Elizabeth Letourneau, PhD
Director, MOORE | Preventing Child Sexual Abuse, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Understanding harm gives us the best opportunity to prevent and end child sexual abuse.
For too long, child sexual abuse has been ignored in our communities. Efforts to prevent abuse often place the responsibility for safety on children themselves. This isn’t okay and it isn’t enough. We strive to prevent child sexual abuse around the world, at scale. To do this, we need to understand the many pathways to harm, in myriad social and cultural contexts, so that we can intervene early and proactively before a child is harmed.
The launch of Understanding Harm is the beginning of an ambitious, multi-year research initiative that seeks to generate the highest quality data on harm. Data that are necessary to drive better policy and practice and to ensure more effective funding.
It is really very simple. We seek to understand harm to end child sexual abuse.
“The bar for gold standard prevalence studies is high. The bar for gold standard perpetration prevalence studies is even higher.”
The importance of ‘gold standard’ science
The first step in understanding harm is understanding prevalence. When we know the prevalence of any social issue, we have baseline information that allows us to target our interventions (whether in policy, practice, or funding) and measure the effectiveness of action over time. But these data must be accurate, and the methodology used to generate them reliable, repeatable, adaptable, and shareable. The bar for gold standard prevalence studies is high. The bar for gold standard perpetration prevalence studies is even higher.
We are proud to share Prevention GPS (the Prevention Global Perpetration Survey) as part of Understanding Harm. For the first time, this gold standard survey and methodology will provide researchers around the world with a blueprint to develop reliable and accurate prevalence data.
Revealing risk for prevention reward
Prevention GPS also includes a comprehensive set of measures for risk factors associated with child sexual abuse perpetration. These are critical if we, as a society, are to design more targeted and more effective prevention programs. As we begin to reveal the risk factors associated with specific pathways to harm, we have an unprecedented opportunity to interrupt them. Over the coming year we will release prevalence and risk factor analyses from across multiple country surveys. Stay tuned for more.
Momentum is building, we need global leadership
Finally, we are delighted to welcome Commissioner Magnus Brunner and Ľubica Debnárová from the European Commission to the launch of Understanding Harm. The European Commission’s ongoing leadership and proactive commitment is key to building global momentum for prevention. Explore the Commissioner’s perspective on the importance of understanding harm and generating high quality and reliable data, and a Q&A with Ľubica on the EU’s prevention priorities. The message is clear – we need more leadership for prevention, in every region of the world.
We invite you to explore the Understanding Harm knowledge product in full and follow Prevention Global throughout 2026 and beyond for critical insights into the prevalence and risk factors that define perpetration. Together, we can understand harm to end abuse.
Learn More. Act Now.
