Fostering Connection and Healing: An Intervention Study to Understand Adolescent Sexual Offending Treatment Effects, Mechanisms, and Worldviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevalence of child sexual abuse in Canada is an important social problem, with a significant portion of sexual offending charges against children and youth peers committed by adolescents or young adults under the age of 24 (Afifi et al., 2014; Gewirtz-Meydan & Finkelhor, 2020; Statistics Canada, 2022). The extensive scholarship from adult sexual offending has informed the adolescent sexual offending research, sociolegal, and clinical fields, providing a helpful starting point. However, continued application of adult sexual offending frameworks onto adolescents has resulted in the promulgation of misinformation and inappropriate treatment approaches. Resultingly, it is especially imperative to conduct research and evaluation on developmentally appropriate adolescent-specific models of treatment. This dissertation offers an intervention research program on the Unite and Redefine Group Therapy Program for adolescents (ages 15-21) who have sexually offended by: (1) Addressing gaps in the current adolescent sexual offending literature; (2) Contributing an evidence base for a group therapy intervention (Unite and Redefine) to the sexual abuse prevention clinical practice field; (3) Understanding the processes of group therapy goals through content and emotional connection/processing, with an emphasis on cohesive and client centered practices; (4) Understanding the perspectives and lived experiences of adolescents who sexually offend in treatment; and (5) Offering a meaningful social work contribution to the adolescent sexual offending field. Quantitative pre- and post-test measures by the participants of Unite and Redefine were analyzed and are detailed in Dissertation Paper 1. Qualitative interviews with participants yielded Paper 2, which specifically focuses on the group processes and content that resulted in meaningful change for the participants. Interview analysis also comprise Paper 3, which offers a Constructivist Grounded Theory, informed by symbolic interactionism, of the skillful use of impression management redressive action to cope with the societal stigma of sexual offending by adolescents who have sexually offended. The research presented here will have an impact on clinical practice and further research by guiding clinicians in implementing necessary and important interventions with their adolescent clients that supports them in striving to achieve better and more fulsome lives without causing future harm to themselves or others. This research can direct future efforts to better understand how this population engages with group treatment and can help clinical efforts in supporting clients to engage with important treatment goals such as masculinity, shame, self-compassion, and impression management to live safe, fulfilling futures with healed familial and intimate relationships.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".