Using Shared Decision Making to Empower Sexually Exploited Youth.

Commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is a pervasive public health crisis that affects children across the United States. After receiving public attention in recent years, several approaches have been developed to aid in identifying and intervening with trafficked youth to prevent further exploitation. Despite these developments, intervention efforts are plagued by client dropout, treatment nonadherence, and failures in placement, partially due to the failure of service systems to recognize the child's voice and preferences in decision-making conversations. We propose a new approach to addressing CSEC by applying shared decision making, a model developed in other areas of medicine, to working with high-risk and trafficked juveniles to increase youth voice and participation in care and to prevent revictimization.