On October 4, 2017, Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau gave a talk at the World Congress for Child Dignity in the Digital World, a conference that brought together leaders and researchers from around the world to discuss the dangers of children becoming victims of online sexual abuse and bullying. The conference took place in Vatican City and was convened by the Child Protection Centre at the Pontifical Gregorian University. (Featured at left: Dr. Letourneau and Fr. Thomas Rosica.)

Dr. Letourneau’s talk was one of the few that introduced the idea of prevention and the importance of viewing child sexual abuse as a public health issue. She also discussed how most of our efforts in the U.S. go toward detection and punishment.

Minimum sentencing, sex offender registration and living restrictions are all policies that have been implemented after harm has already been done. None of these costly policies prevent child sexual abuse.

Another important concept that Dr. Letourneau covered was the idea that as long as we view people who sexually abuse children as monsters, we are going to overlook the people in our children’s lives that we would never suspect: coaches, priests, teachers and family friends are more likely to sexually abuse our children than strangers. We wrongly believe that people that hurt children are on a trajectory toward more offending and greater harm, when in fact, once caught, people who commit sex offences have very low risk of committing other sex offenses.

You may have seen recent stories about the German prevention project Dunkelfeld that offers treatment to people who are sexually attracted to prepubescent children. This treatment philosophy is a marked departure from how we in the US have typically prevented child sexual abuse: by target-hardening children and strengthening sex offender registration and notification policies that are meant to prevent future abuse but aren’t effective.

Our current study, Help Wanted, conducted by Elizabeth Letourneau, PhD, director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is one of three youth and family-focused research projects that are developing prevention efforts that target specific populations at risk of offending.

In the Help Wanted study, we’re conducting qualitative interviews with a little known or understood population: young adults attracted to prepubescent children, but who have not committed abuse. Many of these people have said that they recognized their attraction in adolescence, but did not know what to do. We want to find out how young people manage this attraction and develop an intervention for those adolescents who are looking for help.

Help Wanted Goals

• Why? People often think of sexual abuse perpetrators as predatory monsters. This idea is reinforced in the media when stories frame pedophiles as inhuman and anyone attracted to children as an inevitable offender. This hopeless view hampers efforts to provide treatment services and/or promote efforts aimed at stopping abuse before a child is harmed.
• Purpose: We’re bringing experts from law enforcement, therapy, victim advocacy, prevention, research and policy together to identify strategies to help youth attracted to children avoid acting on those interests.
• Vision: This project is designed to create a safe place for young people to seek effective professional intervention early, to ensure that they have the skills and resources needed to prevent them from harming children and to equip them to develop in healthy ways that are safe for all involved.
• Aim: We aim to develop, rigorously evaluate and broadly disseminate an effective prevention intervention for youth attracted to children that will be one step in our mission to prevent, and ultimately end, child sexual abuse.

Media Coverage:

• Our work was recently featured in “Sympathy for the Deviant” from Psychology Today’s November 2015 issue
• From Upworthy: A treatment program in Germany (Project Dunkelfeld) is raising eyebrows
• Luke Malone created a popular podcast (over a million downloads so far) for This American Life based on our research in 2014

Even though Jared Fogle’s child pornography and child sexual abuse charges aren’t a top story these days, we haven’t stopped thinking about this case. The world was up in arms that this “regular guy” could do something so awful against children.

Who will be next?

Far more often than not, victims know their offenders. This fact is undisputed and widely understood at this point. When thinking hypothetically, most people acknowledge this simple truth. But when child sexual abuse hits closer to home – when it’s your dentist who is accused of molesting young patients, or when it’s the guy whose face and physique are ubiquitous with the largest fast food chain in the world  - that’s when it seems to be much more difficult to believe. When we assume that only monsters or total strangers are capable of hurting our children, we fail to see, much less act on, evidence that something might be amiss. Regular guys (and some regular gals) are, however, the norm, not the aberration.

It might be biologically adaptive to believe the best of people who seem like regular guys, people who seem like us. Few of us have the wherewithal or desire to be “on alert” all the time, including with friends and family or even with celebrities. So in addition to getting more people to report concerns about child sexual abuse more often, it also seems critical that we go much further by providing the resources to develop and rigorously evaluate prevention strategies. We need strategies that do not rely on the identification of possible abuse by people we know and love but that avert these disasters from occurring in the first place.

How do we do that? The first step is recognizing who perpetrates child sexual abuse and why. Perhaps as much as half of all sexual crimes against young children are committed by other children. So strategies for prevention could include strengthening families’ ability to promote the safe and healthy sexual development of their children – both to protect children from victimization and from engaging in sexually intrusive or abusive behavior with others. Strategies could target young teens and their parents with education about responsible behavior with younger children. And we could and should develop interventions for people living with sexual attraction to children but who are committed to not offending against children. These strategies fit within a public health approach to the prevention of violence in general and could leverage existing effective violence prevention programs currently in practice.

Maybe as individuals we will never stop being shocked by stories about the latest sex offender who we thought we knew. But as a country we can certainly do a far better job of developing and properly resourcing a national strategy for the prevention of child sexual abuse. We should not limit our options to simply detecting abuse and responding to it after the fact. We can no longer wait for “regular guys” to be charged before we realize that prevention must be priority.

From a quick scan of headlines related to child sexual abuse, it’s clear that the public often thinks about sexual abuse perpetrators as monsters. Perhaps it’s easier to think of them as inhuman and to think of child sexual abuse as inevitable rather than believe that these crimes are 100 percent preventable. (I wrote about this “monster frame” in an earlier blog where I reviewed Channel 4’s recent documentary “The Pedophile Next Door.”)

At the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, our mission is to support and conduct research that betters our understanding of child sexual abuse, educate policymakers and the public, and cultivate partnerships with organizations to develop proven strategies that prevent child sexual abuse.  In order to further our understanding of what causes child sexual abuse, we’re launching a research project called Help Wanted.

The purpose of Help Wanted is to bring experts from law enforcement, therapy, victim advocacy, prevention, research, and policy together to identify strategies to help youth attracted to children avoid acting on those interests. This project is designed to create a safe place for young people to seek effective professional intervention early, to ensure that they have the skills and resources needed to prevent them from harming children, and to equip them to develop in healthy ways that are safe for all involved.

The idea that anyone who is attracted to children will become an offender is hopeless and unhelpful. This view hampers efforts to provide treatment services and/or promote efforts aimed at stopping abuse before a child is harmed. Through our work we hope to change the way this issue is discussed and create a better understanding of interventions that work to prevent child sexual abuse.

To read more about this project’s scope and goals, please click here.