On 6/4/25, Dr. Kruh presented a webinar with Keith Cruise, PhD, MLS, (Director of Behavioral Screening at National Youth Screening and Assessment Partners and Associate Professor at Fordham University) on the topic of Narrative Formulations in evaluations of youth who have sexually harmed. More information about the training is below. It will soon be available on-demand at Safer Society. Please see: https://safersociety.org/continuing-education/all-on-demand-trainings/  

If you want to bring Dr. Kruh to your group or agency to receive training in evaluations of youth who have engaged in problematic sexual behavior, or if you are hoping to have an evaluation conducted for a youth who has engage din problematic sexual behavior, please reach out to Dr. Kruh at IvanKruhPhD@gmail.com.

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Our understanding of the risks and needs of youths who have sexually harmed has advanced in recent years. Whereas assessments once looked only at those risk factors that signal dangerousness, they now employ a more comprehensive approach that takes into account:

• The youth’s protective factors
• The youth’s developmental status
• Multiple contexts in which the youth exists (e.g., home, school, and community environments)

Further, many authors have pointed out that identifying risk factors is not nearly as helpful as explaining how risk factors and protective factors have occurred and combined to make harmful behaviors more or less likely to occur. Over time, these risk and protective factors form a narrative—a story of how the youth came to behave the way they have.
In this training, Drs. Kruh and Cruise explain how the risk assessments of the past have evolved into comprehensive, structured methods for understanding and explaining a youth’s potential for harmful behavior. Narrative risk formulations are a key component of assessment and management in mental health and criminal justice settings. The presenters examine:

• A model for narrative risk formulation
• Essential knowledge about adolescent development and developmental psychopathology
• Current data on adolescent sexual re-offense rates
• How trauma plays a role in sexual abuse by adolescents
• “Scenario planning” to identify situations for potential abuse

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​On 1/14/25 and 1/15/25, Drs. Ivan Kruh and Gina Vincent of National Youth Screening and Assessment Partners collaborated with CONCEPT Palo Alto University to offer a two-day online training entitled Violence Risk Assessment in Juveniles Using the SAVRY. Nearly 40 juvenile court clinicians and others who work with youth reviewed the foundations of juvenile violence risk assessment, the development of and research support behind the SAVRY, the clinical rating of SAVRY items, and the interpretation of the SAVRY results to develop an estimate of a given youth's risk level and to identify targets for services aimed at managing and reducing that risk. Several case vignettes were used to support the development of these skills. The training is available for on-demand participation at https://concept.paloaltou.edu/.

If you want to bring Dr. Kruh and his colleagues at National Youth Screening Partners to your group or agency to receive training in use of the SAVRY, please reach out at www.nysap.us/  If you are hoping to have a violence risk assessment of a juvenile conducted, please reach out to Dr. Kruh at IvanKruhPhD@gmail.com.

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​On November 7, 2024, Ivan Kruh and Shoshanna Must presented a webinar to the International Forensic Psychiatry Lecture Series, hosted by McMaster University and St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton, ON. This series is a weekly education opportunity addressing engaging and innovative topics in forensic psychiatry reaching psychiatrists and allied professionals worldwide. The topic of the webinar was, “Current Assessment Approaches for Problematic Sexual Behavior in Adolescents.” Dr. Kruh discussed the field’s evolution from traditional risk assessment of Youth with Problematic Sexual Behavior to a “needs assessment” approach that focuses on considering protective factors and developing a narrative formulation that allows for scenario planning toward planning interventions. Dr. Must discussed the need to place these evaluations in a developmental and trauma-informed context, to attend to the role of exposure to pornography and other possible online harm, the role of sexual preoccupation, atypical sexual interests, attitudes supportive of sexual misbehavior, and victim awareness as key markers of risk, and the limited role of denial in these cases.