Child Sexual Abuse Is Preventable — So Why Aren’t We Preventing It?
For decades, much of the public conversation surrounding child sexual abuse has focused on what happens after abuse occurs: arrest, prosecution, incarceration, registration and increasingly severe punishment.
But a new article from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health makes an important point: child sexual abuse is preventable, not inevitable.
The Johns Hopkins MOORE Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse argues that the United States needs to approach child sexual abuse as a public health problem and prioritize prevention rather than relying primarily on punishment after a child has already been harmed. A system that waits until abuse occurs before intervening is, by definition, not a prevention system. Punishing someone after a crime has occurred may serve legitimate punitive purposes, but it does nothing to prevent harm or undo the harm suffered by the child.
According to Johns Hopkins, decades of research have identified opportunities to prevent child sexual abuse, yet prevention remains significantly underfunded. “Every year, the U.S. spends $5.4 billion on incarcerating people convicted of CSA compared to about $3 million for CSA prevention research.” That’s pathetic! The institution is calling for a national strategy that recognizes child sexual abuse as a public health issue and invests in evidence-based prevention.
It’s a question the Florida Action Committee has been asking for more than a decade. Why does so much of our public policy focus on perpetual punishment of people after they have offended, rather than on preventing abuse before it happens?
Florida has built an enormous system around registration, residency restrictions, public notification and increasingly severe criminal penalties. But those measures only operate after a person has already been convicted and have been proven in study after study to be ineffective at preventing recidivism.
If our goal is truly to protect children, the government should be directing resources toward the interventions that research shows can actually prevent abuse.
That means supporting children and families, educating communities, identifying risk earlier, expanding evidence-based prevention programs and creating opportunities for people at risk of offending to seek help before a child is harmed.
The Johns Hopkins message is not that sexual abuse isn’t serious. It is precisely the opposite. It is too serious to settle for policies that only respond after the damage has been done. According to the article, child sexual abuse is preventable. It’s time for politicians to invest in prevention with the same urgency and resources that we devote to punishment.
Read the Johns Hopkins article
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Maybe press releases with Hopkins research and snippets from the very factual replies to start stirring the pot…
These snippets could be incorporated into the FAC lawsuit, maybe.
There is no revenue stream and no profits in prevention. That’s the only reason these registries exist. If they hadn’t figured out so many opportunities for profit, there would be no registry.
I have in dozens of emails, for several years, asked the cesspool in Tally to explain to me how the registry protects anyone. Not one reply in years. They don’t think they have to reply because they don’t represent us, we the people. They obey orders from their corporate masters.
The weak funding for actual prevention is a low number because they’re having to pay and not receiving any benefits. The ROI IS ZERO. They’ve made the scam so obvious it hurts my head every time I think about it, which is all the time because our son, and we with him, live it every day.
The world is egregiously ignorant and lacking in critical thought abilities. Even before they kidnapped our son and slapped this label on him, I was already waking up to how unconstitutional it is truly. Finding Catherine Carpenter was such a blessing to finally see someone who really knows, explain it.
But then the real kick in the head came when she said 8 and 9-year-old CHILDREN have been forced to register as “sex offenders“.
And then I learned an estimated 200,000 children have been forced to register as “sex offenders“. You know, the age range the liars say they have to protect.
And then I further learned that my son is not the only autistic person forced to register. I read the stats that there are thousands.
But, “It’s just business”, says the world mafia.🤬
As a retired businessman, what you’re saying is actually false. There’s always revenue.\n And profits to be made It just has to be advertised and done to a model of their making if they’re wanting to make money.\n But the true Situation here Shoul.\n Dn’t be about revenue. Shouldn’t be about money. It should be making a better life for all individuals. That’s priceless, when\n You’re bettering yourself or other individuals. There’s always ways that you can Look into the marketing and with a little bit of a turn to a left or a little bit of a turn to a right, you could be a millionaire. So with change comes, the ability of bettering
Lets discuss facts as to why there will never be any legitimate efforts to end “child sexual abuse or ANY “sexual abuse if its ok to have that conversation?
To do that let’s pretend we had a magic wand and really could make all sex crimes disappear over night. We will even make them never happen again! Ever think of what that would do to the economy? No sex crimes perpetrated, no sexual victims to exploit means no need for a sexual registry, correct? It also explains why that will NEVER be allowed to happen and why the SCOTUS does mental gymnastics to avoid the constitutional elephant in the room when ever it does show its face.
There’s nothing secret about government and organizations profiting from the registry and its ever-expanding population. It’s public record, plain as day. Countless organizations would go bankrupt if sex crime registries were ever abolished or significantly reduced. If sex crimes were genuinely prevented or even significantly reduced—or if registries were limited to only the most dangerous offenders—an entire industry ecosystem would collapse.
Private monitoring companies charge monthly fees for GPS tracking. Residential restriction laws create niche real estate markets. Treatment providers bill for court-mandated therapy that never ends. Software vendors sell registry management systems to law enforcement. law enforcement has entire financial budgets balanced on registry monitoring. The registry has become a perpetual motion machine requiring fresh bodies to justify its budget lines.
Politicians fundraise on “tough on sex offenders” platforms. Private prisons profit from warehousing those who violate registry technicalities. Even well-meaning victim advocacy organizations see funding tied to the continued existence of the problem they claim to solve. (silent part spoken) Even many RSO advocacy organizations would cease to be funded if RSOs ceased to exist.
This isn’t conspiracy. It’s a factual incentive structure. When your salary, your department budget, or your stock price depends on maximum registry enrollment, you don’t have a structural incentive to reduce either crime or the registry’s scope. You have every incentive to expand both. With me so far?
The registry doesn’t just fail to prevent harm—it structurally cannot afford to succeed at prevention. Success would mean obsolescence, and obsolescence means unemployment for thousands whose livelihoods depend on the registry’s perpetual growth. YOUR RSO status is food on the table for so many who would be unemployed without it.
Anyone follow the SPLC indictments? Same exact financial pattern. The Southern Poverty Law Center, indicted in 2026 on federal fraud charges for funneling millions in donor funds to informants affiliated with the very hate groups—including the KKK—it claimed to oppose. Whether paying extremists to maintain a threat or expanding registries to justify budgets, the pattern repeats: organizations whose funding depends on the existence of a problem rarely solve that problem. They manage it. They monetize it. And they ensure it never quite disappears.
We recommend that people read the linked article, which identifies multiple efforts to prevent child sexual abuse.
This is a truth that will resonate and why in the past I advocated FAC mak it part of it’s mission statement and build alliances with groups that have this commonality. I get that some groups do not want to be “tainted” by allying with us, but that is when this type of messaging can be tried. The enemy of my enemy is my friend approxajx. I am positive FAC advocates sexual abuse prevention and that should be driven home in those alliance building talks. Together we are more powerful and can spread the message better than alone