NCJ Number
208622
Journal
Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity Volume: 11 Issue: 4 Dated: 2004 Pages: 325-342
Date Published
2004
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article discusses the complexities of delivering juvenile sex offender treatment within a correctional institution.
Abstract
The author is the Clinical Director of the sexual offense-specific unit at the West Virginia Industrial Home for Youth (WVIHY); she shares her insights about working with traumatized juvenile sexual offenders in an institutional setting. The WVIHY facility is described and a typical inmate’s experience living within its confines is discussed. The atmosphere of a prison creates a persistent state of fear in individuals that can create further emotional and psychological damage to juvenile inmates with traumatic backgrounds. Some of the other deleterious outcomes of living within a confined institutional setting are described as memory disorders and affective dysregulation. The author underscores the importance of using a Therapeutic Community (TC) treatment model that integrates a trauma-based approach to therapy in order to meet the therapeutic needs of confined juveniles who sexually offend. Trauma not only plays a part in the backgrounds of these adolescents, but also impacts confined individuals on a daily basis as they are forced to interact and live within an institutional setting that strips them of self agency and surrounds them with the pervasive emotion of fear. While it is not impossible to treat juvenile sexual offenders in an institutional setting, the treatment must take a different form in order to conform to the rigors of the setting and to address the additional traumas invoked by this setting. References