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

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jh.edu.

That's Public Health Question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, our topic is the prevention of child sexual abuse.

I speak with Dr. Elizabeth Leterno, the director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We discuss what prevention means for youth-serving organizations and for children themselves. Let's listen. Dr. Elizabeth Letterno, thanks so much for joining us on public health on call.

To talk about a topic people don't think about very much, the prevention of childhood sexual

abuse, there's a lot in the news about the punishment of people who have committed

childhood sexual abuse, which is, of course, very important.

But talk to me about prevention.

So yeah, I'd love to tell you a little bit about prevention. One area that we've done work in is with

whether these are schools or after school organizations. We have organizations that are news all

the time, religious organizations, scouting organizations and so on.

And so we've done a couple of things in collaboration with youth serving organizations who really want to provide the best possible experiences for the children that they work with.

And one thing that we've done is look at how are they addressing child sexual abuse?

What do they do to try to prevent it? What are the policies they have in place to try to detect it if they suspect it's happening?

And to really try to organize those into a more coherent set of strategies that any organization can use. Right now,

we see the big organizations that have national footprints implementing these policies. But what

about the mom and pop shop that is just running a soccer program down the road? We want them to be

able to implement good prevention strategies as well. And until we developed a desk guide with support from the Bloomberg

American Health Initiative, there really wasn't a coherent strategy that what we want to have

organizations do is think through what is their goal. And what their goal usually is is developing

...