Effective Treatment of Adolescent Sex Offenders: The Development and Implementation of a Risk Assessment Service

This project, funded by the Woods Charitable Fund, Inc., was coordinated through the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln in partnership with Adolescent and Family Services at the Lincoln Regional Center and Bryan LGH Child and Adolescent Mental Health Units. The long range goal for this project was to reduce sexual re-offending in the community by improving the treatment and supervision services provided to adolescent sex offenders.

The immediate goal of this project was to respond to community need and service opportunity by developing a risk assessment service for adolescent sex offenders in Nebraska and then equipping the community agencies with recommendations and training for utilizing that risk assessment service. The risk assessment service included three components: (a) design and implementation of a state-of-the-art risk assessment tool that is consistent with best practice principles; (b) evaluation of a currently offered adolescent sex offender treatment program based on information collected with the risk assessment tool; and (c) provision of training to mental health providers on the administration, interpretation, and use of the risk assessment tool so that they have the knowledge and skills needed to conduct risk assessments with every adolescent admitted to their program, interpret the results, and use the information yielded to individually tailor the services they deliver to the offenders.

For additional information on this investigation, please contact:

Dr. Viljoen may be contacted at:

Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada

Phone: 778-782-3354

Project Key Investigators: Jodi Viljoen (PI)