The Value of Protective Factors for SVP Programs
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Training Description
Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) programs involve three components which are commonly risk-averse: forensic evaluation, treatment, and community management. In addition, such programs are designed to treat persons who are often demoralized and have a high density of pervasive mental disorders (paraphilias and personality disorders). The protective factors approach provides a way forward for such programs by focusing on the promotion of positive dynamic characteristics that can be internal to the individual, external, or environmental in nature. In this training, the most empirically-supported protective factors for sexual offenders will be identified and discussed in the context of benefitting assessment, management, and monitoring in the SVP context.
Trainer Biography
Dr. David Thornton is a licensed psychologist in private practice who specializes in the assessment and treatment of sexual and violent offenders. Together with others he developed the Risk Matrix 2000, the Static-99, the Static-99R, the Static-2002, the Static-2002R, and the SRA framework for dynamic risk assessment. He was treatment director for the Wisconsin SVP program for over a decade. He has published papers on the relevance of protective factors to sex offenders and is an approved trainer for the SAPROF, an instrument designed to assess protective factors.
Dr. Sharon Kelley is employed as a SVP evaluator with the Sand Ridge Evaluation Unit in Madison, Wisconsin. She also completes SVP and other forensic evaluations in her private practice. She is licensed to practice psychology in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and California. Both within her practical work and research projects, she is interested in empirically based risk assessments that capture risk, change as an effect of treatment, and protective factors. She is an approved trainer for the SAPROF, an instrument designed to assess protective factors, as well as the VRS-SO, an instrument designed to evaluate the effect of risk reduction due to treatment change.
Learning Objectives
This training is designed to help you:
- Describe how assessment of protective factors can contribute to forensic evaluation of SVPs who are being supervised in the community
- Describe how the protective factors approach can contribute to the assessment of treatment targets
- Describe the consequence of not gradually reducing external protective factors during community supervision of SVPs