Impact of early intervention for youth with problematic sexual behaviors and their caregivers

ABSTRACT

Targeting broad implementation of early intervention services has a high potential for impact given the prevalence of child sexual abuse committed by youth and the low recidivism rate following effective interventions. This multisite quasi-experimental study examined the outcomes for 320 youth ages 10–14 years and their caregivers who participated in community-based problematic sexual behavior – cognitive behavior therapy (PSB-CBT). Significant reductions in PSB with a large effect size (e.g. t(126)?=?11.69, p?<?.001, d?=?2.08) were found. No site differences were found, despite racial and regional diversity. Nonsexual behaviour problems, emotional problems, and trauma symptoms also significantly improved. Positive outcomes extended to caregivers. Recommended next steps include rigorous strategies for examining the impact of widespread implementation of evidence-based early intervention programmes on the prevention of sexual abuse, complemented with thoughtful efforts to develop and implement policies and procedures that improve the safety and well-being of all children in the community.     

Doing prevention science: A response to Dennis M. Gorman and a brief history of the quasi-experimental study nested within the Seattle Social Development Project

The history of the quasi-experimental intervention test nested within the Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP) is described in the context of the history of delinquency and drug abuse prevention studies before and after 1980. Efforts to identify and assess threats to internal validity associated with the study design are discussed. The pattern of observed results associated with the intervention test is reviewed, and our efforts to advance both prevention theory and preventive interventions in light of these findings are described.     

Education, empowerment and community based structural reinforcement: an HIV prevention response to mass incarceration and removal

In the context of US urban jails, incarceration is often seen as an opportune intervention point for prevention interventions in public health. For the detained individual, it is an opportunity to reflect on individual choices and the potential for changes in one's life course. For population focused public health professionals, jail detention facilities represent a concentration of health risks, and an opportunity to have an impact on a significant portion of those at risk for HIV and other health concerns. This paper presents an innovative education and empowerment model that bridges across jail walls, beginning on the inside, and continuing on the outside of jail where individuals continue to be challenged and supported toward positive health and social choices. The intervention also seeks to foment community activism in the communities to which jail detainees return, thus aiming to have a structural impact. This paper examines both the intervention model and the challenges of examining the effectiveness claims for the intervention at multiple levels.     

LABELING,LIFE CHANCES,AND ADULT CRIME: THE DIRECT AND INDIRECT EFFECTS OF OFFICIAL INTERVENTION IN ADOLESCENCE ON CRIME IN EARLY ADULTHOOD*

Scholars have recently revitalized labeling theory as a developmental theory of structural disadvantage. According to this approach, official intervention increases the probability of involvement in subsequent delinquency and deviance because intervention triggers exclusionary processes that have negative consequences for conventional opportunities. The theory predicts that official intervention in adolescence increases involvement in crime in early adulthood due to the negative effect of intervention on educational attainment and employment. Using panel data on urban males that span early adolescence through early adulthood, we find considerable support for this revised labeling approach. Official intervention in youth has a significant, positive effect on crime in early adulthood, and this effect is partly mediated by life chances such as educational achievement and employment.     

Evaluating a natural experiment in alcohol policy

Research Summary
This study examines the effects of a dramatic change in alcohol licensing policy on the practice of liquor retailing across a metropolitan urban region. The policy was enacted to remove fixed closing times and to install staggered closing times across regions where it potentially would reduce violent crime and disorder. We found great variation in the extent to which the provisions of the policies were installed as intended.
Policy Implications
The findings suggest that prior consideration for how policy interventions will be applied to real-world settings is important to the validity of research evaluations. Understanding and monitoring variation in the implementation of an intervention is a vital prerequisite to the evaluation of outcomes. Without knowledge of the real-world application of an intervention, researchers risk attributing causal effects to a prevention initiative that might have been absent or only partially received.     

Realizing the Promise of Well‐Being: Longitudinal Research from an Effective Early Intervention Program for Substance Exposed Babies and Toddlers Identifies Essential Components

The University of Miami Linda Ray Intervention Program (LRIP) is a Part C early intervention program for children under the age of three, with verified developmental delays located in Miami‐Dade County that has established a strong link and referral process from the Juvenile Court as well as local community‐based care agencies. Creating a system where early intervention communicates well with the court system is paramount in changing the well‐being trajectories of these vulnerable children. This article describes the growing need for early intervention services as well as the results of one successful early intervention‐court partnership that has shown promising short and long‐term results for developmentally‐delayed children who were born prenatally exposed to cocaine.     

Early prevention of life-course personal and property violence: a 19-year follow-up of the Montreal Longitudinal-Experimental Study (MLES)

Objectives

This study assessed the impact of a multi-component prevention program on personal and property violence across three developmental periods (early adolescence, mid-adolescence and late adolescence/early adulthood).

Methods

The preventive intervention targeted disruptive kindergarten boys from low socioeconomic status families when they were 7 through 9 years of age. A randomized control trial was conducted to assess the impact of the preventive intervention relative to a control group.

Results

Two different approaches to data analysis were adopted: an intention-to-treat (ITT) approach and an instrumental variable (IV) approach. Results from the ITT analysis showed that the level of property violence for the intervention group was persistently lower across the three developmental periods compared to the control group. However, the intervention group did not differ from the control group on personal violence throughout adolescence and early adulthood. Results from the IV analysis generally confirmed these findings.

Conclusions

The discussion focuses on the differential effects of the prevention program on personal versus property violence.     

Early detection and early intervention in prison: improving outcomes and reducing prison returns

Our aim was to investigate whether early detection was feasible in prison and whether it could improve mental health outcomes in young prisoners. A secondary aim was to explore whether it can reduce returns to prison. Between 2011 and 2014, a total of 2115 young prisoners were screened, 94 (4.4%) met criteria for ultra-high risk for psychosis and were offered an intervention, 52 actually received it. Return to prison data were sought on the 52 participants, receiving a formal intervention. Of the 52 prisoners who received an intervention, 30.8% returned to custody compared to national average reconviction rates of between 45.4 and 66.5%. Our results suggest that early detection is a feasible option in a prison setting, improving mental health outcomes and reducing returns to prison. Mental health outcomes were recorded for a sub-sample of those receiving the intervention. The results indicated statistically significant improvements on measures of depression, anxiety and psychological distress.     

Streetwork at the crossroads: An evaluation of a street gang outreach intervention and holistic appraisal of the research evidence

Spurred by the success of public health violence interventions, and accelerated by policy pressure to reduce violence without exacerbating overpolicing and mass incarceration, streetwork programs—those that provide anti-violence services by neighborhood-based workers who perform their work beyond the walls of parochial institutions—have positioned themselves as the most important non–law-enforcement violence prevention option available to urban policy makers. Yet despite their importance, the state of the field seems difficult to interpret for academics and practitioners alike. In this article, we make several contributions that bring forth new findings and deliver new perspectives on streetwork as a violence reduction strategy. First, we offer an extended analytic review of the streetwork evaluation literature that connects the study of contemporary public health violence interventions to a preceding tradition of criminologically inspired streetwork studies. Second, we present the results of an impact evaluation of StreetSafe Boston (SSB)—a multiyear streetwork intervention that served 20 Boston gangs. We find that the SSB intervention had no detectable effect on violence among the gangs that it served. We conclude by offering a framework for understanding a field at multiple crossroads: past and present, proclaimed successes and failures, help and harm.     

Overview of: “Getting the Law Involved a Quasi-Experiment in Early Intervention Involving Collaboration Between Schools and the District Attorney's Office”

Research Summary Precursors to serious and chronic delinquency often emerge in childhood, stimulating calls for early interventions. Most intervention efforts rely solely on social service programs—often to the exclusion of the juvenile justice system. The juvenile justice system has been reluctant to become involved in the lives of relatively young children fearing net widening or further straining resources that could be used for older youth with documented delinquency histories. We report here the results of an early intervention program sponsored by and housed in a district attorney's office in Louisiana. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined outcomes associated with program involvement as well as whether the obvious involvement of the prosecutor's office was associated with further reductions in problem behavior.

• 1 : The results revealed that significant reductions in problem behaviors of young children could be attributed to program participation.
• 2 : The obvious involvement of the district attorney's office, however, was associated with limited, albeit significant, reductions in specific problem behaviors.
• 3 : These findings show that successful early intervention efforts can be made part of the juvenile justice system and that in some limited situations prosecutorial involvement can result in positive outcomes.

Policy Implications The expansion of early intervention programming into the juvenile justice system offers opportunities to address early problem behavior. Our study and its results have the following policy implications.

• 1 : Closely coupled partnerships between schools and the juvenile justice system can effectively address, mitigate, and perhaps prevent an early onset of antisocial behavior.
• 2 : Even so, coupling early intervention efforts to the mission of the juvenile justice system warrants debate. Net-widening, resource diffusion, and the potential for officials to rely too heavily on the deterrent characteristics of the justice system represent serious threats to the integrity of effective early intervention programs.
• 3 : We suggest substantial debate and consideration is given before coupling early intervention efforts to the juvenile justice system.

     

Drug and violence prevention: Rediscovering the critical rational dimension of evaluation research

Following criticism of government-funded drug prevention activities of the early 1990s, a spate of best practice or science-based lists of alcohol, drug and violence prevention programs have been produced by federal agencies in recent years. The writings of Donald T. Campbell on validity have had a profound influence on the development of the methodological quality scales that have been utilized in the review processes used to generate these lists. Implicit in this approach to the identification of science-based prevention programs is the idea that science is equivalent to research methodology and study design. Following Karl Popper and Campbell, I contend that, while certain designs are clearly better than others in dealing with threats to internal validity and allow for better generalization of results beyond the study population, utilization of these designs in and of itself is not sufficient to designate an evaluation study as scientific. Nor can the accumulation of data from such studies be used to proclaim an entire area of research a science, as has occurred with the field of so-called prevention science. Rather, the fundamental criterion by which to judge the scientific status of a theory is falsifiability. If the field of drug and violence prevention is truly a science, then it should be subjecting its predictions about the effects of intervention programs to genuinely critical tests and not attempting to verify these hypotheses. It is argued that it has failed to do this, and two specific examples of prevention programs that appear on a number of science-based lists of prevention programs are discussed.     

Innovative Programs in Israel for Prevention & Responding to Parental Alienation: Education,Early Identification and Timely,Effective Intervention

There is substantial research and documentation showing that behavior of a parent which alienates a child against the other parent (PA) and other family members may cause serious, and sometimes permanent, damage to the child. Building on the work that defines maladaptive parental gatekeeping (MG) and PA, and on identifying typologies of behavior, and their effects on the alienated child, the need for prevention of children in these cases is well established. This paper describes programs and responses in Israel, some already in place and others under development, almost all of which require multidisciplinary collaboration between professionals. The programs include: primary prevention; early identification, so as to allow prompt secondary intervention by advice and treatment of parents and child; and immediate tertiary intervention when alienation has led to contact failure or is about to do so. Prevention and early intervention can reduce the need for the massive investment of resources needed for attempts to restore contact, and also for treatment of those affected by PA.     

Closing Off Opportunities for Crime: An Evaluation of Alley-Gating

A new situational crime prevention measure recently introduced into Great Britain involves the fitting of gates to alleyways running along the back of terraced properties to restrict access to local residents and reduce opportunities for offenders. A number of quantitative techniques were used to assess the success of the intervention in reducing burglary in the City of Liverpool. The results demonstrate that, relative to a suitable comparison area, burglary was reduced by approximately 37%, there was a diffusion of benefit to properties in the surrounding areas, and the scheme was cost beneficial with a saving of £1.86 for every pound spent. The analyses provide persuasive evidence that these reductions were attributable to the intervention. We argue that the methodological techniques demonstrated here can be applied more widely to crime prevention evaluations.     

Native American Youth Gangs

ABSTRACT

The number of Native American youth gangs has increased dramatically since the 1990s. These gangs bring increases in crime and pose unique challenges to tribal leaders and local police departments. Using an integrated theoretical perspective, this article connects cultural and historical factors to explain the emergence of gangs in Indian country, identify risk factors for gang involvement, and outline important considerations for effective prevention and intervention strategies. It is expected that an improved understanding of Native American culture and experiences combined with the implementation of culturally-appropriate prevention and intervention programs will lead to more positive outcomes.     

论视频监控的犯罪预防功能及犯罪侦查价值

各国的犯罪预防理论发展至今,已经形成了比较完善的犯罪预防体系,主要包括司法预防、社会预防和情景预防三种模式。在我国的犯罪预防体系中,向来重视司法预防和社会预防,而对情景预防关注不够,情景预防措施尚不完善。作为一种对犯罪的干预,视频监控是一种对情境犯罪的干预,研究发掘其在犯罪预防中的作用对完善犯罪预防体系具有重要意义。同时,视频监控系统在犯罪侦查方面也具有重要作用。     

Problem solving and youth violence: an evaluation of the Boston Gun Project

The Boston Gun Project is a problem-solving policing initiativeaimed at reducing homicide victimization among young peoplein the city of Boston. It represented an innovative partnershipbetween researchers and practitioners to assess the city's youthhomicide problem and implement an intervention intended to havepowerful impacts in the near term. In early 1996, a workinggroup representing a variety of law enforcement and social serviceagencies implemented an intervention that strategically respondedto gang violence, focused enforcement efforts on gun trafficking,and emphasized communication of the strategy to generate deterrence.The intervention is associated with a 60% decline in youth homicidevictimization (i.e., two fewer victims per month). There aresmaller declines in other measures of violence. The declinein youth homicide is sharp and occurs coincident with the introductionof the intervention. Competing hypotheses appear unable to accountfor the decline.     

Police Officers on Drug Corners in Philadelphia,Drug Crime,and Violent Crime: Intended,Diffusion, and Displacement Impacts

On May 1, 2002, the Philadelphia Police Department launched Operation Safe Streets, stationing officers at 214 of the highest drug activity locations in the city 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Interrupted time series (AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average) models on weekly data isolated citywide and local program impacts on all violent crimes, murder, and reported drug crimes. Results showed no significant impacts on citywide weekly counts for drug crimes, homicides, or all violent crimes. Geographically focused analyses showed significant localized intervention impacts for both violent and drug crimes. Analyses of high‐drug‐activity non‐intervention sites suggest: the program impacts seen were not an artifact of history or local history; significant spatial diffusion of preventive benefits for violent crime; and probably significant spatial displacement for drug crime. Stationary targeted drug‐enforcement interventions like Operation Safe Streets may differentially affect the locational selection processes behind violent crime versus drug crime.     

Public attitudes toward funding preschool programs to prevent violence

Public policy on violence prevention has increasingly focused on early childhood interventions to reduce violence over the life course. This paper examines public attitudes toward funding of programs in schools to enhance learning and to reduce violence. The data come from telephone surveys in a large Southern US City collected from 2004 to 2007. The paper explores the relationship between public funding of programs and increased taxes for programs. PLUM Ordinal Regression models were used to predict attitudes toward prevention programs controlling for demographic variables and political affiliation. Implications of these findings are discussed for understanding of attitudes toward school-based programs and their funding.     

School-based child sexual abuse prevention programs

Early prevention education training has been advocated by scholars and practitioners to intervene with children and youth who have been or are being sexually abused as well as to prevent sexual abuse from occurring. This study identified and surveyed major school-based child sexual abuse prevention programs in the country. Results obtained from 126 prevention programs indicated that most programs are conducted at a local level; that together they reach hundreds of thousands of students, parents, teachers, and other school staff; and that they offer a prescribed curriculum and resource materials. Nearly two-thirds receive state funding assistance, with less than a third charging the schools. Most were established in the early and mid 1980s and have well-educated staff. Further, most work to meet the needs of disabled students and provide means for disclosure of sexual abuse. Training format, duration, and materials vary.This study was supported by Grant #5083B80014, Womens Educational Equity Act Program, U.S. Department of Education.