After earning her doctorate from Georgetown and her law degree from Willamette University in 1975, Dr. Young became a member of the founding board of the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA).

She served as NOVA’s board president from 1979 to 1981, and has been its Executive Director since then. She is also the Vice-President of the World Society of Victimology, past treasurer of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, co-chair of the Victim Services Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and a member of the Victims Committee of the American Bar Association. She was a founding board member of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children.

In her capacity as NOVA’s Executive Director, Dr. Young wrote and published the first forty-hour, victim-oriented training curricula for five allied professionals groups, namely, law enforcement patrol officers, law enforcement managers, prosecutors, judges, and mental health providers. She also designed some of the first such courses for victim advocates, victim counselors, and victim service program managers.

Her curriculum on responding to emotional aftermath of community disasters has been used as a basis for some 200 training seminars to such diverse audiences as associations of Employee Assistance Programs, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army, the Department of Energy, representatives of the U.S. State Department, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, several airlines, and the American Psychological Association.

To maintain her practitioner’s skills and to expand her knowledge and experience, Dr. Young often serves as a counselor on NOVA’s 24-hour crisis line, and has served twenty of NOVA’s volunteer Crisis Response Teams which go to communities that have suffered from major disasters—from mass murders to plane crashes—while she has been involved in coordinating Crisis Response Teams in over one hundred other communities. Using that experience, she helped organize the War Trauma Teams that worked in refugee centers in Croatia and Bosnia, and traveled there seven times to assist the refugees, displaced persons, and other victims of the war in former Yugoslavia. She organized and accompanied the teams that assisted after the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, Japan, in 1995.

Dr. Young has published some 120 articles, chapters, and monographs. She has traveled to 49 states and fifteen countries outside the United States speaking out on victim-related issues; the conferences and training seminars at which she has spoken in her travels now numbers over 1,500. Her monograph on “Restorative Community Justice” has become renowned for its insightful understanding of both victims and offenders. Dr. Young's leadership in the victims’ movement has brought her numerous state, national, and international honors, including two awards from United Nations-affiliated groups. She was the youngest person ever to receive the Hans von Hentig Award of the World Society of Victimology in 1985 for her scholarship. In 1987, she World Federation of Mental Health established an award in her name for her contributions to public policy advances. The year following, she received one of the annual awards of the Foundation for Justice Improvement. In 1992, she was specially honored at a Rose Garden ceremony held by President George Bush in commemoration of National Victim Rights Week. She became the fourth recipient, and only non-citizen, of New Zealand’s National Merit Service Award for contributions to victim assistance in 1997. In 1999, the Dr. Marlene Young Leadership Award was established in her name to honor Ohio victim advocates who have exhibited outstanding leadership for others in the state.