Scientific Evolution of Clinical and Risk Assessment of Sexually Abusive Youth: A Comprehensive Review of Empirical Tools

Abstract

Risk assessment of sexually abusive youth is a specialty, which ideally includes a clinical assessment (e.g., psychological evaluation) utilizing a validated risk assessment tool. This article reviews tools for assessing sexual improprieties and/or sexually abusive behaviors in youth: JSORRAT-II, J-SOAP-II, J-RAS, AIM2, and MEGA^♪,1 and a clinical assessment tool, MIDSA. Untested, structured, clinical checklists with face validity, J-RAT-4 and PROFESOR, are included. The authors also highlight clinical dilemmas using “utility tools” (i.e., polygraph and plethysmograph) with sexually abusive youth. The comprehensive review sustains a twenty-first−century New Paradigm of inclusive ecologically based, developmentally and gender-sensitive assessment tools that definitively and accurately assess risk and protective factors of sexually abusive youth.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescent juvenile sex offender
• sexually abusive females
• transgender youth
• risk assessment tools
• juvenile sex traffickers
• J-SOAP-II
• JSORRAT-II
• MEGA^♪

Compliance with ethical standards

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Name of the tool is MEGA^♪; copyrighted and registered by the author includes the musical note.

2. Coarse sexual improprieties are behaviors that reflect an unsophisticated awareness of psychosexual conditions, environments, or social situations. Youth with coarse sexual improprieties engage in sexual behaviors that are crude, indecent, and outside the societal norms of propriety (e.g., crude sexual gestures, sexually suggestive comments, mooning, looking up skirts, a young child rubbing his or her genitals in public or trying to grab another’s genitals, a child looking over a stall in a public restroom) (Miccio-Fonseca, 2010).

3. Sexually abusive behaviors and improprieties fall along a coercion continuum of low, moderate, high, or very high (lethal) risk; this applies to sexually abusive youths who are either adjudicated or non-adjudicated (Miccio-Fonseca, 2010).

4. Erroneously published as 1979–2017 in the online version of Miccio-Fonseca’s (2018a) Family Lovemap article for this Special Issue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

L.C. Miccio-Fonseca

L.C. Miccio-Fonseca, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Researcher specializing in sex disorders. She is Clinic Director of Clinic for the Sexualities, San Diego, CA., USA.

Lucinda A. Lee Rasmussen

Lucinda A. Lee Rasmussen, Ph.D., LCSW is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work at San Diego State University, San Diego, CA.