Is Everyone Rated Equal? An Examination of Factors Related to Sexual Risk in Ethnically Diverse Male Adolescents Who Have Sexually Offended

As the juvenile justice system has evolved, there has been a need for clinicians to make judgments about risk posed by adolescents who have committed sexual offenses. There are inherent difficulties in attempting to assess risk for violence among adolescents due to the developmental changes taking place and the absence of well-validated instruments to guide risk prediction judgments. With minority groups increasing in numbers in the U.S., it is likely that professionals will encounter minority individuals when conducting risk assessments. Overall questions regarding race/ethnicity have been neglected and there are few if any published research that explores risk factors with minority juvenile sex offenders. The present study examined whether differences exist between Caucasian and racial/ethnic minority adolescent sexual offenders on four risk assessment measures (J-SORRAT-II, J-SOAP-II, SAVRY, and ERASOR). The sample of 207 male adolescent sexual offenders was drawn from treatment facilities in a Midwestern state. Overall results indicated that minority adolescent sex offenders had fewer risk factors endorsed than Caucasian youth across all risk assessment tools. Exploration of interactions between race and factors such as: family status, exposure to family violence, and family history of criminality upon the assessment tools risk ratings yielded non-significant findings. Limitations, suggestions for future directions, and clinical implications are discussed.

Wildlife Risk Management at Vancouver International Airport

The Vancouver International Airport (YVR) is the second busiest airport in Canada. YVR is located on Sea Island in the Fraser River Estuary - a world-class wintering and staging area for hundreds of thousands of migratory birds. The Fraser Delta supports Canada’s largest wintering populations of waterfowl, shorebirds, and raptors. The large number of aircraft movements and the presence of many birds near YVR pose a wide range of considerable aviation safety hazards. Until the late 1980s when a full-time Wildlife Control Program (WCP) was initiated, YVR had the highest number of bird strikes of any Canadian commercial airport. Although the risks of bird strikes associated with the operation of YVR are generally well known by airport managers, and a number of risk assessments have been conducted associated with the Sea Island Conservation Area, no quantitative assessment of risks of bird strikes has been conducted for airport operations at YVR. Because the goal of all airports is to operate safely, an airport wildlife management program strives to reduce the risk of bird strikes. A risk assessment establishes the current risk of strikes, which can be used as a benchmark to focus wildlife control activities and to assess the effectiveness of the program in reducing bird strike risks. A quantitative risk assessment also documents the process and information used in assessing risk and allows the assessment to be repeated in the future in order to measure the change in risk over time in an objective and comparative manner. This study was undertaken to comply with new Canadian legislation expected to take effect in 2006 requiring airports in Canada to conduct a risk assessment and develop a wildlife management plan. Although YVR has had a management plan for many years, it took this opportunity to update the plan and conduct a risk assessment.