Elizabeth

J.

Letourneau

,

PhD

For more than 30 years, I have developed, evaluated, and implemented policies and practices that aim to prevent child sexual abuse. My work helped establish an empirical basis for child sexual abuse perpetration prevention efforts and my colleagues and I continue to refine perpetration prevention efforts. My research on juvenile sex offender registration policies established the inefficacy and harmfulness of such policies and was influential in federal and state efforts to revise or repeal these policies and recommendations by the American Law Institute to end this practice. I am also involved in efforts to establish more effective ways to communicate that child sexual abuse is preventable, not inevitable and to establish more consistent funding for this prevention work, both nationally and globally.

I serve on numerous child sexual abuse prevention groups including as inaugural member of the European Commission Prevention Network. My work has been widely reported, including in Psychology Today, Rolling Stones, Sports Illustrated, This American Life, and TEDMED.