Advocacy and Policy Efforts to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse

Advocacy and Policy Efforts to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse

Child sexual abuse impacts 12% of the world’s children. The effects of abuse are profound and include increased risk for physical health, mental health, and behavioral health problems. While many organizations that support victims of child sexual abuse begin their efforts after abuse has already occurred, the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse focuses on preventing abuse from occurring. Research at the Moore Center involves developing, validating, and disseminating effective prevention programs, including programs that focus on helping people who might offend against children to avoid doing so. The Moore Center’s education and communication efforts focus on conveying that child sexual abuse is preventable, not inevitable, and their advocacy and policy efforts focus ensure that policy makers include prevention as a substantial component of comprehensive efforts to address child sexual abuse. Join Elizabeth Letourneau, PhD, as she presents on recent research conducted by the Moore Center on continued prevention of child sexual abuse.
 

Elizabeth Letourneau, PhD is Professor in the Department of Mental Health, and Director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  For more than 30 years, she has developed, evaluated, and implemented policies and practices that aim to prevent the onset of sexual offending.  Dr. Letourneau has led dozens of research projects resulting in more than 80 scientific publications which establish an empirical basis for perpetration prevention efforts that work.  In addition, Letourneau has helped develop and evaluate state and national sex crime policies.  Her research on juvenile sex offender registration established the inefficacy and harmfulness of such policies and was influential in several U.S. state supreme court cases and in U.S. state legislatures that revised their registration policies.  For this work, Letourneau was awarded the inaugural Faculty Practice Award in 2017 by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.