Treating female sex offenders and standards for education and training in marriage & family therapy programs

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the prevalence of female sex offenders, gender specific treatment, and the training implications regarding female sex offender treatment in Marriage & Family Therapy Programs. It is believed that females that sexually offend are more prevalent than sited in the literature and female sexual offenses go unreported, under-reported, or are not believed when disclosed. It is this researcher’s experience and subsequent belief that attention that is offered to the treatment of female sex offenders is typically designed as though sex offenders are an exclusively male population. Differences between male and female sex offenders need to be acknowledged and the differential addressed in order to design treatment strategies that are gender specific and include families. In the course of reviewing the literature this study hopes to address the prevalence of female sex offenders, current theory and ideologies of why females sexually offend, and to discuss treatment practices specific to female sex offenders. Further, it is the intent of this study to enumerate how gender specific treatment needs could be appropriately translated into the model curriculum offered by the Commission on Accreditation of Marriage & Family Therapy Education (COAMFTE). Assessments of sex offender recidivism indicate that, without treatment, approximately sixty to seventy percent of sex offenders will re-offend, while less than half of sex offenders who undergo a treatment program reportedly re-offend (Crime Prevention Committee, 1995). Cost/benefit analysis has indicated that the treatment of sex offenders is a cost-effective approach to the problem of child sexual assault, given that it appears to lead to much lower recidivism rates, while the costs of treatment are far outweighed by the costs of incarcerating recidivists in addition to the social and human cost of the assaults themselves (Prentky and Burgess, 1990). Their needs to be further development of programs appropriately targeting behavior, which resulted in sexual offending. Assessment and treatment issues should be addressed in light of motivational and gender differences (Canadian Correctional Research, 1999).