November 15, 2016
Speakers Theresa Fears and Leigh Ann Davis will provide strategies that help people with IDD develop the skills to understand and fully participate in healthy relationships. The speakers will also describe how to build skills to recognize when a relationship is unhealthy, exploitative, or abusive and provide concrete steps to take in those situations.
Speaker Bios
Theresa Fears MSW
Theresa Fears MSW is a Sexual Abuse Preventionist at The Arc of Spokane. She has been providing Healthy Relationship classes to youth with intellectual disabilities for nine years. Theresa has been a presenter at local, state and national conferences on the topic of developing good relationships and abuse identification and prevention. Her work received the 2014 Visionary Voice Award from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. In her spare time, Theresa spins yarn and crochets lots and lots of hats.
Leigh Ann Davis, M.S.S.W., M.P.A.
Leigh Ann Davis, M.S.S.W., M.P.A., is Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives and in that role oversees The Arc’s National Center on Criminal Justice and Disability®. She has worked in the area of disability and justice issues since 1994 when hired by The Arc of the United States to direct a Department of Justice project of national significance educating criminal justice professionals about ADA accommodations. Since that time, she has authored numerous publications (curricula, guidebooks, fact sheets, scholarly articles) during her almost 20 years with The Arc covering topics related to criminal justice/victimization issues, FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder), and the ethics of genetic research. She has presented both nationally and internationally regarding criminal justice and disability issues and provided congressional testimony on the delivery of law enforcement services to people with developmental disabilities under Title II of the ADA. Ms. Davis served on SAMHSA’s (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) FASD Center for Excellence Expert Panel and currently serves as consultant for the Office for Victims of Crime Training and Technical Assistance Center (OVC TTAC), Vera Institute of Justice, and The Disability and Abuse Project. As a sexual abuse survivor who was shocked to discover the high rate of violence people with I/DD experience, she is passionate about ensuring victims with disabilities obtain justice and healing, and that criminal justice professionals are provided effective, on-going training to adequately serve people with disabilities – whether victim, suspect or offender.