For Professionals

This section of Safer Society’s website is where we will put all the information that is especially relevant to people who provide services to those with sexual behavior problems. This section will be regularly updated and expanded as we receive feedback from professionals about what is most helpful. You can provide feedback through this form.

Sex Offender Treatment Intervention and Progress Scale, 2012

The Sex Offender Treatment Intervention and Progress Scale (SOTIPS), by Robert J. McGrath, Georgia F. Cumming, and Michael P. Lasher is a statistically derived dynamic measure designed to aid clinicians, correctional case workers, and probation and parole officers in assessing risk, treatment and supervision needs, and progress among adult males who have been convicted of one or more qualifying sexual offenses and committed at least one of these sexual offenses after their 18th birthday.

A qualifying sexual offense is a conviction for illegal sexual behavior against an identifiable child or non-consenting adult victim. Qualifying sex offenses include:

  • contact sexual offenses such as sexual assault, attempted sexual assault, and molestation
  • non-contact sex offenses such as exhibitionism, voyeurism, obscene telephone calling, and Internet luring

The SOTIPS is not intended for use with individuals whose only sexual offense conviction is for a non-qualifying sexual offense. A non-qualifying sex offense is a conviction for sexual behavior that was illegal but the parties were consenting or no identifiable victim was involved. Non-qualifying sexual offenses include:

  • consenting sex with an adult in public places
  • soliciting a prostitute
  • possessing child pornography
  • committing statutory rape where the age difference between the offender and the victim is typically three years or less

The  SOTIPS MANUAL 2012 is available here as a free PDF download. Please contact the authors with any questions you may have or to obtain permissions as outlined at the beginning of the manual.

 

Recent Professional Books

Footprints, 2nd Edition

by Krishan Hansen and Timothy J. Kahn

Footprints is a workbook specifically designed for developmentally delayed clients with sexual behavior problems. The second edition incorporates information from the Good Lives Model to help clients build a  positive, healthy “new me”. Each step chapter now ends with a test to help clients track progress and reinforce what they’ve learned. A set of 48 flashcards are also included to help clients remember and apply the concepts they’re learning. More information about the second edition is available here. To purchase copies of the workbook, click here. Supplemental materials are available for free download. These include a Clinician’s Guide, a sexual history form, and an expanded version of the Words to Know section of the workbook. For more information about these materials and to download them, click here.

Building a Better Life: A Good Lives and Self-Regulation Workbook

by Pamela M. Yates, Ph.D., R.D.Psych and David S. Prescott, LICSW

This workbook helps clients establish desirable goals towards which to work. It incorporates the fundamental principles of the Good Lives Model and research findings that approach goals are more obtainable. More information about the workbook, the authors, incorporating the workbook into a treatment program, and extended versions of selected exercises is available here. Workbooks may be purchased online by clicking here.

Healthy Families

by Timothy J. Kahn

Healthy Families is written to help parents and caregivers effectively engage in their child’s treatment. The book gives parents the knowledge they need to make positive, informed, and healthy decisions as their children proceed through treatment. This book works independently of any particular program or workbook, but an appendix is included with additional material for parents whose children are working in either the fourth edition of Pathways or the second edition of Roadmaps to Recovery. More information is available by clicking here. This title may be ordered online by clicking here.

Pathways Fourth Edition

by Timothy J. Kahn

The Pathways workbook has been a cornerstone in the treatment of sexually aggressive youth since the first edition was issued twenty years ago. As the field has evolved and advanced, so has Pathways. This new Fourth Edition reflects current research and clinical experience with adolsecents by focusing on strength-based methods to help clients develop healthy and productive lifestyles consistent with the Good Lives Model of rehabilitation. Pathways continues to use a restorative justice theme emphasizing concern for restitution, development of victim empathy and personal responsibility. Focus is shifted from the offense cycle into understanding the antecedents to a client’s sexual acting out.

Additional information and reviews of the fourth edition are available here. You may order this title through our webstore by clicking here.

Healthy Families, a companion for both the Fourth Edition of Pathways and the Second Edition of  Roadmaps to Recovery, will be published in November, 2011. It provides information and support for caregivers of youth with sexual behavior problems regardless of the treatment workbook being used.

Applying the Good Lives and Self-Regulation Models to Sex Offender Treatment

by Pamela M.Yates, Ph.D., R.D.Psych; David Prescott, L.I.C.S.W.; & Tony Ward, Ph.D., DipClinPsych

Here for the first time is a comprehensive guide to integrating the Good Lives and Self-Regulation models into a sex offender treatment program. The authors present the two models as a combined program to achieve two goals with offenders: buidling a lifestyle incompatible with offending and effectively managing risk. This book is a thorough, step-by-step guide that first lays the groundwork with the fundamentals, continues with sections on assessment and treatment, and wraps up with post-treatment maintenance and supervision.

A practical, common-sense guide written specifically for clinicians from the leading Good Lives experts, this is a book that should be part of the library of everyone who treats or manages sex offenders.

Click here for more information about Applying the Good Lives and Self-Regulations Model to Sex Offender Treatment. To order through our webstore, click here.

Be sure to look for Building a Better Life: A Good Lives and Self-Regulation Workbook in November of 2011.

Current Practices and Emerging Trends in Sexual Abuser Management: The Safer Society 2009 North American Survey

by Robert J. McGrath, Georgia F. Cumming, Brenda L. Burchard, Stephen Zeoli, and Lawrence Ellerby
Safer Society’s 2009 North American survey reports on the responses from more than 1,370 residential and community sexual abuser treatment programs for male and females adults, adolescents, and children. This report provides a wide-angle snapshot of the state of the field, and identifies trends in the assessment and treatment of sexual abusers. Both the current practices and trends are compared with what research and professional associations presently consider “best practice” in the field. Areas requiring additional research are identified and suggestions for program development and evaluation are included. As well as broadening the geographic scope to include Canada, this edition also probes public policy issues and includes the treatment theories Risk, Need, and Responsivity; Self-Regulation, and Good Lives. This report provides invaluable information for practitioners, researchers, and policy makers.

Current Practices and Emerging Trends is available for free download as a PDF file by clicking here. If you would prefer to have a printed, bound copy, they are available through Safer Society Press for $25.00. To order online, click here.

Building Motivation for Change in Sexual Offenders

Edited by David S. Prescott, L.I.C.S.W.
No credible evidence exists to prove that punishing people reduces their willingness to cause harm again. In fact, research indicates that a harsh, confrontational approach does not work over the long term. So how do you motivate your tough clients? How do you create a client/therapist environment that promotes your client’s willingness to change?

David S. Prescott, Clinical Director of the Minnesota Sex Offender Program at Moose Lake, has assembled this leading-edge, professional resource to begin answering these questions. The book includes both theoretical and concrete approaches that focus on problems most professionals have experienced.

Available from Safer Society Press. To order online, click here.