard, 2006;Reitzel and Carbonell, 2006), indicate that requiring \\server05\productn\C\CPP\6-3\CPP311.txt unknown Seq: 5 15-AUG-07 8:17…”

“…These assumptions have driven the inclusion of adolescents on public sex offender registries (e.g., U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), 2007) and the proliferation of intensive, long-term sex offender-specific treatment programs (Burton and Smith-Darden, 2001). Letourneau and Miner (2005) argued that this assumption was erroneous and that the application of adult sanctions, such as listing on sex offender registries and long-term sex offender-specific treatment, was inappropriate for juvenile sex offenders and more likely to be iatrogenic than effective. The major weakness in the current body of literature is that the natural progression from adolescent sexual offending to adult sexual offending is substantially unknown.…”

Sex Offender and Victimization Legislation: Use, Misuse, and Efficacy

“…They conducted longitudinal analyses of three birth cohorts in Racine, Wisconsin, and measured the recidivism rates of those who committed sexual offenses as juveniles (a very small proportion of the cohorts). Like other researchers who studied this issue with different populations, (e.g., Letourneau and Miner, 2005;Vandiver, 2006), they found that juvenile sex offending had virtually no predictive value on whether a person would commit a sexual offense as an adult. Rather, they found that the best predictor of an adult sexual offense was a lengthy criminal record with a variety of offenses.…”