Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation’s safeguarding podcast with Neil, Fairbrother exploring the law culture and technology of safeguarding children.
In this Safeguarding Podcast with Professor Elizabeth Letourneau we discuss the unintended consequences of badly thought through laws and the harmful results of child sexual offender registers. Also YSOs and how they can prevent child sexual abuse, and whether child sexual abuse is inevitable.
There’s a lightly edited transcript below for those that can’t use podcasts, or for those that simply prefer to read.
Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation’s safeguarding podcast with Neil, Fairbrother exploring the law culture and technology of safeguarding children.
Neil Fairbrother
Online Youth Serving Organizations, or YSO’s, should be accountable for the fundamental goals of keeping children safe and placing children on a path to a successful and satisfying life. Research by today’s guest however revealed over 1600 rules and 260 best practice recommendations across just for such organizations, a situation that she points out is counterproductive. Also we’ll be discussing what impact does placing child sexual offenders on publicly accessible registers have on children and is child sexual abuse inevitable?
To discuss what some may view as a controversial point of view, as well as an eight point strategy for Youth Serving Organizations to help keep children safe, I’m joined by Elizabeth LeTourneau Director of the Moore Centre for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. Welcome to the podcast, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Letourneau
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Neil Fairbrother
Could you, Elizabeth, please give us a brief resumé so that our audience from around the world has an understanding of your background and expertise?
Elizabeth Letourneau
I’m happy to. I am a Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in John Hopkins University, which is here in Baltimore, Maryland. For 30 plus years, I’ve been focused on child sexual abuse prevention policy and practice, and have really focused on how do we work with people who might engage in harmful sexual behaviours so that they do not engage in harmful sexual behaviour, something we call perpetration prevention. I direct the Moore Centre for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse and at the Moore Centre what we really do focus on is developing, validating and disseminating effective prevention strategies.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now before we get to your recently published report about Youth Serving Organizations and how they can prevent child sexual abuse within them, I’d like to talk about unintended consequences.
Now after some fairly horrific and high-profile cases involving child abuse, abduction and indeed murder, a number of laws were passed in the US, I think probably one of the most famous being Megan’s law, which was passed in I think the mid-nineties and this built on a previous law called the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act. And what Megan’s law did was to require local communities to be notified of the presence of a convicted sexual offender that was living within their community. And then in 2006, the SORNA act was passed, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. Now, what change did that last Act bring about?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Well, first, just to note that the Jacob Wetterling Act actually proceeded and was modified by the Megan Kanka Act, and then both of those were superseded by the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. People were concerned about repeat adult sex offenders some who committed some really horrific, rare, thankfully, rare crimes, but truly horrific crimes. [They] wanted to see more done about keeping safe from such repeat sex offenders and so in the early 1990s they kind of resurrected a strategy that had been around in previous decades of requiring known sex offenders to register their information with law enforcement. That’s called registration. And the idea there was, if you knew where everyone was who had already been convicted of sex crimes, when a new sex crime happened, you could quickly go and see where they were and identify suspects.
The reality is even that policy is based on several false premises. Most new sex crimes are committed by people unknown to the police and so what that ended up doing was generating a lot of false leads and there’s not good evidence that it’s helpful in that regard.
What Megan’s Law did to modify that was to require that some information on some registered offenders be released to the public. That then was in response to parents’ requests for information that they believe would help them keep themselves and their children safer. And so that was enacted and then the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act actually expanded both who has to register to formally include children, adjudicated delinquent as minors, and to require that everyone on the registry virtually be on a public registry, publicly accessible.
I should say that even people who are on not on publicly accessible online registries, their information is still easily obtained. There’s no such thing as private registration, certainly not in the United States, and I would argue that that’s a false concept regardless of where it is. Hundreds of people at minimum, will know if somebody’s registered, just because of the processes required to establish and maintain registries.
So that’s a little bit of the background of these policies in the US. The Jacob Wetterling Act was enacted in 1994. It was silent on whether children had to be registered, however many States did decide on purpose to include children, adjudicated delinquent as minors, as well as children who’d been fleeted up to adult court or criminal court, as we call it. Other States inadvertently included children in their rush to implement policies that aligned with the Jacob Wetterling Act and then again, in 2006 the Adam Walsh Act required States to register children, at least children 14 years of age or older for sex crimes.
Neil Fairbrother
So in 2016, you gave a TedMed Talk where you asked a very pertinent question which might have a startling answer. And the question was “What do you think the average age is of a typical child sexual abuser?” and you gave three ages, 24, 34 and 44. So what is the correct answer?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Well, the question is actually “What age group is most at risk of engaging a prepubescent child in sexual behaviour?” And that age is 14. So 14 year olds, the age increases from 12 to 13 to 14 years of age, and 14 year olds are more likely to engage prepubescent children in sexual behaviors than 24 year olds, 34 year olds, 44 year olds.
And it is startling, until you think about it in another way. Kids don’t know any better. We don’t tell them! We’re very good at conveying to teenagers not to hit or kick or punch or tease younger children. We are terrible at conveying to teenagers that they also should not touch the penises and vaginas of younger children. Nobody does that. And we just assume that kids, as they are becoming sexual, somehow magically understand that even though they play with younger kids, they hang out with younger kids, they’re around younger kids, but somehow they’re just going to know better than to involve younger kids in sexual behavior. And they don’t.
Neil Fairbrother
I’m sure a lot of people will be somewhat disconcerted or surprised to hear that children sexually abused other children. Is this behavior more than the childhood, you show me yours, I’ll show you mine?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Yeah. I mean, when we talk about children engaging younger children in problem sexual behaviour, it runs the gamut from behaviour that is normative, exploratory, driven by curiosity, impulsivity, lack of knowledge, lack of adequate adult supervision. There are some teenagers who have sexual interest in children. That seems to be something that a small percentage of primarily boys, but some girls, are born with. It’s rare, but that is something that can drive this behavior. General delinquency can drive this behavior!
I could show you a list of 19, and those are not the full pathways towards an older child engaging a younger child in harmful inappropriate or illegal sexual behavior. And some of those behaviours will have little, if any, consequence on the child and some can be quite harmful. So I would not want to minimize the fact that an older child, a 14 year old, 15 year old, 16, 17 year old can cause real harm with a peer or with the younger child with their sexual behaviour.
I do not think we should be thinking about these kids in the same way as we think about adult offenders who by reason of development and age should know better, and do know better. Kids really don’t often. And even if they know they’re engaging in harm, they really do not have a way of understanding the long term, the potential long-term, consequences of that harm. And they’re different than adults. They haven’t gone through the cognitive development. They don’t have the same life experience. And again, this is something we do a very poor job of teaching kids.
I mentioned that the way I like to think about it or talk about it now is, you know, if you think about when a kid is learning to drive. So I have a 16 year old son, he has just got his learner’s permit and we drive around. It’s a little terrifying and you know, he’s good for a 16 year old, but he’s terrible compared to me, or anyone else whose brain has developed and who’s got some experience. And with driving, you know, we know kids are terrible at it. We can predict that. Insurance companies predict it, my insurance rates are going to about to go way up and we know that they get better.
And so we don’t treat a child at 16 who makes a mistake behind the wheel of a car in the same way that we would treat a 40 year old and we give them training, right? Like, we’re good about training kids before they get and when they get behind the wheel of a car, even though we know by virtue of their age and development, that they’re going to be bad.
We need to take that same conceptualization to sexual behaviours. Sex is complicated, it’s interpersonal. There’s complex concepts like consent that even adults really don’t seem to have a clear consensus around or understanding of. And you know, this is an area where not only do we not do a good job of educating children about sexual behaviour and sexual concepts, we often actively hide that information. Certainly in the United States, less so I would say in the UK and the EU, but many countries are complicit and really keeping important behaviour away from kids.
Neil Fairbrother
Indeed, indeed. So to get some idea of scale, I believe there’s around 40 States in the US that put children on registries. But in 19 of those 40,there’s no minimum age, meaning that even prepubescent children may well be on the same list as even adult offenders are. And I believe a lawyer Eric Berkovitz wrote in the New York Times that it appears as many as 24,000 of the Nation’s 800,000 registered sex offenders are juveniles, and about 16% of that population, which is about 4,000 just under, are younger than 12 years old with more than one third being 12 to 14. Those numbers seem extraordinarily high. Is that the case? Is that your view, is that your experience?
Elizabeth Letourneau
I’ve been doing research on the impact of subjecting children to registration, and I should clarify when I say child I mean anyone under age of 18, since about 2003. And one thing is that States and national government really don’t advertise how many people are on registries for behaviour they engaged in when they were children. And in fact, I’ve seen Federal-level government officials really try to minimize that number. I think because, you know, when you put it out there, it’s horrifying that we put any child on a registry, particularly now that we’ve got good science that shows that these do nothing to improve public safety. And they cause among the worst types of harm for the children to whom these policies are applied.
So we’ve got good data out there now, you know, again, about 18 years of publications, all very consistent, there’s no, there’s no wiggle room in the findings. We only find no helpful effects, no public safety effects and very, very harmful effects on the children that they’re applied to. So there’s not good information on how many kids on registration. We’ve had access to registry data from multiple States. And we know it’s in the thousands. It would not all surprise me if it was 25,000 people, it could be higher, but those data are not publicly available.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now there are as you say some unintended consequences, which I’d like to spend a little bit of time on. I believe some of these implications of a child, someone under 18 as you say, sexually abusing another child, are that they’re not caught, but they stop offending anyway, because they kind of grow out of it, or they’re court and they might get some kind of treatment in lieu of prosecution or they’re caught and prosecuted and convicted. Is that a correct approach? Maybe that’s a question you might have an opinion on? Or they have other limits imposed on their lives as a result of that conviction?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Right! I mean, well, what we know about juvenile delinquent behaviour, whether it’s sexual delinquent or non-sexual delinquent behaviour, is that most kids outgrow that as they age through adolescence and into adulthood. And so by and large children who engage in harmful behaviour are going to stop engaging in that really on their own. Certainly there are children who will need services to help get them back on the right path and typically it’s the children and family focused interventions that have been found to be strongly effective with kids who engage in harmful sexual behaviours.
My colleagues and I have run a randomized controlled trial showing the treatment effectiveness of one family-based intervention used with kids who have charges or adjudications for sex crimes. And then Jane Silovsky and her colleagues at the University of Oklahoma have been publishing on another there that appears to be very, very highly effective, again family-based interventions that works with kids have caused sexual harm. So certainly there are effective interventions for the kids who may need them.
And then anytime a child has engaged in harmful sexual behaviour and it comes to light, it has to be reported in the United States and so there is often a very robust we call it juvenile justice, not criminal justice, but juvenile justice response. And you know, kids can and often do go to prison. I’ve seen prison sentences of five years, and some can even be committed to sex offender civil commitment facilities in the US, indefinitely and we know of people who have been committed to sex offender civil commitment facilities.
These are maximum security facilities that are run in 20 States and by the Federal government. We know of many dozens of cases where people have gone in and never come out. And so they’ve been there since, you know, for decades for offenses they committed as children.
Neil Fairbrother
And in addition, I believe that some of the impacts is an increase in depression with four times as many children likely to attempt suicide?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Yeah. We ran a study where we surveyed children ages 12 to 17. All of them were in treatment for having engaged in harmful sexual behaviour. A percentage, about a third of them had to register and/or were subjected to notification. And we compared the two groups. So we matched them for age. These were all boys. So we matched them for age, gender, race, and also the type of offense that they had committed. And what we found was really startling even for us and we long suspected that labeling a child as a registered sex offender would cause harm. But as you said, what we found is that kids who were required to register in comparison to kids who are not, were four times more likely to have attempted to die by suicide in the past 30 days. So in the past 30 days, these kids were four times more likely to have actually tried to kill themselves.
We also found that the children who were subjected to registration relative to the children who were not, were five times more likely to have been approached by an adult for sex and twice as likely to have sustained a sexual assault victimization. They’d been physically sexually abused in the past year. And so what that showed us is that registration is actually associated with increased risk for the very type of harm that it is supposed to prevent.
Neil Fairbrother
Well, indeed. These registries post photographs, I believe, of the children and also their address?
Elizabeth Letourneau
These are not on public online registries. So many States that do require children to register, keep that registration off of their online registry. And it is still as harmful to the kids. Because again, it is often the case that if you’re registered, your school will be notified and once that happens everyone knows. Other local businesses may be notified. So I want to be really clear, just keeping kids off of an online registry does not help. That would not take away these findings or this harm.
Most of the kids that we surveyed who had any registration notification, only had registration, they were not part of online registries and we still found these huge increases in the likelihood of attempting suicide. And of course, we also found increased suicidal ideation due to the increase in being approached by an adult for sex.
When you go to register, even if you’re not online, you’d have to physically go register. And the place you’d go to register is where all of the other people who have to register, register. So other offenders know who you are, but so do all the people in that building when you go to register. And I think what registration does, whether it’s placed online or not, is it does a very, very good job of identifying and labeling a child as less than, as less than everyone else and really as worthless. And that label brings the worst out in the people around him or her. And that’s why these children are at risk of these horrible, horrible outcomes. They internalize the sense that their future is hopeless.
And in fact, yesterday I was testifying to the Washington State Senate, which has a bill to eliminate juvenile registration that I sincerely hope they pass and another person who testified to the Senate was Timothy Kahn, who’s a long-term therapist in Washington state. He had a client who committed suicide and this was someone who was a young adult, doing everything he was supposed to do, but was never going to get off this registry and finally just gave up.
So they internalize the sense that nothing’s ever going to get better with this label as a registered sex offender, and then everyone else around them believes it too, and subjects them to just horrific behaviour.
Neil Fairbrother
Just as a reminder, these are people who committed an offense, or who’ve been convicted of committing an offense, when they themselves were children. We’re not talking about adults here.
Elizabeth Letourneau
No that’s a separate conversation!
I do want to say, you had mentioned how many States subject children to registration and subject children to online registration. And there really is a movement to change that. Some States have backed off. Delaware used to have very young children on their online registry. They stopped that practice several years ago, Oregon changed its juvenile sex offender registration policy to make it less likely that a child would have to go on the registry. States have been increasing the opportunities for children to come off registries.
But honestly, given the abundance of data that these are failed policies that harm children, I don’t understand why anyone would want to put any child, no matter how egregious their behaviour was, on a registry, knowing that it will not keep the community any safer and that it is very likely to cause serious harm.
Neil Fairbrother
Is it more a question of retribution than justice or even treatment?
Elizabeth Letourneau
I don’t know how else you would justify this, and it’s not supposed to be retribution. Children have already been punished by the time they get to the registry and registration is constitutional in the US because it is not punishment, extra punishment for the same offense, which would be unconstitutional. It is supposed to provide a civil societal protection and we have shown that it does not. And so it’s unclear to me what is so difficult to roll these failed policies back, but it has been a struggle. We’re getting there though. We’re getting there.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you’ve recently published a report called “A Systematic Overarching Framework for Child Sexual Abuse Prevention in Youth Serving Organizations”, which as titles go is quite a long one. So let’s try and break that down. What do you mean by a Youth Serving Organization?
Elizabeth Letourneau
So my colleagues and I, and these included wonderful people, Keith Kauffman out in Portland, Ben Matthews in Australia, and then my colleague Luciana, Assini-Meytin who works with me at the Moore Centre. We worked with four of the largest Youth Serving Organizations in United States and these organizations that provide services to kids outside of a scholastic context. You know, the services can be geared towards civic engagement or addressing youth needs. Youth Serving Organizations include sports related organizations, arts related organizations, religious, secular, really anything where the goal is to is to work with children and sort of in any capacity to basically serve children into services.
Neil Fairbrother
So such as the scouting organizations, the guiding organizations and so on.
Elizabeth Letourneau
Yeah, absolutely. They were not one of our partners, but yes, that’s exactly the kind of organization that we’re talking about
Neil Fairbrother
I mentioned in the introduction that from your research, you found a massive quantity of rules, over 1600 I think, and 260 best practices across those four Youth Serving Organizations that you talked about just now. First of all, what is the impact of having so many rules and best practices?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Yeah. One of our other partners Don Palmer, who’s at the University of California Davis, Don is an organizational sociologist, but what Don brought to our team was a knowledge of how the organizations work. He’s done research on things like why do professional cyclists dope and in factories, why do good people do bad things that cause things to break down or that increase the likelihood of injury?
And you know what we found in Youth Serving Organizations in general and in the best practice recommendations that are targeted towards Youth Serving Organizations, and those best practices have been developed by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention by the Australian Royal Commission, into the protection of children and a variety of other organizations. So we looked at just general best practice recommendations, found that we could identify 260 separate individual recommendations.
And then when we went into our organizations and they gave us all of their materials around anything they have to do with child sexual abuse, policies, codes of conduct, training, everything, and we were able to identify 1600 discrete elements of what they do to try to address child sexual abuse.
What Don Palmer explained is that layering rules on top of rules on top of rules on top of rules does not get you a safer work environment. In fact, it makes it more complicated and the likelihood of something going wrong increases both with greater complexity and also because if you’ve got so many rules, then it’s going to be probably impossible to follow that many. Then what you begin to see is the norm of breaking rules, because you can’t follow all of them. You may forget some of them, some rules may be incompatible with the broader mission of the organization. And some rules may just not be feasible in a lot of a lot of situations.
I mean, the example I like to use for that is from the Boy Scouts of America, where they implemented what they call the Two Deep rule, which is that two adults 18 or older always have to be present if there’s one or more children present. Always.
And that sounds like a really good idea, right? Like, yeah, that makes sense. So you’re unlikely to have two adults are going to sexually abuse a child. And so that should increase safety and it may well, none of this has been tested, but it may well.
The problem is that, you know, think about your own life. You know if you’ve ever volunteered with kids and some parent forgets or is late picking up their child and you and the kid, now you’re violating this rule. What are you going to do? What if somebody calls in late, or is stuck in traffic, or is sick? What do you do? What if you’ve got three kids and two of them have to be in different places than the third one, what do you do? There’s so many ways where you can see that particular rule breaking down. And so it is with most rules.
I should also say there’s mentorship-based organizations that are built around one-on-one relationships between the adult mentor volunteer and the kid. And that rule is never going to work for those organizations.
So first, we just wanted to see what is going on, and it’s a lot, and this is encouraging the sense that these organizations clearly take child sexual abuse very, very seriously. It is absolutely part of their mandate to keep kids safe from child sexual abuse, even though that’s not the reason that these organizations exist. Right? So how can we help organizations do this when they’re already doing so much? And we felt like streamlining is really important and it’s going to be important.
Every time some new piece of technology comes on, new rules get added. You can never text a kid, but what if the kid just told you he was suicidal? Are you really not going to text that kid to see how he’s doing? I mean, again, so we wanted to streamline, but we also wanted to see, you know, can we categorize rules in a smaller number of overarching principles or practices, that then we get people thinking, all right, what is the real goal?
The goal of the Two Deep policy, that policy of having two adults present all the time, is really to improve monitoring, to ensure that when adults and kids are interacting, we have effective ways to monitor that, to know what’s happening. You can add another set of eyes, but you could also, you know, in a mentoring context, what often happens is they just go ask the kid and the kid’s parents, how did it go? What happened? So we wanted to elevate the overarching principle that was really driving these discrete rules and get folks thinking about that. And then they can make a decision about in my situation and this situation, you know, what do we have the resources to do? And what really makes sense for us rather than having rules that everybody must implement all the time.
Neil Fairbrother
You’ve got eight overarching guidelines. It’s do a quick zoom through them. The first one is focused on child well-being and safety above all else, which sounds like it’s based on the UN CRC’s do what’s in the best interest of the child. Basically that’s what you’re saying.
Elizabeth Letourneau
Absolutely. I mean, what we wanted to convey here, and again, what many organizations already do is to really highlight at every level, particularly at the leadership level, that child wellbeing and safety is going to be the most single important focus, no matter what else we may be trying to do.
So whether we’re trying to teach a kid to play flute, or be a better soccer player, or whatever it is. We have all heard about terrible tragic events, where a kid died from heat exhaustion, heat stroke, during a football practice or some kind of practice and the coaching staff was being inattentive to making sure that there’s water and rest and that sort of thing. This is where we want there to be clear, clear messaging from the highest people in the organization that child safety, child wellbeing, is above our own personal mission and our mandate.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. And that’s backed up by point 2, which is all about training being the cornerstone of Youth Serving Organizations’ practices with three attributes, knowledge, attitudes, and awareness.
Elizabeth Letourneau
Absolutely. I mean, we know that you can have every kind of policy you want and we saw hundreds of pages of policies and codes of conduct. But if you don’t provide good effective trainings and you don’t provide them often enough, and at key moments, you know, when you’re onboarding somebody and then making sure that the information is updated and re-evaluated regularly, then we know we just get people forgetting what the rules are. I mean, you know, sometimes people break the rules of the organization, not because they intend to cause harm, but they simply forget. And so we know that training is key to this.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. The third of your eight guidelines is to increase the monitoring of adult child interactions within the Youth Serving Organizations. Now by monitoring, I think that has a certain connotation. I think it’s a dangerous word to use, or it could be dangerous word, but one way that you described doing this is to design the Youth Serving Organizations’ physical space to maximize the visibility of adult-child interactions. Could you explain a little bit about that?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Sure. There’s a situational prevention efforts, which means you’re sort of designing space or the environment to reduce the likelihood of injury or harm. And so Kauffman has done this work for years. He works with organizations to identify where are the risks likely to occur? With kids, if you ask kids in a school building, where does sexual harassment happen? Where does sexual violence happen? They will tell you it’s in the dark stairwells, it’s in the bathrooms, it’s in the cafeteria, it’s in the places where there’s not adult supervision or where there is darkness, or it’s just difficult, where it’s unlikely that somebody is going to come upon you.
And so when we think about designing space for organizations that have the wherewithal to design their space or to renovate their space, and that is not all organizations, but for the organizations that do have that wherewithal, designing it so that you have clear lines of sight so that you have a windows in doors, interior doors and interior walls so that it makes it easy to observe and to interrupt adult-child interactions.
We know that we all behave better when we think someone that we respect is going to come around the corner, right? And so that’s one way to do it. Again, I do want to emphasize it is not the only way. So another way to monitor is again, Boy Scouts just say, well, there always has to be two adults.
Another way that I am surprised and not surprised is, no organizations routinely asked kids about whether or not they’re experiencing sexual harm in the organization. And if you want to know if sexual harm is happening, the single best way to find out is to ask kids if it is.
Now, some organizations do have surveys to get at the behaviour and harmful behaviour and have asked things like, has anyone done anything that made you feel uncomfortable? And that was the closest they could get to “Has anyone touched your penis or vagina”, or asked you to do anything sexual or whatever kind of language you want to use.
And what they found is that when they looked at the kids they knew had been sexually abused because it came out and there was investigations and they went back and looked at their answers on that, the answer was “No”. So you can’t use a discreet or indirect question. You really have to be clear. And I guarantee if we started asking kids about these behaviours, we would discover them much earlier in the process and there would just be so much less mystery about it.
But figuring out how to do this, and then what to do when a child does say something is happening, those steps need to be taken before you start asking the kids, you need to have the answers. But I would really, really like to see us get to a culture of just talking about this more, about just the kids come home from school, you know, is everything okay? Is anybody hurting you? Did anybody ask you to touch their penis or vagina or try to touch yours? I mean, these are things my two boys have been asked and I can tell you, it’s fine.
Neil Fairbrother
And that inclusion of children in conversations, it leads on to the fourth point, which is collaboration with children and parents. And here you refer to Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Elizabeth Letourneau
Children have a right to be involved in decision-making that’s going to affect their lives. And, you know, the United States is the only country that is not a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and that’s very distressing to many of us that live in this country. So we don’t have a cultural norm around involving children and it’s seen as difficult and perhaps even counterproductive to have children at the table when you’re making these kinds of rules and decisions in your organization.
But in fact children, you know, are the ones who can tell you what seems reasonable to them. I can tell you, I’ve done research on sexting when kids send and receive nude pictures of one another, and they will almost all tell you, and other people have done this research, for example David Finkelhor and the EU Kids Online 2020 report, a wonderful report on child online behaviour. This is normative behaviour for kids, for older teenagers. It’s absolutely now viewed as normative behaviour and telling them to not do this is not going work. They’re just going to ignore you.
And so far that’s all we’ve been doing, is telling them, well, just don’t send nude pictures of yourself and you won’t get in trouble and they’ll never be a problem. And they just roll their eyes and tune you out because it doesn’t comport with what’s normative for them. So involving kids in these discussions, I think many would agree is really quite key and figuring out ways to ensure that children have a voice and parents have a voice.
I think where parents might differ with organizations is in zero tolerance policies. You know, the US is famous for zero tolerance policies. If you do this, you’ll never get to come back, ever again. And we do these with kids. And so if a kid engages in harmful sexual behaviour, I think the first impetus is to kick that kid out of the organization, when that child may be the very child who needs the organization most. So yeah, so I think we would all like to see kids and parents more substantively involved in the rules.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, now you refer to sexting there and that leads us on to number five, which is to identify safety concerns and to generate solutions to specific organizational CSA risks. Who would validate the safety risk assessments needed there, and should they be made public?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Yeah. You know, again, this is an area that Keith Kauffman has done a lot of work in and what he’s developed and this is not necessarily the only way to do this. And we’re not advertising this as part of this report, but what he’s found is that if you can train people to correctly identify risks, it’s the people at the local level who are going to have the knowledge to know what really are the risks here in my setting? Even for a national organization that has lots of different sites across the country, in any given setting, there might be different risks that that need to be identified.
Some sites have pools, some don’t, some have locker rooms, some don’t. The folks on the ground, the folks that are there at that site are going to know if there’s been a burned out light bulb for forever around the back that keeps a corner dark, and that’s going to be one of the things that gets identified.
That’s a really easy fix, right? But often those things don’t get fixed because they’re not really highlighted as risks. And then of course there’s more complicated fix. How do you keep a locker room safe? How do you keep bathrooms safe? You’re not going to post an adult someplace where they can watch kids who are in the process of undressing or dressing but how you keep them safe and coming up with reasonable strategies to do that.
When I worked with a school system here in Maryland, which now by law is supposed to consider situational prevention efforts, the lead individual’s idea was we’ll just put cameras everywhere. And I said, well, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to get a lot of black and brown kids being reported for behaviors that are normative and that will cause harm to them that probably wouldn’t cause harm or be treated with the same level of severity as if the kid was white. And so we don’t want to be spying on kids. We’ve got to figure out other ways, other solutions, to the risks that do get identified.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. The six point you make is to increase Youth Serving Organizations’ evaluation and accountability. So who would they be accountable to?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Well, I think they’re accountable to quite a few stakeholders not at least themselves. No organization that works with kids, wants kids to be hurt on their watch. They really don’t and we saw that very clearly with the organizations that we worked with. But in addition how about youth and parents? And so, you know, again, if we had youth and parents completing surveys and getting the results of those surveys, that would be one way. Surveys of what kinds of behaviours, both exemplary and troubling. That would be one way of improving accountability, accountability to boards, accountability to a local child advocacy or organizations to law enforcement. You know, there’s quite a few stakeholders that have skin in the game when it comes to keeping kids safe from child sexual abuse. And we just, again, need to do some deep thinking around what is the information that we need to be collecting and how do we make this information public so that people can make good decisions about where to place their children.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now the penultimate item on your list is to address youth sexual behaviour. And there were two specific points which seem to resonate with me because it does come back to almost where we started from, which is this registration of child sex abusers. One is to move beyond the victimization focus. And the other is move beyond a zero tolerance approach, which you’ve just touched on just recently.
Elizabeth Letourneau
So any organization that’s going to bring kids together, whether it’s scholastic or anything, is you’re going to have youth sexual behaviour. Children are sexual beings right out of the gate and so you want to have policies that are reasonable, that acknowledge that children are sexual beings without demonizing sexuality, but that may be very clear about what are the rules for this situation? You know, what are the rules for this organization?
The rules may well be that we don’t engage in specific sexual behaviours. And then you’ve got to be sure that the kids understand what you mean by that, and that the parents understand what you mean by that. And then if they do get caught, to have some kind of a strategy for addressing that, that does not involve just kicking the kids out, but having reasonable consequences, which may simply be separating children and reminding them of the rule. That may be all that’s needed to get a kid back on track.
And then you do also have kids engaging in consensual sexual behaviors, if we’re allow that kids could consent to these behaviours, but certainly mutually desired behaviours. And then you do have inappropriate behaviours, again, whether with peers or with younger kids, and recognizing that those things can happen, figuring out what are the laws in your particular region. Are those reportable, if so, how can you report in a way that is more likely to ensure the child gets the kind of services they need versus being demonized. Involving parents in these decisions and working to address these in a way that doesn’t minimize any harm that a younger child or a peer may have experienced, but then also we’re not really throwing away kids who have made mistakes.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. And the final and the eighth strategy that you recommend is to strengthen human resource management. Now in the UK we have a process called DBS or the Disclosure and Barring Service, which is a service where employers can check the criminal record of potential employees. Do you have a similar process in the US?
Elizabeth Letourneau
We certainly have several ways in which background checks, criminal background checks can be conducted, and typically the organization has to pay for those. And so it tends to be expensive. But at this point, I think virtually everyone does background checks. It’s expensive. You do not find many people with prior convictions for child sexual abuse, so it’s not a particularly efficient strategy. The hope is that just by doing the background checks, that’s part of how you convey to potential new hires that you take child sexual abuse seriously.
I think a much more efficient and certainly more cost effective way is to say to potential hires “We take child sexual abuse and other forms of harm very seriously. If we suspect anything is happening, we will conduct a full investigation and we will terminate and report anytime we find that.” I think that’s a more efficient way than background checks. You know, again, I think I mentioned this earlier, 95% of all sex crimes are committed by people unknown to the police. And so background checks really are not going to… they’ll bring up fraud. They may bring up other concerning issues, maybe child physical abuse, but very, very, very rarely are they going to bring up any indicator of child sexual abuse history.
Neil Fairbrother
Just looking at your definition of a Youth Serving Organization, which is that it’s “…any organization designed in whole or in part to meet children’s needs and wants related to social and developmen enhancement, education, physical and mental health, sports recreation, and leisure arts, religion, and juvenile justice, as well as child welfare.” Social media companies often set their minimum age to be 13, but we know that many children under the age of 13 are on the social media networks anyway. Could this definition of a Youth Serving Organization be extended to include social media networks so that they become like a virtual YSO, a vYSO?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Oh, I think absolutely. I think, you know, I was involved in an effort to develop best practice recommendations for internet purveyors companies. And the idea there was to move towards safe by design. So to improve the safety of children online, as a fundamental aspect of what’s getting developed and not as an afterthought.
I do want to stress one thing, and I think many, many people are very worried about the risks to children posed by online engagement and see the worldwide web and the internet as places where children are only at risk. And in fact, what we find, and again, there’s an EU Online report from 2020 that surveyed children in 19 EU countries that really finds that kids actually are pretty safe and pretty savvy when it comes to their internet interactions, they’re unlikely to experience inappropriate behaviour.
And when they do, they’re unlikely to perceive it as particularly harmful. Not to say that harm doesn’t occur. It absolutely can and does, but at least from where I sit, I feel like we miss the real value and the opportunities that the internet brings to children to learn about sexuality, to find more people like themselves, whatever that means to them.
And I think those of us, you know, I’m 54. I did not grow up with the internet. You know, we are so unsavvy and so scared for our children’s sake, but these are kids, you know, we call them digital natives and it’s second nature to them to know when they get exposed to inappropriate behaviour, many of them, most of them actually, know how to handle that pretty well.
I worry about really over overstressing the harms to children and not recognizing that while harm can happen, it is relatively rare. You know, even kids are sharing naked pictures of one another, even if they take a naked picture of someone else and share it with another group, it’s usually not to cause harm. And maybe because they’re bored or they’re trying to develop some street cred, I’ve had kids tell me in, in the sexting study that we did, but it is usually not to cause lasting severe harm. And that we really have got to start taking a more nuanced approach to how we address children’s safety, both online and offline.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Well, one, one last question, which is quite possibly the biggest question of all, but of course, you’ve got the least amount of time to answer it because we really are out of time. And that is, is child sexual abuse actually inevitable?
Elizabeth Letourneau
Oh, absolutely not. It’s not inevitable at all. This is something that is entirely preventable and has been declining since the early 1990s in most countries. And so we know we’re moving in the right direction. And how do we amp that up, is the work of the Moore Centre and I think the work of SafeToNet and other organizations.
Elizabeth Letourneau
Okay. Listen, Elizabeth, thank you so much for your time which we really are out off, I’m afraid. Fascinating report, thank you very much. Where can people find this report?
Elizabeth Letourneau
It is such a pleasure. The report is online. If you go to the Moore Centre, which you just type in Moore Centre and Hopkins you’ll come to our website and you can find a link to the website, there is actually a whole website that has this report on it.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. No worries, Elizabeth, thank you so much for your time.
Elizabeth Letourneau
Such a pleasure. Thank you so much.