ATSA Practice Guidelines for Adolescents: Implications for Current Practice (1.5 hours)

This session provides a brief review of the historical response to adolescent sexual offending and how the vestiges of adult policy and practice continue to impact the adolescent field. The recently released ATSA Practice Guidelines for Adolescents will be utilized in describing an empirically grounded, caregiver-involved, developmentally appropriate approach for addressing abusive sexual behavior with adolescents. This will include the following:

• Unique features of the adolescent population • Empirical Framework/Foundational Points for practice • Fundamental aspects of effective policy and practice • Characteristics of effective treatment interventions • Treatment targets/modalities

This 1.5 hour workshop will seek to leverage the ATSA’s Practice Guidelines for Adolescents as the “gold standard” in the field, and as a means of providing leadership and guidance to the ongoing evolution of the adolescent field. Participants will be able to identify future goals regarding the use of an empirically supported framework to inform policy, program development, and clinical practice.

The goal of this presentation is for participants to identify broad principles and factors associated with evidence-based policy and practice for adolescents who have engaged in sexually abusive behavior.