Japanese team visits for clues on treating young sex offenders
Japanese team visits for clues on treating young sex offenders

By Jeff Raymond

Published: September 14, 2007

A six-person team of Japanese researchers is meeting this week with experts at OU Physicians to determine how to effectively rehabilitate juvenile sex offenders.

The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center's adolescent sex offender treatment program boasts a 3 percent recidivism rate, meaning few who complete treatment recommit the offenses that led them there.

"I think they wanted to come and find out what we've learned and if they could take home some ideas about incorporating some techniques we use here,” said Barbara Bonner, a professor of pediatrics at the health sciences center and director of its Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Speaking through a translator, Junko Fujioka, a professor of clinical psychology at Japan's Osaka University, said her nation had just begun treating sex offenders last year in the adult correctional system.

"What I have been thinking was, ‘Can't we do something for the juveniles, as well, and maybe do something for those who may turn into a sex offender in their adult life?'” she said. "In Japan, the whole system ... is heading toward more of a punitive direction, so what I want to emphasize in Japan is that adult sex offenders and youth sex offenders are different.”

Fujioka said she and others were learning treatment techniques from the United States and elsewhere and noted little work was done in Japan with sex offender researchers in the nation's universities.

"What happens is everything is done within the corrections system,” she said.

The typical patient in Bonner's program is a 14-year-old boy who has fondled a child or forced the child to perform oral sex, she said.

One aspect of the program that makes it stand out is the strong involvement of parents and caregivers in treatment, she said. Parent groups are given a room and a therapist — something rare elsewhere.

"This is one of the things where people would like to run and get under the bed and not come out after 10 years,” she said of parents of adolescent sex offenders.

Although adolescent sex offenders have done terrible things, a punitive approach is the wrong way to go, she said. The program receives patients new to treatment programs and those who have been through it. Those with more serious offenses largely make up the second group and come from the correctional system.

"We do not have boys stand up and say, ‘I'm a sex offender, blah, blah, blah,'” Bonner said. "They do a lot of work. It is not sitting around processing your feelings by any stretch of the imagination. They leave with a very clear idea of what will get them into trouble and what won't ... and how to control their impulses, how to put stop signs in their mind.”

Most offenders, she said, did so because they thought they could get away with it.

"It's not some deep ... personality disorder with most of these kids,” she said. "I think they see an opportunity, and they take advantage of it.”

Bonner began the youth treatment program in the mid-1980s after seeing a newspaper story about a program in New York. She spent time there and returned to start a program at the OU Health Sciences Center while she was a postdoctoral fellow in adolescent medicine and pediatric psychology.

The program began with five boys and has expanded to 25.

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