By Ron Grooters, LMSW
The demand for predicting juveniles’ risk for future sexual offenses has taken on increasing importance in our society. Professionals often assume there are tools available to assess youth who have committed harmful sexual behavior like the actuarial-based tools used with adults. However, there are no robust actuarial-based risk tools that predict recidivism for juveniles. In fact, there may never be such a tool. The Treatment Needs and Progress Scale (TNPS)* is being developed to implement a new assessment protocol that will focus on risk relevant dynamic factors that can inform how to effectively reduce recidivism and promote healthy development among juveniles with sex offenses without focus on risk prediction. The authors of two of the most widely used juvenile risk tools are involved with this project being piloted in five states.
Extensive research over the past 15 years has shed light on the limitations of current risk scales for juveniles who have sexually offended. The three most commonly used tools currently are the ERASOR, J-SOAP-II, and JSORRAT-II. No risk scale, including these scales, has adequately addressed what the extensive empirical literature (as well as the Supreme Court of the United States) has underscored; the developmental immaturity of juveniles, the tools putative relevance to general criminality, and prediction of future sexual offending among a group with a very low base rate makes effectively predicting risk among adolescents to never be like risk assessment tools of adults. Adolescence is a period of significant flux and an effective tool must capture the relevant factors that determine risk as well as the factors that lower risk (protective factors). The current juvenile risk tools do not identify the protective factors that highlight what might mitigate or buffer risk. It is now widely held that assessments for juvenile sex offenders should include protective factors as well as assumed risk factors.
So, what do we know about juveniles who commit sex offenses? An extensive empirical literature reveals that the base rates of sexual offenses among juveniles are very low, typically ranging from 3 to 15 percent. The former classification systems of juvenile sex offenders were so markedly heterogenous that they had virtually no predictive value and were best used for administrative designations. Existing risk scales for juveniles target a narrow range (typically 12-17) and exclude emerging adults (18-25). There is also a vast difference in how people interpret the arbitrary risk categories of high, moderate and low. Further, assigning juveniles to a group that they might grow out of in a matter of months is misleading at the very least, and potentially highly detrimental. This has resulted in arbitrary management decisions and misguided treatment recommendations.
All existing risk scales for juveniles focus on the likelihood of reoffense. Promoting health over the long term rather than managing behavior over the short term is not only cost effective but far more effective if community safekeeping and victim reduction is our objective. The pendulum is currently shifting slowly back to the treatment direction. Declining juvenile crime rates have contributed to this shift as well. It should be noted that the developmental changes that occur in adolescence include impaired decision-making, mental health issues leading to poor behavior choices, and emotion regulation problems. All of these are potentially risk-relevant, and all are subject to change as a function of maturity and properly designed supervisory and treatment interventions.
The TNPS was designed to address many of the limitations in existing risk assessment scales with juvenile sexual offenders. Broadly the researchers are hoping to accomplish the same goal; optimal management of juveniles who commit sex offenses through a treatment lens rather than through a punitive lens. The pilot version of the TNPS relies primarily on 27 items designed to assess dynamic risk and protective factors and treatment response needs that cover the following domains:
- Attitudes and beliefs (criminogenic, or positive social attitudes)
- Interpersonal relations (social skills strengths and deficits, criminal peers, social isolation)
- Behavior (risk taking, impulsivity, delinquency, social isolation)
- Familial/situational (caregiver support or disengagement)
- Community (positive or negative supports)
- Psychological functioning (problem solving, co-occurring mental health issues)
Overall, through the development of the TNPS, researchers hope to shift the goalpost from an outcome-focused exclusively on risk of sexual reoffense to an outcome-focused on health that not only reduces risk in the long term but also promotes well-adjusted youth and adults. As this scale becomes available for use, it is my hope that we will continue to focus on dynamic risk factors in juveniles that can change and increase their positive adjustment to the community without the social stigma of being labeled a sex offender for the rest of their lives. I look forward to further development of this tool and its use within the community of persons who assess and treat adolescents with sexual behavior problems.
*Kang, T., Beltrani, A., Manheim, M., Spriggs, S., Nishimura, B., Sinclair, S., Tachniuk, M., Pate, E., Righthand, S., Worling, J. R., Prentky, R. A. (2019). Development of a risk/treatment needs and progress protocol for juveniles with sex offenses. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 5(2), 154-169. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/tps0000191.