Juvenile Sexual Offenders: A Comprehensive Guide to Risk Evaluation

Clinicians who do not exclusively work with juvenile sexual offenders still need to evaluate and assess risk with sexually reactive children in their practices. Providing crucial, current literature, Juvenile Sexual Offenders offers a timely overview of the process of risk evaluation of juvenile sexual offenders. Practical information is provided in effectively conducting thorough evaluations of juvenile sexual offenders. Topics include projecting risk and using the instruments. Professionals in the field, including clinicians, supervisors, and administrators, will receive detailed guidelines on how to gauge potential risk of repeat offense.

A thorough and thoughtfully written overview of the process of risk evaluation of juvenile sexual offenders

The evaluation of risk for sexual re-offense in children and adolescents is quite different from risk evaluation with adult sexual offenders. Sexually abusive youths are persons-in-development and, as such, must be understood in the social and developmental contexts of their lives, having the potential to change from year to year in their capacities, attitudes, sense of self and others, and neurobiology. With this perspective as its foundation, Juvenile Sexual Offenders: A Comprehensive Guide to Risk Evaluation helps you become more sensitive and better informed in understanding, assessing, and treating this unique population.

Written by a specialist in the field, this timely resource offers a comprehensive overview of the process of risk evaluation of juvenile sexual offenders, as well as detailed and practical guidelines on how to evaluate this population and gauge potential risk of re-offense.

This helpful book authoritatively explores:

1. The current thinking about and understanding of risk assessment for sexually abusive youth

2. Development of ideas and standards for the practice and administration of assessments

3. The "whole" child as the subject of the evaluation in addition to the subtleties and nuances of the assessment process

4. The need for theory, processes, and instrumentation to inform and structure the practice of forensic risk assessment

5. The methods, elements, strengths, and weaknesses of the risk assessment process

Moving from theoretical ideas to the practical application of these ideas through the use of explanation, principles, and guidelines, Juvenile Sexual Offenders: A Comprehensive Guide to Risk Evaluation contributes to a greater understanding of risk assessment and toward the development of guidelines that can shape and steer the process of risk assessment.

Phil Rich, EdD, MSW, is the Clinical Director of Stetson School, a residential treatment facility for sexually abusive children and adolescents in Barre, Massachusetts. He presents and trains nationally and internationally, and is also the author of Understanding, Assessing, and Rehabilitating Juvenile Sexual Offenders and Attachment and Sexual Offending: Understanding and Applying Attachment Theory to the Treatment of Juvenile Sexual Offenders, both published by Wiley.