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Order An American Travesty here at the University of Chicago Press.
Ethical Treatment for
All Youth |
EXCERPTS FROM From Chapter 4: The Emergence of Juvenile Sex-Offender Treatment (pp. 69-99) This chapter's focus is on the principles and practice of a national network of juvenile sex-treatment professionals [the National Adolescent Perpetrator Network] that has been active and influential since the late 1980s. This vocal and well-organized network of treatment units for juvenile sex offenders is not a standard group of mental health professionals by any means...For juvenile sex offenders, it would change most of the priorities and tactics of the juvenile court…[it] teaches important lessons about the conflicts and dangers produced when punitive and treatment agendas are mixed.Policy by Assumption [The NAPN's 1993 report] announces that it is based on 387 unproven assumptions…almost all the members of the Task Force were practitioners active in treatment rather than researchers, and this generates a natural bias toward lower standards of evidence...The medical profession and medically trained personnel are also notably absent…the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association is nowhere referred to in the body or references of the Task Force report, despite its use of medical terms and diagnoses…The legal profession is also not well represented…Also absent among the Task Force members are experts on the history and functions of juvenile justice… A New Order …Treatment would be combined with punishment (this encourages “accountability”) and would continue as long as was thought necessary. The Task Force report also advocates long-term registration and tracking of all juvenile offenders, and toward this end would allow for revision of the current legal protection of juveniles without any stated limit. …any conflict between the offender’s interests and community safety should in all cases be resolved in favor of community safety because “the community is the client” in this branch of the healing professions. (How that policy might ever permit the release of subjects from restraint or treatment is not addressed.)…Prosecution is explicitly called for in all cases… Some Critical Assumptions …it is asserted that “sexually abusive youth
require a specialized response from the justice system which is
different from
other delinquent populations.” But the
Task
Force never describes what it considers the proper response to other
delinquent youth or the reasons for believing that sex offenders are
different
from other young offenders...the report retreats to a standard that
defines all
illegal behaviors as abusive, including that by children otherwise too
young
for their acts to qualify as illegal… Indeed, with all the statutory
age-of-consent limits imposed
on consensual youngsters by the criminal laws concerning indecent
liberties and
statutory rape, there is no logical reason to support an inference of
sexual
abuse from the violation of a criminal standard. Petting
and intercourse involving fifteen-year-olds is felonious
in most states. It is only “sexually
abusive behavior” because the Task Force defines it as such…If
therapists
should treat every person who commits a sex-law violation in the United
States,
why shouldn’t they also treat all burglars (who abuse property rights
and scare
homeowners) and car thieves?...there is no necessary connection between
law
violation and the existence of any sexual disorder that should require
treatment. …there is no reason to suppose that sex-law
violators are
any different from shoplifters, adolescents who commit aggravated
assault, or
drug-law violators…Without extensive screening it
is
probably the case that a clear majority of unlawful sexual contacts
involving
teenagers lack a “victim.”…Certainly the term “sex abusers” sounds
dangerous,
but its use as a way of defining all sex-law violators robs the term of
any
real dangerousness…The data reviewed in chapter 3 on arrest samples of
juvenile
sex offenders show low sexual re-offending rates combined with higher
levels of
general delinquency. This suggests
great continuity between current sex offenders and other delinquents
rather
than any special dangerousness of the sex offender.
Adding millions of sexual-status offenders into the mix,
as the
Task Force recommends, would make sex offenders less dangerous than
other
delinquents. The Adversarial
Therapist Another critical assumption of the 1993 Task
Force is that
an adversarial relationship between a therapist and an adolescent
offender is
appropriate and effective. The
treatment process as described by the Task Force is certainly one
designed to
ensure that such an adversarial relationship exists.
The therapist’s real client is said to be the community
and the
therapist’s principle goal is sex crime prevention.
Her tools include polygraphy, confrontation, and no
obligation of
confidentiality to the client…there are powerful indications in the
text of the
1993 report that adolescent offenders are regarded as enemies by the
therapists. New Frontiers of Sexual Deviance ...language is used in ways that are
symptomatic of significant
problems of
judgment and perspective…The second
definitional
misstep in the report is a more frightening abuse of language and
clinical
knowledge…It
mixes harmful behavior with obnoxious behavior,
attempts to request
consensual sex between peers with exploitative sex, unlawful behavior
with
allowed behavior. It degrades a legal
and moral classification, and it is pointless. When
this type of Orwellian misuse of language is made
explicit by
definition in this official report of an association of sex treatment
professionals, it imperils the credibility of the group. By the standards of the National Task Force
on Juvenile
Sexual Offending, a majority of American men and boys have committed
multiple
acts of child molestation by the time they reach their twenty-first
birthdays…This aggregation of such behavior into a single category of
“child
molestation” is an extraordinary abuse for an organization of
therapists. The Ends and Means of
Juvenile Sex-Offender Treatments The report does not distinguish between
sexual abuse (its
primary topic) and sexual deviancy. Yet
treating an entire population for problems and impulses that only some
of them
have is more than inefficient; it is potentially catastrophic and
cruelly
confusing to the target of treatment…false-positive labeling is a
genuine
problem that must be confronted by conscientious professionals. …the prosecution and punishment of sex
offenders in court is
claimed to be itself therapeutic…But no data is provided to indicate
that
accountability has positive behavioral effects. There
is also no awareness in the Task Force report of the
inconsistency of this assumption with the predictions of labeling
theory…Why is
a list of thirteen reasons to prosecute juvenile sex violators given
prominent
attention in a manual on treatment of offenders that is compiled by a
group of
clinicians? And when did these therapists
become expert in the operation of law enforcement and juvenile justice
agencies? The willingness of treatment staff to
participate in punishment, in labeling, and in the denunciation of
treatment subjects
is a remarkable part of the 1993 Task Force’s version of sex-offender
therapy…mixed treatment and control agents are usually state employees
who
officially represent the interests of social control. Here,
those so enthusiastic for social control are to be
found in the ranks of treatment professionals… The central standards of the Task Force that sex
therapy seeks to enforce are not rooted in psychology nor in any
behavioral science. This is therapy in the service
of legal standards. Sex abuse is
whatever the law prohibits. What is
being treated is not a deviation from clinical standards but a
deviation from legal standards... Comparisons and
Contexts There are substantial discontinuities
between the attitudes
of the 1993 Task Force toward adolescent sexual offenders and the usual
orientations of mental health and social work treatment professions
toward
adolescent patients with conduct disorders and criminal records. The sharpest difference is the strong
identification of therapists with the needs and subjective emotional
well-being
of their patients, even in adolescent drug and alcohol treatment
programs that
make confrontational demands on patients…This reorientation toward
treatment as
control of juvenile sex offenders began during the same era as the
sevenfold
increase in imprisonment of adults for nonrape sex offenses and the
fourfold
increase, during the years after 1972, in overall rates of
incarceration in the
United States…I think, however, that the unmitigated hostility of the
1993 Task
Force report to the juvenile sex offender sets that branch of coercive
therapeutics apart even from the drug treatment approach and its
clinical
adherents. The tone and priorities of
the 1993 report when dealing with adolescent offenders sets this theory
of
offense-specific treatment apart from any previous community-based
therapeutic
alliances with agencies of social control.
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