Last November Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau, director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse and professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, gave one of the most important talks of her life: A TEDMED talk about preventing child sexual abuse.
The talk weaves her experiences as a seasoned researcher who was surprised to learn that there were young adults attracted to children who made a decision to never offend against a child. A reporter named Luke Malone introduced her to this concept, and his reporting became a This American Life episode. From there, interest in this topic ballooned and eventually Letourneau was invited to share her story with the TEDMED audience and now that her talk has been released, she can share it everyone.
Interesting concept, she claims 80% happen at institutions, the other 20% in the home…Hmmm,where are all the sex offenders that they are so worried about? Oh, and half of those are kid on kid. Like I said, interesting little piece there..
Here’s a link to the talk itself:
http://tedmed.com/talks/show?id=620399
Overall some good points are raised by her. Yet she misses an opportunity to introduce the bigger picture by not following through on her best findings. Despite correctly realizing child sex abuse can be prevented before it happens she unfortunately fails to make the connection to how prevention efforts focused on children and teenagers also leads to stopping those individuals from becoming offenders as adults. Moreover by mapping what occurs in childhood and adolescence that leads to an offense the roots of what might lead an adult to do something illegal are also revealed. So eventually all adult offenses can be prevented prior to occurrence as well.
Back in my day if it was kid on kid we just called it being curious and playing Doctor.