ABSTRACT
The most popular modality currently in use within specialized adolescent sexual offender treatment is group work. In our practice with low to medium risk adolescent sexual offenders in an outpatient treatment program set at Astor Counseling Services in Poughkeepsie, New York, we too use group as the principal modality in our multi-modality approach. While we inherited from our predecessor this preference for a group approach to the sex-offenderspecific, cognitive behavioral therapy, we have developed our own rationale for the primacy of group in our practice. That rationale has shaped and informed every aspect of our assessment and treatment process and it is the purpose of this chapter to describe that rationale. Our hope is that we may provoke further reflection on why we, as clinicians, are currently practicing in the ways that many of us are and that this chapter may stimulate research to further substantiate the speculations and claims made here.
