Introduction

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is dedicated to preventing and reversing trends of increased delinquency and violence among adolescents. These trends have alarmed the public during the past decade and challenged the juvenile justice system. It is widely accepted that increases in delinquency and violence over the past decade are rooted in a number of interrelated social problems—child abuse and neglect, alcohol and drug abuse, youth conflict and aggression, and early sexual involvement—that may originate within the family structure. The focus of OJJDP’s Family Strengthening Series is to provide assistance to ongoing efforts across the country to strengthen the family unit by discussing the effectiveness of family intervention programs and providing resources to families and communities.

The 1970’s witnessed a tremendous increase in the number of Hispanic adolescents involved with drugs. In response to this problem, the University of Miami (FL) School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatric and Behavioral Sciences, established the Spanish Family Guidance Center in Miami to provide services to the local Hispanic community, which was predominately recent immigrants from Cuba. The Center was initially funded by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Economic Opportunity.

One of the first challenges the Spanish Family Guidance Center’s clinical program encountered involved identifying and developing a culturally appropriate and acceptable treatment intervention for Cuban youth with behavior problems. To understand Cuban culture and how it resembled, and differed from, mainstream culture, the Center’s staff conducted a comprehensive study on value orientations. The study determined that the Cuban community expected a family-oriented approach in which therapists take active, directive, present-oriented leadership roles (Szapocznik, Scopetta, et al., 1978).

The Center’s second challenge involved developing interventions to help recent immigrant Hispanic families work together to deal with the stress of acculturation. In these families, it was quite common for conflicts to emerge or intensify when the children or adolescents began to behave in ways that were not consistent with the families’ traditional cultural values. Typically, these conflicts occurred as children and adolescents assimilated more rapidly than their parents to the bicultural environment in which they were living, and often involved a clash between the American value of individualism and the Hispanic value of familism. Such intergenerational (parent versus adolescent) and cultural differences often yielded intense conflict within the family and resulted in parents and adolescents feeling alienated from one another.

In 1975, the Spanish Family Guidance Center adopted structural family therapy (SFT) as its core approach, and SFT has been at the heart of the Center’s efforts to develop interventions for use in culturally diverse contexts (Szapocznik and Kurtines, 1993). Over time, the structural approach of SFT has been refined to meet the needs of the Hispanic community in Miami. For example, SFT uses treatment methods that are both strategic (i.e., problem focused and pragmatic) and time limited. Thus, the structural approach has evolved into a time-limited, family-based approach that combines both structural and strategic interventions. This approach, called brief strategic family therapy (BSFT), has become the most common intervention used by the Spanish Family Guidance Center for families that include youth with behavior problems.

BSFT evolved from more than 25 years of research and practice at the University of Miami. The structural orientation of BSFT draws on the work of Minuchin (Minuchin, 1974; Minuchin and Fishman, 1981; and Minuchin, Rosman, and Baker, 1978), and the strategic aspects of BSFT are influenced by Haley (1976) and Madanes (1981). By integrating theory, research findings, and clinical practice, BSFT has been continuously refined to improve its effectiveness with youth with behavior problems.

Since its modest beginning in a small store-front location, the Spanish Family Guidance Center has grown in response to the needs of the minority community in Miami. In particular, work with youth with behavior problems has expanded to include minority families from a variety of backgrounds, including both Hispanic (from the Caribbean Islands and Central and South America) and African American youth and families. To accommodate this expansion, the Center for Family Studies was established as an umbrella organization to serve inner-city minority youth and families in Miami. The mission of the Center for Family Studies is to identify the needs of minority families and develop and refine culturally appropriate interventions to meet those needs. The Center for Family Studies uses BSFT to help children and adolescents with conduct, delinquency, and other behavior-related problems, including alcohol and substance abuse. To improve youth behavior, BSFT attempts to change family interactions and cultural/contextual factors that influence youth behavior problems. BSFT is based on the fundamental assumption that the family is the “bedrock” of child development; the family is viewed as the primary context in which children learn to think, feel, and behave. Family relations are thus believed to play a pivotal role in the evolution of behavior problems and, consequently, they are a primary target for intervention.

BSFT recognizes that the family itself is part of a larger social system and—as a child is influenced by her or his family—the family is influenced by the larger social system in which it exists. Sensitivity to contextual factors begins with an understanding of the influence of peers, schools, and neighborhoods on the development of children’s behavior problems. However, BSFT also focuses on parents’ relationships with children’s peers, schools, and neighborhoods and on the unique relationships that parents have with individuals and systems outside the family (e.g., work or groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous).

Brief Strategic Family Therapy	Juvenile Justice Bulletin • April 2000