Working with Adolescents Who Have Committed Sexual Abuse: Establishing a New Place to Stand— John R. Stillman

In my practice, I have observed children in the process of receiving blanket ‘sex offender treatment’. Children are exposed to numerous stories of other children’s misconduct and are treated as a general sex offender, stripped of any individual identity which could help them to step away from practices of sexual abuse. A central goal of treatment is to reduce the risk of future offences. In order to achieve this goal and for the sake of the children who have experienced abuse, alternative means of treating older children who have perpetrated abuse are needed. This paper will discuss another way of going about treatment which offers these older children something different than strengthening the label they have as sex offenders.