Main description:

This rigorous survey offers a comprehensive rethinking of the assessment and treatment of sexual offenders for a bold challenge to practitioners. It critiques what we understand about offenders and the mechanisms of offending behaviors, and examines how this knowledge can best be used to reduce offending and relapses.

To this end, experts weigh the efficacy of common assessment methods and interventions, the value of prevention programs, and the validity of the DSM's classifications of paraphilias. This strengths/weaknesses approach gives professional readers a guide to the current state as well as the future of research, practice, and policy affecting this complex and controversial field.

Included in the coverage:

Strengths of actuarial risk assessment.
Risk formulation: the new frontier in risk assessment and management.
Dynamic risk factors and offender rehabilitation: a comparison of the Good Lives Model and the Risk-Need-Responsivity Model.
The best intentions: flaws in sexually violent predator laws.
Desistance from crime: toward an integrated conceptualization for intervention.

From a victim/offender duality to a public health perspective.

A call to clear thought and accurate action, Treatment of Sex Offenders

will generate discussion and interest among forensic psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and social workers.

Contents:

Problems in diagnosis.- Problems in classification: major vs. minor paraphilias.- A brief history of risk assessment.- Strengths of risk assessment.- Weaknesses of risk assessment.- Community control of sex offenders.- Phallometry vs. viewing time.- Polygrtaphy in the treatment of sex offenders.- Shortcomings of sex offender treatment.- Two models: Risk-Need-Responsibility (RNR) vs. Good Lives Model (GLM).- Desistance-focused rehabilitation of sex offenders.- The strengths of sex offender treatment.- Civil commitment of "sexual predators".- Prevention of sex offending: the public health approach.- Early detection: the case for juvenile sex offender treatment.- Summary and conclusions