Training Description
This ATSA Master Class provides an overview of sexual abuse prevention with a focus on preventing first time perpetration using actionable public health principles. The session includes foundational definitions of prevention and reviews historical trends in this important field. Using the social ecological model, the trainers discuss individual and relational models as well as community and societal models to demonstrate a full range of prevention strategies and programs. Recognizing the difficulty in evaluation prevention programing, the Master Class focuses on those programs with a strong or promising evidence base. In addition to these programmatic examples, the trainers highlight important and emerging developments in the prevention field, including brain science, technology, media understanding, and healthy sexual development.
Trainer Biographies
Cordelia Anderson, MA has been working since 1976 to promote healthy sexual development and prevent a wide range of sexual harm. She began one of the country’s first child sexual abuse prevention programs which started in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office where she was a child victim advocate. While her early work focused on prevention she was also a consulting therapist with adult survivors, prostituted women and sex offenders and a restorative justice/circle practitioner. In addition to having conducted over 2,500 presentations and consulting with a broad range of organizations, Ms. Anderson founded the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse & Exploitation and is on the ATSA Prevention Committee.
Joan Tabachnick, MBA is nationally recognized for her expertise in sexual violence prevention and social marketing. Over the past 25 years, she has developed award-winning educational materials and innovative programs for a wide variety of national, state, and local organizations. Since having created programming for a national nonprofit (Stop It Now!), Ms. Tabachnick has been the director of NEARI Press, the executive director of MASOC, and a fellow with the SMART Office of the United States Department of Justice. She is also on the executive committee of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation, is founding co-chair of ATSA’s prevention committee, and serves on a number of statewide task forces.
Learning Objectives
This training is designed to help you:
- Describe the unique perspective of prevention that professionals working with sexual offenders have to offer
- Define a public health approach to the prevention of sexual abuse
- Discuss the use of sexual offender treatment skills for prevention
- Identify key evidence-based primary prevention programs focusing on perpetration prevention