NCJ Number
221324
Journal
Criminal Justice and Behavior Volume: 35 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2008 Pages: 5-23
Date Published
January 2008
Length
19 pages
Annotation
The study examined the ability of the Juvenile Sexual Offense Recidivism Risk Assessment Tool-II (J-SORRAT-II), Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY), and Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol-II (JSOAP-II) to predict whether male adolescents in a residential sex-offender treatment program engaged in sexual and nonsexual violence during and/or following treatment.
Abstract
Although many situations require clinicians to make judgments about risk for reoffending in adolescents who have committed sexual offenses, there are no well-validated measures to accurately assess for risk in male adolescent sex offenders. The results indicated that the SAVRY and J-SOAP-II were able to predict nonsexual aggression with some degree of accuracy; however, the tools that were developed for predicting sexual violence (J-SOAP-II and J-SORRAT-II) did not significantly predict sexual violence in the sample. Furthermore, it was especially difficult to predict violence among adolescents aged 15 and younger compared to older adolescents. The limitations of these assessment tools, considered leading approaches for assessment of youths’ violence risk, puts into questions what accurate and viable information clinicians can actually provide courts regarding youths’ risk for subsequent sexual violence. Furthermore, the findings concerning limitations of the assessment tools raise questions about the legal system’s current focus on placing youth on public sex offender registries, and transferring them to adult court based on clinicians’ judgments that they might pose a high risk of subsequent violence. This study measured youths’ reoffending by examining official and unofficial sources, including law enforcement, probation, treatment records, and charges rather than convictions. Nevertheless, it is likely that the numbers of reoffending youths provided in this study were still underestimated. Given that many sexual offenses, particularly those that are committed by youth, do not lead to formal convictions, future research should strive to measure reoffending behavior through multiple sources of information, rather than based solely on convictions. The sample consisted of 169 male youth who were admitted to a nonsecure residential treatment program for sexually abusive adolescents in a medium-sized midwestern city between 1992 and 2005, and had been discharged from the program for at least 250 days prior to the data collection. Tables, references