COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Prompted by a federal report on sexualassaults of incarcerated young
people, Ohio is sending employees to itsfour juvenile corrections facilities to talk with youth and
reiteratetheir options for reporting assaults and other concerns.Incarceratedyoung people responded
anonymously to survey questions about unwantedsexual activity involving other inmates and facility
employees, and theU.S. Justice Department report put Ohio among states with the highestsexual-assault
rates, The Columbus Dispatch (http://bit.ly/191Xw7U ) reported.Theso-called
"climate assessors" being sent to the facilities will reportto a task force created by Gov.
John Kasich after the federal report.The move comes months after a federal judge ended most
court-orderedmonitoring of Ohio’s youth prison system that stemmed from an earlierlawsuit
settlement."We want to make sure we’re doing everythingwe can to protect our youth," Ohio
Department of Youth Servicesspokeswoman Kim Parsell said. "We are gathering information,
reachingout to youth. We want them to be free to let us know what’s going on."Anassessor already is
in Circleville, and the other three assessors willbe sent in the next few weeks, Parsell said in an
interview Tuesday.Nearly10 percent of young people in state and private facilities said they’dbeen
sexually assault at least once last year. The Circleville facilityhad the second-highest sexual-assault
rate in the country at about 30percent. The rates were about 23 percent at Scioto Juvenile
CorrectionalFacility and nearly 20 percent at Cuyahoga Hills Juvenile CorrectionalFacility.A monitor
appointed by the U.S. District Court in Columbus questions whether the report overestimated such assault
cases."Somethingof that proportion would have come to our attention, and it just didnot," the
monitor, Will Harrell, told the newspaper.YouthServices records showed 29 sexual assaults were reported
last year, andtwo were substantiated. Those two didn’t involve staff.___Information from: The Columbus
Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.comCopyright
2013 The Associated Press.