National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth

The National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth and this website was directly supported by cooperative agreements with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking (2010-WP-PBX-K062 and 2013-MU-MU-K102).  We are enormously grateful to their partnership, advice, guidance and assistance.

This website resource would not have been possible without support from the Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC) and the University of Maine.  They received an OJJDP Grant which supported the format and content development of the professional section of the website.  Drs. Sue Righthand and Jeffrey Hecker coordinated this project and were assisted by Drs. Asia Serwik and Douglas Nangle who all worked closely with MDOC administrators Lars Olsen and Renna Hegg.  To address children with problematic sexual behaviors, Drs. Alison Gray and Jane Silovsky provided consultation. This team concluded that a web based resource designed to provide the latest research findings for understanding and working with children and teenagers with problematic and illegal sexual behavior would enable the work of this project to continue. The website is designed to allow evidence based information to be available to a wide audience of treatment providers, juvenile justice professionals, attorneys and judges, child welfare professionals, schools personnel, and policy makers, as well as youth and families.  Dr. Righthand led this effort during the MDOC project. Following the Maine’s OJJDP grant, the MDOC provided the resource to the University of Oklahoma’s Center on Child Abuse and Neglect for the National Center for Sexual Behavior in Youth to complete this resource and make it available on this website.