ABSTRACT
The staple of a treatment program for sex offenders is the sex offense-specific group. Group therapy has long been regarded as the treatment of choice for the work of sex offense-specific therapy (Way and Balthazor, 1990), and it is used in secure, residential, and outpatient settings. Seghorn (1986) has reported that as many as 97 percent of service providers use a peer group as the primary modality of treatment, and most of these recognize that the group, although vital, cannot be the only mode of treatment used. The 1996 Nationwide Survey of Sexual Abuse Treatment Providers and Programs by Burton and colleagues (1996) reports that actually 86 percent of the programs surveyed nationwide use a group treatment modality. However, it should be noted that this source also reports that only 2 percent of providers use no group by choice, while the others are not able to provide groups for one reason or another.
