Sibling Sexual Abuse and Preschool-Age Children
- Show Notes
- Transcript
In this episode of ‘One in Ten,’ host Teresa Huizar interviews Dr. Jane Silovsky, Director of the Center of Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Oklahoma, Health Sciences Center. They discuss the often-overlooked issue of sibling sexual abuse and preschool-aged children, examining risk factors, prevalence, and the challenges in addressing this sensitive topic. Key points include the difference in behaviors between preschoolers and older children, the role of maltreatment, and the impact of exposure to sexual content online. Dr. Silovsky emphasizes hope through effective treatment and offers practical advice for child abuse professionals on handling these cases with empathy and understanding.
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction to the Episode
01:29 Welcoming Dr. Jane Silovsky
01:59 Research on Preschoolers with Problematic Sexual Behavior
04:00 Defining Problematic Sexual Behavior in Young Children
05:50 Understanding Sibling Sexual Abuse
09:30 Impact of Family Dynamics and Exposure
11:54 Influence of Online Content and Technology
14:16 Details of the Study and Key Findings
21:31 Implications for Child Abuse Professionals
28:14 Prevention and Policy Recommendations
35:31 Concluding Thoughts and Acknowledgements
Links
Jane Silovsky, Ph.D., is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She serves as the CMRI/Jean Gumerson Endowed Chair, director of the Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, and director of the National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth.
Nicole Barton, Cierra Henson, Kimberly Lopez, Emma Lambert, Jordan Simmons, Erin Taylor, Jane Silovsky, Characteristics of preschool-age children who engage in problematic sexual behaviors with siblings, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2024
“Sexual Behavior in Youth: What’s Normal? What’s Not? And What Can We Do About It?” (Season 3, Episode 15, November 5, 2021)
Teresa: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, Sibling Sexual Abuse and Preschool Aged Children, I speak with Dr. Jane Silovsky, Director of the Center of Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and a renowned researcher on problematic sexual behavior in children and youth.
Now, as child abuse professionals, we know that problematic sexual behavior in children is not uncommon at all. In fact, NCA’s own statistics demonstrate that 20 to 30 percent of the children who come through our doors every year have been acted out upon by another child or youth. And we also know, as heartbreaking as it is, that sibling sexual abuse is not rare.
Where today’s conversation adds to the world. Literature is by examining this behavior in children so often overlooked preschoolers, why would preschool aged children begin to sexually abuse their siblings? What are risk factors that we should attend to and how do we give hope to parents that it is successfully treatable in these little ones while not minimizing the behavior?
I know you’ll be as interested as I was in this important conversation. Please take a listen.
Hi Jane. Welcome back to One in Ten.
Jane: I’m glad to be here.
Teresa: I’m so glad you joined for this episode because I was really interested by your paper. I think you know that we’ve covered kids with problematic sexual behavior several times, but not kids as young as we’re going to talk about today, ages three to six.
And also, while we have had an episode or two on sibling sexual abuse, that’s an area where there’s not a lot of research. And so, really excited to see this paper that sort of joins the two topics together. So, I’m wondering, how did you decide to research this particular intersection between very young children and problematic sexual behavior, especially with siblings?
Jane: I think that the story begins with how I got interested in preschool kids, because if you look at the literature of problematic sexual behavior, there’s just very little that’s out there. And that came from directing our school age program for kids with problematic sexual behavior and being referred four-year olds.
Teresa: Oh, that’s interesting.
Jane: And so, clearly a school age program is not developmentally appropriate. And so, we developed a program for preschool children and tested that. And I come with a background in parent child internet action therapy. And, a good foundation of those behavioral and cognitive approaches for changing behavior.
Sexual behavior is a behavior, but also the need, really, to have a group approach to address the isolation and stigma. And also, the kids are having problems with other kids, so being able to really help them have appropriate behavior, kids being critical. So, in the 90s, we started that and evaluated our preschool program and have continued it since that time.
And I’ve looked that sometimes they’re with siblings and sometimes they’re not. And also some different dynamics than when you think about sibling sexual abuse that’s out there because it may be toward older kids in the home. And so, in reading the sibling sexual abuse and seeing a call for additional research on it, our team decided, let’s dive in.
What is different and similar for those with siblings who act out on siblings? Are those with siblings who don’t? What are the characteristics of them and have some more foundational research in this area?
Teresa: So, we keep using the term problematic sexual behaviors and most of our listeners will be familiar with that term.
For those who aren’t, and especially when we’re talking about at this age group, so three to six year olds, which is what your study covered. When we are talking about problematic sexual behavior, just what’s a general definition? What are we talking about?
Jane: The broad definition is it’s not typical. It’s not what you would expect, and it potentially can cause harm to themselves or others. But to unpack that more is that we do know preschool kids is a time of a lot of sexual behaviors. It’s an important time for healthy sexual development because they’re curious about the world and that includes their bodies.
So, there’s sexual behavior that occurs around looking and maybe touching and asking questions. However, that can become concerning or problematic when it becomes preoccupying, when it keeps happening even when parents intervene and say that this is inappropriate behavior, uh, when it’s aggressive, coercive, intrusive, uh, and with kids that they wouldn’t be normally hanging out with.
And it can involve, which what may be surprising to your listeners. It can involve coercive and aggressive behaviors, and it also can involve the use of electronics and media. So, we’ve seen an uptick of kids in the preschool age recording sexual behaviors with their parents’ phones.
Teresa: That’s interesting.
Jane: And so, being aware that it can be potentially more concerning than you may initially think that preschoolers could have.
Teresa: That is so interesting. Oh my goodness. Okay, now I’m just adding questions to the list of things I want to talk to you about, but let’s just kind of talk about sibling sexual abuse in general for a moment before we dive specifically into your study.
What do we know about sibling sexual abuse in general? What’s its prevalence? What are risk factors for it? How does it typically start if there is any typical way that it starts?
Jane: As you mentioned earlier, it’s an area where there’s a lot of research needs. And so, a lot of the questions you have are excellent questions that we can’t give you a really clear definitive answer, such as prevalence.
We really don’t know how prevalent sibling sexual abuse occurs. We do know a bit about risk factors. Some of it’s pretty similar to problematic sexual behavior in general having experienced sexual abuse, particularly sexual abuse that’s intrusive with perpetrators or people that cause harm, can increase the risk to this living in a chaotic and experiencing trauma, living in a home that has a lot of exposure to family sexuality, and then individual factors in terms of impulsiveness, hyperactivity, as well as developmental factors can impact the likelihood of sibling sexual abuse.
There has been some unique characteristics that have seen that’s maybe different than problematic sexual behavior with kids outside of the home. One pattern that has been found is that we do know kids are curious and have some typical sexual behaviors that can occur even among siblings, and it may start that way.
But then, what leads it to dissent and just remain normative versus become concerning or abusive? And a pattern that’s been seen is that one of the siblings become more coercive and pressured around those behaviors. And a pattern that’s been seen is, is a brother who hits puberty and while an exploratory sexual behaviors at a younger age becomes more coercive and persistent.
And the impacted sibling is confused because at first it was curiosity driven, but now they don’t like it. But how do they say? And so, there’s some dynamics around that. There is also a pattern of kids that are looking and seeking nurturance. And so, the sibling relationship is one that’s an easy access, particularly if they’re in a family where there’s.
Not available parental nurturance, whether it be neglect or that they’re working five jobs or whatever factors are involved. They may begin seeking nurturance with each other, but in a way with other risk factors, it becoming problematic. Another pattern is the youth who are the highest risk for problematic sexual behavior are 12 to 14 year olds where hormones are going, frontal cortex is not in gear, that’s easy access and opportunity. And so that’s another pattern of sibling sexual abuse that can occur.
Teresa: You know, one of the things that I noted, and I think for those listeners that are involved in CACs, I think we’ve all seen, you know, that all those variations of patterns at some time or another with the child who came in and this was the case.
One of the other things you noted, which I thought was interesting in the paper, was about, you know, what you all called family sexuality, but really had to do with children in the family and their exposure to nudity, to sexual acts in the family, to co sleeping, and other kinds of things. Can you talk a little bit about that and the way that basically boundary issues, it sounds like to me, you know, can be potentially a risk factor?
Jane: Sure. There’s some very early research by Bill Friedrich, who’s found in a series of studies, a relationship in his measure of family sexuality, sexual behavior index, and problematic sexual behavior. So, if there was more of the things you described, access to nudity, seeing sexual behavior, bathing, et cetera, there had a higher scores on the child’s sexual behavior inventory.
This population of preschoolers. It’s a bit unique in that, because in many cultures, it’s normative to bathe your little kids together, even bathe with them, and there are variations of when do you stop that. As well as how is that communicated in terms of what’s okay and not okay. And what we have seen is that those kinds of experiences without a paired education around what’s safe, private, and appropriate with other people can lead to the kids being confused, no?
We walk around naked. We can see private parts. Why can’t I do that with siblings or with other kids outside of the home? So that ends up being a risk factor for that.
Teresa: That was interesting. It was talking about kind of an age cutoff for, you know, that there doesn’t seem to be so much of a concern when you’re talking about younger children, but if some of these behaviors really persist into older childhood, it would drain, and it was briefly touched on in the paper, but I’m wondering if there’s more that you want to say about it here, which is that One of the things that’s changed since the early research is kids exposure to online porn, which, no matter how, what your age is, you can unfortunately happen onto that content, and so, What have you seen in your own practice and work around the sort of contribution to this issue that’s made by exposure to highly sexualized content like that?
Jane: 2020 changed the whole landscape. It put devices in all our kids hands for school to even access school without the added on protections to prevent them accessing things that are inappropriate. One third of our internet is porn. One third of the traffic, the internet, the World Wide Web is porn. And so, kids are able to access it.
And unfortunately, there is efforts to send those types of materials to kids. And so when kids inadvertently run across it or normative behavior, I’m curious. I heard the word boobs, so I’m going to put boobs in. The, the search engine, but exposed to way beyond that. What we’re seeing with preschoolers is things that I don’t think that caregivers and adults around them thought was a risk until they saw the ramification.
So for one is we have phones that often are protected, but the camera is not. You can access that. And so we had kids take. Thumbs, and record themselves doing lots of things, including touching other kids private parts. The other thing is we have lovely Siri, or those similar things, so they don’t need to type or spell.
They can push the button, Siri asks them the question, and they ask things, and again, get exposed. And then the third pattern we’ve seen is older classmates, siblings, et cetera, showing them something that they’ve run across. And then them being more curious and showing other kids. So, lots of different risks, even for 4 and 5 year olds.
Teresa: You’re terrifying every parent who’s listening to this right now, especially if they have a young child, because I have to say, I had not even thought about Siri and the fact that you can access the camera without the passcode. You know, that is so interesting about the way that is influencing your work and what you are encountering in your own clinical population.
Oh my goodness. Well, now let’s turn to your study because I feel like we’ve framed out the issue for folks in general. What were you looking at in this study in particular? What were the key research questions that you were trying to answer?
Jane: How are preschool kids different than older kids? Most of the sibling sexual abuse literature that’s out there is adolescence. Preschoolers are very different than teenagers in lots of ways. And so, what is different about them, and what are the potential risk factors? So, predicting that those with more sibling sexual behavior would have more of a maltreatment history and potentially more likely to have coercive sexual behavior, and wanting to look at the dynamics, like you mentioned earlier, of family sexuality.
Teresa: Oh, and that’s interesting because there was a piece of it to looking specifically at to what degree that a history of maltreatment impacted it. Right?
Jane: Yeah, right. Exactly.
Teresa: So what did you find? And did anything surprise you in what you found?
Jane: So, just a little bit of it, we had 284 children and all preschool kids who had problematic sexual behavior and had a sibling. So, if we had kids that were only children, they were out of the study as the exclusion criteria. And then looked at, did they have a sexual behavior with a sibling? or not. And what we found is if you had a sibling, you were likely to have sex and problematic sexual behavior. Often happened with the sibling and potentially other kids, but siblings were involved.
About two thirds of the cases of kids with siblings and problematic sexual behavior, they acted out on the sibling. Makes sense. Easy access, they’re in the home, that’s who they’re interacting with, and that spontaneity of that behavior occurred with those siblings. We did find, as you mentioned, child maltreatment history, and I’ll talk a little bit about types of child maltreatment, and I’ll back up a little bit about preschoolers.
So, in the 90s, when I started this work, and we had four year olds being referred for these kinds of sexual behaviors we described, my mind was, they all were sexually abused. How are you four, and you have these behaviors, and not be sexually abused? But that’s why we do research. So what I found in the early research is actually similar to what we are finding with the school age kids.
It’s really about a third or a henna have sexual abuse histories. And that means about a half or so have no clear sexual abuse histories. I will say preschool kids and sexual abuse is very hard to substantiate. And so you don’t have that crystal ball to know for sure, but I would say half of our kids, there were no reasons other than the PSP to consider sexual abuse in terms of changes of behaviors, new people in the home, all those different risk factors that might suggest additional factors of sexual abuse.
So, we have to look broadly of types of maltreatment and what we found is that the variety of maltreatment. The more likely the kid had it, the more likely it was acted out. So those with siblings and maltreatment histories were more likely to act out on a sibling.
Teresa: Sexual abuse seems obvious to most people. You’re like, okay, sure, it makes sense that a third or half of those kids who’ve been sexually abused would act that out on someone else. What about physical abuse? What about neglect? What about emotional or psychological abuse?
Jane: In this study, and also in our other work, is a relationship with physical abuse and a coercive family environment.
It leads to that understanding that this is a behavior, because there is a lot of research to demonstrate the link. Between harsh parenting practice and physical abuse and behavior problems, oppositional behaviors, conduct problems, those experiences will lead to emotional dysregulation. They’re not taught how to stay calm and manage your emotions.
They have models of taking advantage of each other, of causing harm in a boundary violations. And so even if it wasn’t sexual abuse, and is a physical abuse, it leads to a child breaking boundaries, have poor control of impulses, and leading to problematic sexual behavior. And if you think of that as preschool years, um, preschool is a time where you see an uptake of sexual behaviors.
Again, as I said earlier, they’re curious. They’re trying to figure out the world. They’re trying to figure out all these differences. And so you have that layered on poor impulse control, poor emotional regulation. The other piece is neglect. So, failing to get your emotional needs met, your physical needs met, and maybe more importantly, failure to have that thread of guidance catches the natural curiosity and guides it to more appropriate choices.
So, when they’re having that curiosity, does it lead to attention getting behavior and increase at it? Or is the caregiver in a non neglectful environment coming in, doing corrective teaching, helping them be aware we got to keep our private parts covered, we need to keep our hands to ourselves. And so that parental neglect leading to an escalation of sexual behavior.
Teresa: That’s really interesting. That in terms of especially what you’re saying about the sort of escalating the behavior basically to get attention, you know, that if you’re not getting any attention from your parent, except when you’re doing this and you escalate it, however much is needed in order to finally get the attention of a caregiver or parent.
That’s really interesting. I mean, we’ve always said kids would rather have negative attention than no attention, but it’s just the sort of the extreme version of that, it seems to me, that you’re really talking about.
Jane: Thinking about the trauma history of the caregivers and how much those behaviors might be triggering. So, if I’m a depressed parent, and I’m just not able to meet those needs of my child, and I have an abuse history, my kid demonstrating sexual behavior may trigger for me an escalated response. So, you have a variety of context issues that have to be understood for planning out the intervention and support.
Teresa: Oh, I can imagine a parent who. Whether they’re neglectful or just at the end of their tether, they see this behavior, they can’t believe what they’re seeing because they have their own trauma history, and then may well overreact to that, or if not overreact, at least act in a way that’s not helpful in terms of resolving the behavior.
You know, when you think about the implications of this for professionals who work with kids and families, I’m sure there are many, you know, one of the things I was thinking about is that when we’re dealing with school aged kids and Children’s Advocacy Centers specifically, often we are paying attention for issues around PSB.
I’m not sure that this is as much on our radar when we’re talking about preschool age kids unless the child presents for that reason, which we certainly do see that sometimes you have caregivers that are at their wits end, they’re like something must be wrong with this kid or something happened to them because even when I try to intervene, they don’t stop the behavior, they’re acting out on a sibling and they won’t quit or some neighborhood kid or something else.
So, that might be the presenting issue. And of course, the police are like, we’re not going to do anything with this, and they shouldn’t. And CPS is like, there’s nothing we can do about this, and really, it’s not something that requires necessarily CPS involvement, it’s really something that can benefit from a clinical intervention.
But I’m just wondering, should we be looking at this issue more when we are interviewing young kids, when young kids are coming in for a variety of reasons, or just what do you see as the overall implications when dealing with school aged children? Because this doesn’t seem like it’s a rare issue based on your own research and that that preceded it.
Jane: Yeah, in fact, there’s been previous meta analysis looking at kids who’ve been sexually abused and who then has problematic sexual behavior. The highest risk group actually were preschool kids and preschool kids that had multiple people who acted out on them and who had more intrusive sexual behaviors, that they were most likely to have problematic sexual behavior.
And so, being able to really think about if they’re coming in for these kinds of concerns, both ends of the spectrum. If they come in for PSB, were they sexual abuse? But also, if they come in with sexual abuse, let’s look at healthy sexual behaviors. Are they having problematic? And if they’re not having problematic now, what can we put into place now?
To prevent that from developing, because if you’re young and the people around you are being sexual around you, that gives you the impression that’s what you’re supposed to do. So how do we empower those around them to give them healthy information? And that is actually the second recommendation I would have is around being able to help parents.
Understand sexual development starts way before puberty and how they can lay a good foundation in these early ages for healthy boundaries, understanding of consent, respect of their body without shame. And our partnership board actually just finished up a tip sheet that should be out fairly soon. And their focus is on all of us, all the professionals on how to approach caregivers in a way That they can receive information about sexual development, how to prevent problematic sexual behavior, and how to respond if it does occur.
Teresa: You know, I so appreciated all the many resources you all have developed over the years, and I’m excited to see this and get to help distribute that as well.
One of the things I’m wondering, though, is for Children’s Advocacy Centers, again, more specifically, but for all child abuse professionals, often, We wind up involved because there’s one particular child who’s of concern, but other kids may be in the home and other kids may wind up being even interviewed about, like, imagine an adult offender that’s tied to a child who’s been abused, but that child has siblings.
Often, we are interviewing those kids also because we’re thinking, okay, you may have one child that disclosed, but you could have other children in the home who also experienced that. But I don’t know that we’re always thinking. Those other kids in the home, we probably should also be just talking to about healthy boundaries and these other kinds of things.
So, what’s your advice about the way that we should approach both caregivers and helping them support having conversations with siblings, whether or not they’ve been abused, but how to talk to them about establishing healthy boundaries right from the beginning, what’s appropriate and what’s not.
Jane: A couple thoughts I have, maybe I’ll back up a little bit of some tools that might be useful in assessing screening and then resources that could be helpful.
I know your wonderful mental health team under Michelle Miller’s leadership has been looking at using screening tools by victim advocates to be able to identify who needs a bit more. And so including in those screening tools. Are you concerned about the sexual behavior? Do you have questions about sexual behavior?
I know there are things that they’re considering that could help either in a measure or somehow having that part of that interview so it becomes A safe conversation to have around this, that this is something. And to make it universal, you know, lots of caregivers are not provided information about sexual development and have some questions or confusion about what’s okay or not okay.
So it feels more universal than targeted and allow more opening about that. I always love motivational interview approaches where you ask permission, so would it be okay if I share with you some websites or resources that can be useful for you having these dialogues? Watching out for concerning behavior and helping them learn about good boundaries and being able to know that you’re the person to go to with these questions rather than going to the internet.
And there’s some great tools both for internet safety as well as just sex education, kinds of safety, abuse prevention, safety, that CACs have developed like the Care Centers ROAR Program. For the kids themselves, the ROAR program is applicable. There are other wonderful programs directly for kids that really combine abuse prevention and safe decision making.
Elizabeth Letourneau’s work has really been trying to make more universal that we help kids know. You know, don’t touch other people’s private parts. You can’t really look at other people’s private parts if you have questions you need a trusted adult to ask. So, finding ways to have that dialogue.
Teresa: I’m just wondering what your recommendations are in regard to prevention and thinking beyond what you say to individual parents and caregivers. And also, when we’re thinking about setting policy and programming around prevention, you know, how should we think about including these topics?
Jane: Things that come to mind is providing narrative. So, helping people understand this topic in a way that brings curiosity rather than walls up.
Because we’re talking about the most sensitive things you can talk to parents about. Their parenting and sexual behavior of their kids. And so if we can knock those walls down and make this more of a universal conversation of how to empower them to help their kids to have the healthiest relationships they can have.
So one of the ways is making things universal. That the downside of all the kids now being able to access the internet. Is that we have more kids being aware of things that when we were kids, we wouldn’t have had access to. And so with that, we need to increase and enhance how we prevent that, but also increase their awareness because knowledge is power.
And I would start the dialogue with the caregivers about what is your way of helping them know about healthy relationships. And one of the things that we have found that really helps with this conversation. It’s to talk about how did they learn and what was great about that and what would they want different and so many times parents did not learn about this in ways that were healthy or that they would really like to have, you know, they were given a book by a parent but never had any person to really talk to most of their information came from a buddy.
How do you want it different? Do you want to be that person that your kid goes to when they have questions rather than someone else? And how can we prepare you so you have the confidence to be that person?
Teresa: Jane, I really appreciated your reminder about the empathy piece to bring to these conversations as well.
One of the things I was thinking about as you were talking is that for those of us who work in this as a profession, we can sometimes forget how very sensitive this is. Yes. And that first of all, you could be talking to an adult survivor that you don’t know anything about their history, you know, they came in because of their child, but maybe they were a victim of some sort of sexual assault or sexual abuse or something like that.
The other thing that I think is that when I think back on the families that came through the CACs I led that felt the most shame, it was sibling sexual abuse. Those parents felt so torn. They felt so upset, they felt so afraid for what would happen for their kids, you know, both in terms of the child that acted out and the child that was acted upon.
It’s easy when we’re going from case to case to think about this as, well, you know, this happens, we’re going to give them the information, we’re going to go on. But I think That we also have to sit with what it would feel like to be a parent who’s hearing that and think about how we’d like to receive that information if that were us who had just been told about this.
I appreciated the way that you frame that because I just took me back 20 years in time thinking about a particular family that came through and just how tearful even the parents were in dealing with this. You sort of framed out the kind of conversation to have. But when you’re just thinking about yourself as a professional, and you know you’re gonna have to approach that conversation, what have you found over the years helps prepare you for it?
Jane: A couple things I would have in mind. One is the theme that I like to have in my head is this is serious and there’s hope.
Teresa: I love that.
Jane: Coming in thinking about that. Channel Carl Rogers. I think channeling Carl Rogers makes such a difference and I may be dating myself, but really taking the time to get in their shoes and allow them to tell you their stories, thoughts, and feelings so that they can feel heard using reflective listening.
And then being able to ask permission to share information with them and taking that time. It’s all confusing. The Caregiver Partnership Group tells me they’re probably hearing maybe 10 percent of what you’re saying. So repetition, flyers, follow up, all of that is important. Another thing that I think and I hope is changing, but I think is really important for our MDT members, is in the sibling sexual abuse cases, don’t ask the caregivers to choose.
Choose which kid is staying in your home because they can’t stay together anymore. That is putting that caregiver in an impossible position. And instead talking about, let’s talk about safety risk supports. Who do you have in your life? Is separation needed? And if so, who in that family can provide that support and it not be forever support, but thinking from the beginning, when could safe reunification happen if it can?
And so having those things in mind when you’re having that dialogue. Uh, so you’re telling them and helping them understand this is not just kids playing doctor, it is serious. But there is hope, there’s su supports that can happen, there’s treatment that can happen to support the impacted child and getting them quickly in trauma focused cognitive behavior therapy or something like that and getting the, uh, youth with problematic sexual behavior in services to address the risk factors and increasing protective factors for them.
Teresa: I was thinking as you were talking about how grateful I am that treatment advances have made it such that we really can give families hope. Because we do know that there are treatments that are so effective and work, and that’s such a different position than when I started more years ago than I’m going to talk about.
It’s not that there weren’t treatments, but we didn’t know what really worked and what didn’t. And so I’m grateful that for professionals who are in the field now, and certainly for folks who are starting out now, you’re just so lucky because when you reassure that parent that there’s hope, you’re not gaslighting them.
There really are super effective treatments. Is there anything, Jane, that I didn’t ask you and I shouldn’t? I mean, I could talk to you all day, but I know you have other things to do, too, and other people you have to talk to, or anything else that you wanted to absolutely make sure that we talked about today?
Jane: Well, one is I want to give you all praise in terms of helping families access that. Your guys undying commitment. To evidence based treatments and providing the kinds of training and support so that CACs can access that training and have that either within their CAC or with their partners is huge. And it makes such a difference across the country.
And you’re absolutely right that the access is what helps with the hope. The other piece that I’d like to just share, I want to give kudos to the team that did this research. so much. And it really came out of my team, bachelors level and postdoctoral students. And so Nicole Barton is the first author and Cierra Henson, Kimberly Lopez, Emma Lambert, Jordan Simmons, and Erin Taylor, who is a fellow faculty member.
I just don’t want to forget to acknowledge their incredible work and persistence on this project.
Teresa: Jane, we’ve just so appreciated the partnership over the years and we look forward to our continuing partnership at making sure that all these kids who need our help actually get it. And you guys have been so instrumental in that and really set us on the path of looking at kids with problematic sexual behaviors.
So, thank you so much for that. And to our listeners, we hope you’ll listen again to One in Ten. Thank you.
Jane: Thank you!
Teresa: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And for more information about this episode or any of our other ones, please visit our podcast website at oneintenpodcast.org.