Journals > Journal: Preventing Child Maltreatment > Article: The Prevention of Childhood Sexual Abuse
Journal Issue: Preventing Child Maltreatment Volume 19 Number 2 Fall 2009
Conclusion
No strong scientific evidence points as yet in the direction of one strategy or program to prevent sexual abuse. Clearly more research is needed to help develop and identify such strategies.
In setting priorities for further development, educational programs using school settings have some claim, based on five convergent lines of evidence and argument. First, school-based educational programs have been more fully evaluated than any other prevention strategies (with the exception of offender and victim mental health treatment), and results have been encouraging. These evaluations provide a foundation on which more sophisticated studies can be more quickly built. Second, school-based education programs have proven to be a successful primary prevention strategy in other domains, some closely related to sexual abuse prevention. Successful programs to prevent bullying and delinquency are particularly relevant. Third, school-based programs appear to be an efficient and non-stigmatizing delivery system for addressing multiple forms of child sexual abuse, including adult-on-child abuse, peer-on-peer abuse, and adult-on-teen statutory sex offenses. Fourth, school-based programs are efficient at addressing a variety of prevention goals. In addition to providing avoidance skills to potential victims, they can provide deterrence messages for potential offenders and assistance skills for potential bystanders. They also are well suited to promote reporting by victims and can be adapted to provide some harm-reduction messages, too—for example, encouraging children not to blame themselves for abuse or to see such experiences as very rare or stigmatizing. Fifth, although it would be possible to design other delivery systems for prevention messages, such as advertising and websites, the reality is that schools are a well-established venue for delivering such prevention messages; they have access to nearly the entire universe of children and families; and they have already in many jurisdictions accepted responsibility for this prevention task.
The arguments against these child-focused educational programs—that they cannot foil abuse by adults and that they put all the burden on children—have, as noted, major flaws. Some offenders, especially other youth and ambivalent adults, can almost surely be dissuaded, even by children. Moreover, other child-focused prevention techniques—such as wearing bicycle helmets—have been embraced after they have been proven to work.
The first key challenge for advocates of child-focused educational programs is to develop formats that can fit sustainably into school settings and other instructional environments, such as religious education classes, by being well adapted to and integrated with the other goals of these environments. The second is to undertake research designs of sufficient size and power to answer questions about their ultimate effectiveness.
Research on such educational programs, however, cannot be the sole focus of prevention, because the research evidence is still somewhat equivocal and because in reality advocates have investments in other strategies as well. In particular, the management of known offenders will continue to be a strong preoccupation of the public and policy makers.
Sex offender management strategies pose many problems. The strategies are limited in what they can accomplish, because they focus only on the small group of offenders who have already been identified and ignore all the rest. Many of the strategies are based on flawed logic models and misconceptions about the predominant dynamics of sexual abuse. Moreover, the research evidence in support of these strategies is equivocal. Yet still, they have tremendous support among influential policy makers, many of whom may not be interested in or responsive to evaluation results. Indeed, policy makers’ pre-occupation with these offender management strategies likely diminishes the resources for and interest in other potential strategies.
There is a clear need to rejuvenate evidence-based practice in offender management policy, but doing so is a daunting challenge. Some jurisdictions, such as Washington state95 and Canada,96 are fostering closer collaborations between researchers and policy makers, and these may help. Researchers in the field also need to propose well-designed experiments. But politicians and corrections and law enforcement officials may also have to take courageous actions to make evaluation a larger component of policy making in this area.
Outside of the justice arena, treatment services should be made available to children who have been victimized and who have symptoms or other disturbances and concerns in the wake of abuse. Solid evidence shows that certain forms of cognitive-behavioral therapy reduce such problems. National initiatives are already under way to make such treatment standard and widely available,97 and its successes should be highlighted and imitated by those who want to see a planned, empirically based approach applied to related sexual abuse prevention programming.
Other strategies for preventing sexual abuse and its consequences, such as community publicity efforts or outreach to potential offenders, are certainly worth exploring as well. However, it would not be wise to see these strategies as a substitute for school-based prevention,98 especially given evidence that major improvements have occurred under current practices that do include such prevention approaches. New strategies should be viewed as additions rather than alternatives and should be required to show empirical promise before being widely embraced.
Sexual abuse is a special challenge, different in many of its dimensions from other types of child maltreatment, crime, and child welfare problems. But enormous strides have been made to understand the problem, educate the public, and mobilize resources to address it. With additional research and program development, there is every reason to believe much more can be accomplished.
