Clinical Services

Youth Health Associates (YHA) serves higher-risk male youth, ages 12 to 18 years old, who engage in sexual misconduct with a broad range of sexual-offense behaviors and who are often sexually-preoccupied. These youth have serious and significant sexual acting out issues, potentially highlighted by being patterned and repetitious behaviors. They may have persistent or fixated patterns of offending, use of force or weapons in committing their offenses and/or a display a propensity to act out with same-aged peers in addition to their younger victims. These are youth with multiple vulnerabilities and deficits in their ability to meet their needs and obtain human goods. Treatment for these youth must go beyond the sexual problems and must focus on treating the entire person.

Youth referred to YHA present a significant risk for reoffending sexually, and thus, require intervention in a structured and restrictive residential treatment setting. These youth possess multiple risk, etiological and maintenance factors – it is these factors that place all youth on the pathway to sexually offend. Due to the manner in which these youth sexually offend and the number and variety of etiological and maintenance factors identified in these youth, they score in the moderate-to-high and high risk range on acceptable national risk assessment tools. They possess risk too great to remain in the community or be placed with less-sophisticated youth in a lower level of care. They are youth in need of intensive structure, treatment and supervision in order to address their sexual-acting out issues and other vulnerabilities, deficits and treatment needs. These youth usually require more-intensive intervention than provided in less-intensive programing.

YHA is a twenty-four-hour intensive community-based residential treatment program. YHA provides maximum, non-secure supervision and intensive clinical intervention. It is not a locked facility but is staff secure. Treatment not only focuses on the sexual problems, but also addresses the youth’s growth and development, health, social skills, resilience and interventions focused on resolving the youth’s own victimization and co-occurring disorders. The primary aim is to instill the youth the knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary to develop and implement a positive identify revolving around personally-meaningful ways of meeting their human needs and pursuing their interests. As part of this holistic approach, YHA treatment integrates standard sex-offense-specific treatment components, such as development of full accountability for all offense behaviors, insight into offense dynamics and choice to offend, building realistic and effective self-regulation/relapse-prevention strategies, develop a family safety plan, develop healthy sexual attitudes and boundaries and develop and sustain victim empathy.

YHA utilizes a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for addressing sexual misconduct and sexually aggressive behaviors. YHA’s curriculum is designed for youth who are moderate to high need in the area of sexual behavior problems. YHA’s curriculum can be delivered as a stand-alone curriculum or incorporated into larger programs, particularly those designed for clients in the corrections system. YHA’s curriculum relies on a cognitive-behavioral approach to teach clients strategies for avoiding sexual offending and related behaviors. The program places heavy emphasis on skill-building activities to assist with cognitive, social, emotional, and coping skills development.

Additionally, trauma-specific treatment interventions are utilized with those youth who present with an unresolved trauma history. Youth will have opportunities to resolve his own childhood victimization with sensory interventions, separate from focus on his sexual offending to assist him to resolve his trauma, enhance his emotional coping skills and develop a healthy sexual identity.

YHA treatment includes targeted sex-specific therapy to include individual therapy, group therapy and family therapy weekly to provide the youth with information regarding health sexual functioning and prevent further development of his/her sexual misconduct. YHA is capable of providing offense-specific risk and clinical evaluation. Treatment services include sex-specific treatment, psycho-social education and training groups in daily living and social skills, healthy sexuality and psychosexual education, family therapy, individual therapy, group therapy, psychological evaluation and testing, psychiatric evaluation and, as deemed appropriate, medication management.

Overall, the goal is to assist the youth to increase competency and skills necessary to ensure their ability to control or eliminate etiological and maintenance factors influencing their pathway to offend, reestablish a healthy developmental trajectory, obtain their needs and human goods in a healthy way, and place themselves on a healthy pathway toward becoming a functional adult.

YHA programs are staff-secure, community based facilities within an overall residential campus where resident activities and movements are controlled or monitored by staff on a twenty-four-hour basis, and there is a strong emphasis on structure, intensive behavior management and containment. YHA provides on-site schooling, as well as frequent and intensive psychological or psychiatric services delivered by on-site professional staff. YHA relies on behavioral and level systems to gain compliance from clients.

Youth referred to YHA receive clinical intervention to decrease sexually-abusive behavior problems as part of an overall structured program. Individual, family, group and recreational therapies, as well as the therapeutic milieu intervention, provide the basic structure. Additionally, the youth participate in group therapy that focuses on sexual offending issues. YHA youth cannot be adequately treated in non-sex-specific or traditional residential programs where the client population is insufficient to create a homogeneous group for youth with sexually-abusive behavior problems.

Length of stay at YHA’s treatment program averages twelve to eighteen months, with six to twelve months of follow-up continued care services. However, some youth may stabilize more quickly, and based on progress and current assessment, step-down to a less restrictive level of care. Criteria for treatment progress include: accomplishment of the specific treatment goals and objectives, cooperativeness in treatment, maintaining control and self-responsibility, changes in thinking, and observable changes in behavior over time. As in any treatment level, lack of treatment progress may result in a referral to a more-intensive treatment intervention or Level of Care.