Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our focus is the novel coronavirus.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's

news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.

If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I speak with Professor Elizabeth LaTerno, the director of the Moore Center for

the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse.

We speak about the evidence that rising rates of child sexual abuse may be a consequence

of the coronavirus pandemic and what can be done to prevent that from happening. Let's listen.

Dr. Latterno, thank you so much for joining me. Is this a time of particular concern for child sexual abuse?

It really seems to be.

Responses to COVID-19 may have inadvertently

increased the risk of child sexual abuse in two ways.

First, we believe the risk for online offending

has increased due to children and adults

spending more time online for work,

education, and recreation. Second, we believe the risk for offending perpetrated by household

members has also increased as adults and children spend more time confined together due to

stay-at-home orders.

So do we have any sense of the reality of this?

...