Treatment of Child Sexual Abuse: Programs,progress, and prospects

Recent years have witnessed the development and implementation of clinical services designed to remediate the many deleterious effects of child sexual abuse. However, little information has been disseminated and reviewed in the professional literature to facilitate clinical application and empirical investigation of specific procedures with child victims and their families. This paper provides an overview and critique of treatment programs and modalities, highlighting their achievements and limitations. The methods, characteristics, and empirical outcomes of specific programs are discussed along with future directions and recommendations.     

Automobile theft: Estimating the size of the criminal population

Animal abundance estimation procedures including a new method of Zelterman are applied in the criminological context of auto theft in the Australian Capital Territory. Using goodness-of-fit statistics and comparing the estimates with known clearance rates, it is estimated that during 1987 about 39% of offenders were charged with at least one count of auto theft. The results also indicate the extent of overrepresentation of juveniles in court statistics compared with their relative participation rate in auto theft.     

Privatization,information and incentives

In this paper the choice between public and private provision of goods and services is considered. In practice, both modes of operation involve significant delegation of authority, and thus appear quite similar in some respects. The argument here is that the main difference between the two modes concerns the transactions costs faced by the government when attempting to intervene in the delegated production activities. Such intervention is generally less costly under public ownership than under private ownership. The greater ease of intervention under public ownership can have its advantages; but the fact that a promise not to intervene is more credible under private production can also have beneficial incentive effects. The fundamental privatization theorem (analogous to the fundamental theorem of welfare economics) is presented, providing conditions under which government production cannot improve upon private production. The restrictiveness of these conditions is evaluated.     

Social Skills Training in Juvenile Detention: A Rationale

The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Juvenile Detention Association or the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.