Elizabeth Letourneau, PhD, director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse speaks about the effects of juvenile sex offender registration on child well-being at the 2017 Child Sexual Abuse: A Public Health Perspective symposium at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Watch more videos from our symposium here.

On May 31, 2017, Stephen Moore, M.D. was awarded the Founding Dean’s Medallion for his commitment to improving public health. The medallion is given to those who have made an important impact in the field of public health. Read more.

The Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse was founded in 2012 with a generous gift from the Moore family, who courageously decided to fund a research center that would create, through rigorous science, a public health approach to preventing child sexual abuse.

The Moore family purposefully “seated” this Center within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a leading international authority on public health, the School works to keep millions around the world safe from violence, illness and injury by pioneering new research, deploying its knowledge and expertise in the field and educating tomorrow’s scientists and practitioners in the global defense of human life. 

On May 22, 2017, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Federal Adam Walsh Reauthorization Act of 2017. The House’s judiciary subcommittee on crime, terrorism, homeland security and investigations worked to reauthorize the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, the only federal law that requires states, tribes and other jurisdictions to register children who have committed sexual offenses.

By removing one paragraph from Section 111 in the Adam Walsh Act that broadens the definition of “sex offender” to include adjudicated juveniles, our elected leaders could have ended this wasteful and ineffective policy.

On May 3, 2017, the South Carolina State Supreme Court upheld lifetime sex offender registration for behavior committed as a child. The court made this finding despite a decade of scientific research that clearly and consistently points to the failure of juvenile registration policies to improve public safety in any way. That much of this literature was based on data from South Carolina only heightens the distance between this ruling and the countervailing scholarship.

Read the rest of this post at Psychology Today column, Prevention Now.

On May 22, 2017, Michael Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health awarded two members from the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse with awards during a ceremony to honor outstanding faculty and students in the Department of Mental Health.

Elizabeth Letourneau, PhD, director of the Moore Center and professor in the Department of Mental Health was presented with the Bloomberg American Health Initiative Excellence in U.S. Public Health Practice award for her work studying the effectiveness of policies intended to prevent child sexual abuse and make communities safer.

Since 2003, Letourneau has conducted a program of research evaluating the intended, unintended and collateral consequences of juvenile sex offender and notification policies. During this time, she and colleagues demonstrated that there have been no reductions in sexual, violent, or nonviolent recidivism rates among youth who have committed sexual offenses.

In fact, there are more harmful consequences associated with these policies than positive outcomes. Mental health providers treating youth who have sexually offended believe these policies are associated with substantial harm, placing youth at increased risk of mental health problems, harassment, school difficulties and living instability. There is also a reduced likelihood of prosecution most likely due to the perceived harshness and unfairness of these policies even in the eyes of prosecutors and judges.

Letourneau wasn’t the only person from the Moore Center who was presented with an award, however. Kenneth Felder, a PhD candidate studying under Letourneau was given the Paul V. Lemkau Scholarship Fund, which is given annually to an outstanding Department of Mental Health student or fellow who has made a significant difference in the community life of the department.

On Thursday, April 27, 2017, during our fifth annual symposium on child sexual abuse prevention, held at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, our keynote speaker, Patrick McCarthy, president and CEO at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, pledged to donate $100,000 to support our Center operations and research.

This gift was unexpected and our team was moved by the sentiment that it conveyed – that McCarthy not only believed in our mission, but also felt strongly about investing in the idea that child sexual abuse can be prevented.

“The generosity of individual donors is critical…but we also need public policy makers who are willing to invest public funds in solving this public health problem because that is the scale of investment that we need,” McCarthy said.

We couldn’t agree more that we need both individual donors as well as public funds to address child sexual abuse, and we’re very thankful to have the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation to help us develop universal, evidence-based prevention programs and reverse policies that cause harm.

Watch McCarthy’s keynote address as well as other speakers from our April symposium.