Journals > Journal: Preventing Child Maltreatment > Article: The Prevention of Childhood Sexual Abuse
Journal Issue: Preventing Child Maltreatment Volume 19 Number 2 Fall 2009
Other Strategies
A variety of other possible avenues for prevention have also been suggested. For example, Stephen Smallbone, William Marshall, and Richard Wortley88 describe a strategy of “developmental prevention” to forestall some of the developmental deficits that may lead a person to become a sexual abuser—early attachment failures in childhood, poor school adjustment, and then non-involvement in early parenting as an adult. The authors also point to a set of “situational prevention” strategies that try to alter environments or interactional contexts (particularly in child-serving organizations) to make abuse less likely—for example, the Boy Scout requirement of “two-deep leadership” prohibiting private activities between one adult volunteer and one child. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has developed guidelines for preventing abuse in youth-serving organizations,89 few other coherent programs and no evaluations have yet been undertaken around such ideas. Another speculative prevention strategy has involved attempts to develop a psychological screening tool to identify possible abusers, even those without criminal histories.90 A key problem with this strategy is that the many false positives from such a screen could risk branding innocent people as child molesters (or even as potential child molesters).
