RE: Best Practices with Youth

["Ron Kokish" <ron@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mark - I just ran across this email from you.  I'm familiar with the
literature you are relying on.  However, I have an email from Jim Worling in
which he lists the 5 risk factors that are currently most strongly
correlated with sexual recidivism in his ongoing research with ERASOR.  One
of these is "incomplete or no sex-offender-specific treatment." He also
mentions this in his workshops.  You might want to check with him and see
what he's finding.

***************************************************************************
 Ron Kokish at Delson-Kokish Associates, P.O. Box 476, Trinidad, CA 95570
        Clinical and Forensic Evaluations, Consultation & Training
                 (707) 677-3181 voice        677-0187 fax
                 ron@delko.net email         www.delko.net
***************************************************************************

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-CHILD-MALTREATMENT-RESEARCH-L@cornell.edu
[mailto:owner-CHILD-MALTREATMENT-RESEARCH-L@cornell.edu]On Behalf Of
Chaffin, Mark J. (HSC)
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 8:01 AM
To: Child Maltreatment Researchers
Subject: Best Practices with Youth


Rob,

Although there is considerable clinical lore and opinion that some sort
of "sex-offender specific" treatment is absolutely a must for these
youngsters, the findings from the two randomized trials done to date
suggest that the more targeted CBT sexual behavior oriented approaches
did no better than unstructured unfocused models.  Of course, all of the
treatments in both trials had parent involvement, which may be the key.
It may not matter what you do with the kids, so long as you have the
parents involved and providing some level of supervision and support.
All the kids got better, recurrence rates were low and most recurrences
were for less serious non-victimizing types of sexual behaviors.

We are currently working up 10-year follow-up data on a couple of
hundred under 12 y/o kids from the Oklahoma project, and thusfar it
looks like recurrence of reports for sexually abusive behavior are so
low that its impossible to make treatment type comparisions.  For
example, our initial database match with child welfare report and police
report data found only two kids out of 200 who had a CPS sexual abuse
perpetration report across their adolescence and early adulthood, and
virtually none who had police reports for an alleged sex offense.  This
might suggest that best practice for these kids should be determined
more by what other (i.e., non-sexual) problems they have, rather than
being intensively sex sex sex sex sex oriented.  We know these kids have
multiple comorbidities (ODD, CD, PTSD) and perhaps any best practice
approach should consider these more general problems as a major part of
treatment.  There are evidence-based best-practice treatments for these
problems.

Mark Chaffin