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Today's Featured Biography

 
David Michael ALLBURN

Dave Allburn, Ofc 740-767-3853, Cel/Txt 740-707-5220
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Executive Director of two nonprofits:
* Safe Harbor Resources...and the
* National Foundation to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse

Also, Founder and CEO of National Fingerprint LLC.

Wife Jan helps with the businesses. We live in Appalachian Ohio on 40 forested acres near the Burr Oak State Park.
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David M. Allburn, BSEE/MBA, is a former software project manager and trained developer of electronic counter-measures and counter-terrorism for the Air Force, where he served as an officer during the Viet Nam era.

Allburn’s electronics degree from the Case Institute of Technology was applied to help quadraplegics regain control of their environment. His finance MBA from Wright State University was applied to the business side of Healthcare, and now to fixing social problems.

When trying to retire to Appalachian Ohio during 2000, he won a grant for a community after-school program at his tiny country church, joined Big Brothers Big Sisters, and got fascinated with Ohio's then-new “feel-good” legislation about screening staff who work with kids. He discovered that the state and federal laws that try to prevent child sexual abuse in organized programs share a significant conceptual flaw: They are based on criminal history background checks and ignore the fact that only 3% of pedophiles have a criminal history.

While touting compliance with such laws helped nervous officials calm worried parents, obeying the laws tended to only reduce the risk of losing money from lawsuits over a negligent selection of workers. It had little impact on the risk faced by enrolled children of actually being sexually abused by a staffer.

Since sexual predators routinely terrify their victims into lifetimes of silence, and research showed less than 1 in 100 child complaints reach officials, Allburn felt it was disingenuous of officials to cite lack-of-complaints as proof that “It can’t happen here.” Valid surveys showed a consistent 1 % of churches, different ones each year, file insurance claims for protection against parental lawsuits over sexual abuse of children by volunteers or staff.

Allburn noticed there were practical reasons why police mostly caught the clumsy but sensational “snatch-and-grab” predators that average “only” two or three victims each, rather than the less numerous sophisticated serial predators who averaged over 150 victims apiece, and as a group produced the vast majority of outside-the-home victims.

When a Big Brother was caught raping his Little Brother in Newark, Ohio, Allburn learned the predator passed mentoring background checks with flying colors while Child Protective Services had several open investigations of him for child sexual-abuse incidents. It became clear to Allburn that better worker-screening information existed, but was being concealed or not sought due to outdated confidentiality rules, unintended consequences of credit reporting laws, widespread fear of lawsuits over privacy, discrimination, duty-to-warn, defamation risks of warning, and fear that discovering a likely predator clouds the reputation of the person who selected him.
    
Prepared from interviewing famous researchers and authors such as Dr. Anna Salter, Dr. Gene Abel, Dr. Rebecca Bolen, Dr. Cory Jewell-Jensen, the American Prosecutors Research Institute trainer-lecturer Victor Vieth, and the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops’ Director of Child Protection, Kathleen McChesney, and from attending national seminars on the problem, Allburn founded the nonprofit Safe Harbor Resources [SHR] on 9-11 and developed new inquiry methods comprising The New Precautions™, ways to screen that are more effective without increasing liability risks for employers.

SHR is a member of the Association for Sexual Abuse Prevention, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, the National Association of Professional Background Screeners’ Consumer Protection Committee, and is endorsed by Mothers Against Sexual Abuse on whose board sits the founder of MADD, and by the Morgan County Commissioners. SHR is a faith-based organization citing Jesus’ advice to the apostles in Matthew 10:16: “I am sending you out as sheep among wolves. Therefore, be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”

SHR reasons that since even the apostles were advised to take precautions, how much more so advised should be the leaderships of our youth-serving groups?

SHR urges that we change the mythical belief “It can not happen here” by replacing just one word. Let the myth transform into the modern resolution, “It shall not happen here.”

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