Continuing Education Center

In this Our Safe Haven, we invite you to join Robin Cooper and David Prescott to explore how personal and professional beliefs about sexuality influence our work, client relationships, and the broader field. Each session begins with a focused review of how sexuality beliefs influence professional practice, evolving naturally into an engaging, attendee-driven conversation shaped by shared experiences and professional insights: Session 01: Let’s Talk Shame Around Sexuality and Sex - Examine the role shame plays in client experiences and professional practice. Discuss ways to address shame while fostering healthy, supportive narratives in treatment.

In this webinar, Dr. Hanson invites us to rethink how we conceptualize risk and offers insights into the future of evidence-based assessment. He provides practical advice for early-career researchers and shares his vision for advancing approaches to the prevention of sexual abuse. Join us for this opportunity to engage with one of the field’s leading experts whose work continues to inform policy and practice in sexual abuse risk assessment and intervention.

Dr. Séan Foy developed this training to introduce participants to Solution-Focused Harm Reduction (SFHR) as a practical approach to working with people who use substances or display other high-risk behaviors. He explains the many synergies between solution-focused therapy and harm reduction, and describes how the two approaches are complementary and, when used in conjunction, create a novel way of approaching addiction work.

Despite decades of progress in evaluating and treating both adults and adolescents who have sexually abused, working with “emerging adults” can often be less clear. These clients are typically young men between the ages of 18 and 25—in some cases, it includes individuals in their late twenties—who are developmentally between adolescence and adulthood. They often do not “quite fit” into either category. This lack of fit is especially apparent in their living situation or placement logistics and the assessment tools and treatment modalities commonly used with this population. In many cases, clients who are now considered by the courts to be legally adults were adolescents when their abusive actions took place.

Dr. Waltrip and Dr. Leslie are both experts in evaluation and treatment, with experience across diverse practice settings in the United States. In this training, they focus on how professionals can best understand, assess, and treat emerging adults. This includes the similarities and differences they share with justice-involved adolescents and adults.

In these Our Safe Haven sessions, we invite you to join Steven Sawyer and David Prescott to explore the complexities of group intervention, from addressing denial and minimization to managing difficult group dynamics and safeguarding the wellbeing of clinicians. Each session begins with a focused theme, evolving naturally into an engaging, attendee-driven conversation shaped by shared experiences and professional insights.

Evaluations of adolescents with problematic sexual behaviors (PSB) often focus on future risk and recidivism, consistent with the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) model. However, the low base rate of known sexual re-offense and moderate effect size of risk tools limit the accuracy of these assessments. Further, youths with PSB are still very much “works in progress.” Their abilities to anticipate consequences, solve problems effectively, and apply prosocial reasoning are still developing. Therefore, additional assessment methods may help professionals identify the most relevant risk factors and support the establishment of appropriate treatment goals.

In this training, Dr. Norbert Ralph presents a developmental model for adolescent assessment, emphasizing factors that disrupt normative, prosocial psychosexual development and highlighting treatable conditions that can reduce risk for repeating problem sexual behaviors.