Last Friday, Drs. Sara Jahnke and Skye Stephens presented the results of their Delphi study.
The announcement of the event can be found here.
The article about the study results: "Delphi Recommendations for Diagnosis and Treatment of Sexual Interest in Children in Non-Mandated Community Settings".
What is a Delphi study? Jahnke and Stephens summarized it briefly in the presentation: sometimes there is a lack of reliable data from which to derive reliable recommendations how to handle something. Or it is difficult to find a consensus among professionals. Then the Delphi method (after Dalkey "Analyses from a group opinion study" from 1969) offers a way of systematically obtaining expert opinions and comparing them with each other. The team has done so in the recent past.
As a result, structured data and recommendations are now available from a group of experts, who were selected partly at random. These include researchers on the subject, experts from the therapeutic field and also people with pedophilia who have been active in self-help for a long time.
I have been hoping for collaborations between these groups of people for many years, as each of them brings unique insights, approaches and possibilities to the table.
A few words about the exact results shall follow in the coming days.