Preventing and Addressing Child Sexual Abuse in Youth Serving Organizations A Desk Guide for Organizational Leaders
Date
2020
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Publisher
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Abstract
This Desk Guide seeks to shift the focus on preventing and addressing CSA away from a seemingly
endless series of discrete rules towards the achievement of overarching goals. We present a
core set of rational principals that flow from a unified framework and that can help guide the
development of individualized protocols to best meet local needs by addressing local risks with
strategies that are feasible in a local context. We recognize that much of what we propose is
already reflected in many organizations’ policies and practices. Indeed, this work was informed
by several organizations’ CSA-focused efforts. Our hope is that this Desk Guide increases the
coherence and reduces the complexity of organizations’ CSA prevention efforts. While our focus
is on CSA, we recognize there is substantial overlap in risk factors for CSA and other types of child
abuse, neglect, and unintentional injury. We believe that efforts to prevent and address CSA will
enhance the prevention of other form of child maltreatment and injury as well. Adverse childhood
events, including different types of child abuse and neglect, are causally related to one another
,and any effort that successfully reduces one form of harm, such as child sexual abuse, will likely be
associated with reductions in other forms of harm.
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Keywords
child abuse, youth-serving organizations, prevention, intervention, guidelines, policy
Citation
Letourneau, E. J., Assini-Meytin, L.C., Kaufman, K. L., Mathews, B., & Palmer, D. (2020). Preventing and addressing child sexual abuse in youth serving organizations: A desk guide for organizational leaders. Baltimore, MD: Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.