Internalizing Problems And Intervention Of Female Young Offenders

In the recent years, the number of young offenders increases sharply. In China, therehabilitation of young offenders has drawn greater attention, and how to reform young offendersto law-abiding citizens and make them adapted by the society are what we concerned.Rehabilitation of female young offenders still use the traditional model of labor reformation.However, it is a negative event for the young girls to be sentenced to imprisonment, they losspersonal freedom, and their social support systems have been damaged. As a result, they areextremely sensitive to mental stress, which could even lead to emotional distress. Internalizingproblems of the female young offenders could affect their adaptive behavior and rehabilitation inthe prison as well as the social adaptation. Therefore, it is important to implement thepsychological intervention to ease the internalizing problems of the female young offenders. Alot of studies have shown that: group psychological intervention and individual psychologicalintervention can relieve the internalizing problems of adolescents effectively, so adopting themulti-level psychological intervention is an effective way for female young offenders’internalizing problems remission. This study includes three sub-studies: the first study aimed toexplore the internalizing problems of female young offenders; in the second study, formulatedand implemented group psychological interventions based on the result of study 1; and in thethird study, implementing the individual psychological intervention for the girls, which make alot effect on internalizing problems remission. Conclusions drawn in this study are as follows:1. The internalizing problems are generally in female young offenders, and one ofinternalizing problems always accompany with others2. The group psychological intervention, which was applied to adolescent girls, obtainedeffective results: the change of female young offenders is more obvious on the depression factorthan anxiety and fear factor, and the number of lower depression level of female young offendersreduced significantly.3. After group psychological intervention, we adopt individual psychological intervention tothree female young offenders, whose internalizing problems were remain negative or relievedunobviously. Among them, two of them have significant changes on anxiety, depression and fear,and other one have some amelioration on internalizing problems.As shown in the study that it is feasible to build multi-level psychological intervention to relieve the internalizing problems of female young offenders, which can be used as an effectiveform of psychological intervention to offenders, so it is worth of widely use.