YOS's Effective Interventions for Adolescent Sex Offenders and Children With PSB

Youth Outreach Services (YOS) is a private 501(c)3 nonprofit youth agency with a 60+ year history delivering comprehensive services to high-risk youth. An experienced provider working with Cook County Probation and the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, YOS will partner with MST Services Inc. and University of Oklahoma to receive staff training, monitoring and evaluation of services to ensure adherence to the model's fidelity and achievement of program goals. Over the 36 months, YOS and Cook County's multidisciplinary team will prevent sexual reoffending by adolescent sex offenders and youth with sexual behavior problems in Cook County, Illinois, promote healing, and provide services for victims and families. YOS will annually serve 40 interfamilial and/or coresidential child victims and youth offenders ages 10-18. YOS will deploy Multisystemic Therapy with a Problem Sexual Behavior adaptation. MST-PSB is an intensive, family and community-based treatment program that addresses the sexual behaviors of juvenile offenders providing family interventions delivered at home. YOS will also utilize Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for PSB (CBT-PSB), which is an intensive group family model in which caregivers participate in simultaneous therapy weekly in addition to with their child. Further, YOS will continue to work with city and suburban Children's Advocacy Centers to treat victims in addition to offering its own trauma-focused CBT. YOS will improve family and system response to incidents of adolescent sex offenses and problematic sexual behavior in children. This will be accomplished through safety planning, addressing denial, reconciliation, extensive assessments and evaluations, community resources for the families, victim therapy, team and school involvement, and centered youth voice. YOS will increase protective factors in targeted youth to prevent sexual reoffending or continued problematic sexual behavior. This will be done by various tools and scales leveraged, a comprehensive intervention plan, additional services and activities, community partnerships, and a thorough assessment of progress and discharge planning. Deliverables include: Enhance intervention and supervision services; Enhance treatment services for the child victims and nonoffending family members; Develop a comprehensive assessment of system resources that details the continuum of intervention services available for the target population and treatment services for victims. In order to enhance public safety in economically distressed communities Qualified Opportunity Zones, YOS does not charge a fee for any of its services, and commonly targets low-income clients in communities that would otherwise not have access to such quality services. This includes working closely with youth involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems, often times from communities of persistent-poverty.