Beginning in the late 1980’s I pursued another area of specialization, child sexual abuse, inviting Dr. Suzanne Sgroi, a pioneer in this field, and others to educate my SCO staff and me and enhance our ability to serve our clients. This eventually enabled us to develop protocols and to conduct child sexual abuse assessments without having to rely upon limited outside resources. It also permitted me to share our observations and findings with mental health and legal professionals (Gries, L., 1990, 1995) at conferences sponsored by the Practising Law Institute (PLI). Specific details of my protocol, and findings regarding disclosure of sexual abuse were subsequently published in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse (Gries, L.T., Goh, D.S., & Cavanaugh, J., (1996). In 1998, I presented a paper entitled, Positive Reaction to Disclosure and Recovery from Child Sexual Abuse at the First International Conference on Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Hong Kong, (Gries, L., Andrews, M.B., Gilbert, J., Goh, D. & Praver, F., 1998). An article based upon the paper was then published in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, (Gries, L. et. al., 2000). Other paper presentations and articles, based upon our clinical work, relating to various aspects of assessment and treatment of sexually abused children included, (Gries, L., 1997; Gries, L., 1997; Gries, L., 1998; Gries, L. & Gries, J., 2000; Friedrich, W., Baker, A., Parker., Schneiderman, M., Gries, L., & Archer, M., 2005; Baker, A., Gries, L., Schneiderman, M., Parker, R., Archer, M., & Friedrich, W., 2008).
As word spread of my expertise in child sexual abuse, requests for my specialized services outside of SCO prompted me to establish the Institute for Emotional Health (IEH) as a vehicle for delivering such services to clients in other foster care agencies, and eventually to clients referred by the courts. Starting in 1990, and continuing to this writing in 2020, I conducted approximately 200 child sexual abuse assessments, and treated or supervised the treatment of hundreds of sexual abuse victims as well as children or adolescents exhibiting problematic sexualized behavior. As Executive Director of IEH, I recruited and trained dozens of psychologists, certified social workers and licensed mental health counselors to provide in-home individual and family trauma focused therapy for sexually abused and otherwise traumatized youngsters in foster care. This delivery service model represented the inverse of the center-based model followed at SCO, as demand dictated. My four decades in foster care taught me there is no “one size fits all” best model for delivering clinical services. There are distinct clinical, logistical, and financial advantages and disadvantages inherent in both a center-based service model and a home-based service model, which must be considered in each situation before making a determination on how to proceed. Along the way, attempts were made to learn about factors affecting therapy outcomes to inform agency referral practices and to learn about the efficacy of our efforts, with findings published in The Journal of Public Welfare (Gries, L., & Cantos, A.L., 2008) and Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal (Cantos, A.L. & Gries, L.T., 2010).
As a portion of children in foster care have a permanency goal of adoption, the need for developing expertise in assessing readiness for adoption, and assessing the need for specialized individual and family counseling was evident from the beginning of my venture in the field of foster care. To this end an unpublished scale, the Gries Assessment of Psychological Permanence (GAPP) scale, was developed (Gries, L., 1999). It focused on the degree to which a subject child achieved psychological permanence, a construct defined as “the inner subjective state of a child who feels he belongs and is at peace with his place in one or more families with which he identifies…it is a state of emotional balance or homeostasis, durable over time…it reflects resolution of inner conflict concerning questions about separation from birth parent and about attachment to the adoptive parent.” As a non-standardized scale, the GAPP was intended to be used solely for individualized goal planning and measurement of change in client beliefs over time. Its development was informed by work subsumed within two papers presented a few years earlier on “Psychological Permanence and Adoption,” (Gries, L., 1994) and “Psychological Permanence: A Successful Model Program for Preserving Adoptive Families,” (Chaffkin, B., & Gries, L., 1997).
As already indicated, by the mid-1990’s, I began to receive court ordered referrals to conduct child sexual abuse assessments. By 1996, my experience with assessment of parenting capacity led to court requests to conduct child custody evaluations. In accordance with general standards for conducting such evaluations, I developed a protocol which maximized efficient collection of data in the least intrusive manner. In 1997, I qualified for and achieved the status of Diplomate in Forensic Clinical Psychology, through the American Board of Psychological Specialties, under the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute. Since then, I’ve conducted approximately 200 court ordered child custody/parenting plan evaluations. I’ve succeeded in convincing a number of judges and court attorney-referees to issue orders for child custody evaluation separately from orders for child sexual abuse assessment, in cases where abuse was alleged. The importance of shielding the collection of data pertaining to alleged abuse from the adversarial features of addressing child custody matters, and completing an abuse assessment first, came to be understood by at least some of the judges. To be eligible to receive referrals for forensic evaluation, I had to first be accepted on the panel of mental health professionals of the State of New York, Appellate Division, Supreme Court, First and Second Judicial Departments, and the Nassau County Assigned Counsel Defender Plan. In many instances I was required to testify at court about my findings. Over the course of my career, I’ve been qualified as Expert Forensic witness in Child Psychology, Child Custody, Child Abuse and Child Sexual Abuse at each of the five county family courts in New York City and in Nassau County. I’ve also testified as expert witness for the Special Victims Bureaus of the Kings County, Queens County and New York County District Attorney offices. Most noteworthy of the scores of experiences testifying within a legal venue was my 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the matter of the case described in my book, Gregory of Zimbabwe, when I found myself going head to head with Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. The material which served as the basis of my testimony consisted of reports on child abuse of the subject child, which I prepared for review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Leonard T. Gries, Ph.D., DABPS
4/10/2020
Part lV to follow in 5/2020
As word spread of my expertise in child sexual abuse, requests for my specialized services outside of SCO prompted me to establish the Institute for Emotional Health (IEH) as a vehicle for delivering such services to clients in other foster care agencies, and eventually to clients referred by the courts. Starting in 1990, and continuing to this writing in 2020, I conducted approximately 200 child sexual abuse assessments, and treated or supervised the treatment of hundreds of sexual abuse victims as well as children or adolescents exhibiting problematic sexualized behavior. As Executive Director of IEH, I recruited and trained dozens of psychologists, certified social workers and licensed mental health counselors to provide in-home individual and family trauma focused therapy for sexually abused and otherwise traumatized youngsters in foster care. This delivery service model represented the inverse of the center-based model followed at SCO, as demand dictated. My four decades in foster care taught me there is no “one size fits all” best model for delivering clinical services. There are distinct clinical, logistical, and financial advantages and disadvantages inherent in both a center-based service model and a home-based service model, which must be considered in each situation before making a determination on how to proceed. Along the way, attempts were made to learn about factors affecting therapy outcomes to inform agency referral practices and to learn about the efficacy of our efforts, with findings published in The Journal of Public Welfare (Gries, L., & Cantos, A.L., 2008) and Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal (Cantos, A.L. & Gries, L.T., 2010).
As a portion of children in foster care have a permanency goal of adoption, the need for developing expertise in assessing readiness for adoption, and assessing the need for specialized individual and family counseling was evident from the beginning of my venture in the field of foster care. To this end an unpublished scale, the Gries Assessment of Psychological Permanence (GAPP) scale, was developed (Gries, L., 1999). It focused on the degree to which a subject child achieved psychological permanence, a construct defined as “the inner subjective state of a child who feels he belongs and is at peace with his place in one or more families with which he identifies…it is a state of emotional balance or homeostasis, durable over time…it reflects resolution of inner conflict concerning questions about separation from birth parent and about attachment to the adoptive parent.” As a non-standardized scale, the GAPP was intended to be used solely for individualized goal planning and measurement of change in client beliefs over time. Its development was informed by work subsumed within two papers presented a few years earlier on “Psychological Permanence and Adoption,” (Gries, L., 1994) and “Psychological Permanence: A Successful Model Program for Preserving Adoptive Families,” (Chaffkin, B., & Gries, L., 1997).
As already indicated, by the mid-1990’s, I began to receive court ordered referrals to conduct child sexual abuse assessments. By 1996, my experience with assessment of parenting capacity led to court requests to conduct child custody evaluations. In accordance with general standards for conducting such evaluations, I developed a protocol which maximized efficient collection of data in the least intrusive manner. In 1997, I qualified for and achieved the status of Diplomate in Forensic Clinical Psychology, through the American Board of Psychological Specialties, under the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute. Since then, I’ve conducted approximately 200 court ordered child custody/parenting plan evaluations. I’ve succeeded in convincing a number of judges and court attorney-referees to issue orders for child custody evaluation separately from orders for child sexual abuse assessment, in cases where abuse was alleged. The importance of shielding the collection of data pertaining to alleged abuse from the adversarial features of addressing child custody matters, and completing an abuse assessment first, came to be understood by at least some of the judges. To be eligible to receive referrals for forensic evaluation, I had to first be accepted on the panel of mental health professionals of the State of New York, Appellate Division, Supreme Court, First and Second Judicial Departments, and the Nassau County Assigned Counsel Defender Plan. In many instances I was required to testify at court about my findings. Over the course of my career, I’ve been qualified as Expert Forensic witness in Child Psychology, Child Custody, Child Abuse and Child Sexual Abuse at each of the five county family courts in New York City and in Nassau County. I’ve also testified as expert witness for the Special Victims Bureaus of the Kings County, Queens County and New York County District Attorney offices. Most noteworthy of the scores of experiences testifying within a legal venue was my 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the matter of the case described in my book, Gregory of Zimbabwe, when I found myself going head to head with Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. The material which served as the basis of my testimony consisted of reports on child abuse of the subject child, which I prepared for review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Leonard T. Gries, Ph.D., DABPS
4/10/2020
Part lV to follow in 5/2020
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