Safe Touches: Teaching Children Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Safety Concepts

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a prevalent public health problem, with school-based programs at the forefront of prevention efforts. Existing research is limited by homogeneous samples and lack of rigorous statistical methods. The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children used a delayed intervention, cluster randomized study design to evaluate Safe Touches - a school-based sexual abuse prevention workshop designed for children in grades K-3 – in a culturally diverse, low-income sample of children. Safe Touches key concepts include: defining "private" parts of the body, safe and not safe touches, that not safe touches can be given by someone the child knows, and the child is not to blame for receiving a not safe touch. The 50-minute workshop included fidelity assessment of workshop implementation and questionnaire administration to the children, and had a clear safety monitoring protocol to address potential disclosures. Participants were 492 second and third graders at six New York City public schools. Inclusion criteria were: schools having 75% free lunch program participation, less than 25% White students, and two or more classes per grade available for randomization. The primary outcome measure was the Inappropriate Touch Scale of the Children’s Knowledge of Abuse Questionnaire (CKAQ), a standardized measure that assesses children’s knowledge of unsafe situations and people. Classrooms were randomly assigned to Intervention or Control (delayed intervention) groups. The CKAQ was administered to both groups at baseline, one week later – immediately prior to seeing the Safe Touches workshop for Control, and immediately after for Intervention - and at a four week follow up. The Intervention group showed significant increases on knowledge of inappropriate touch compared to Control, and greater gains were found for children in second grade. At four week follow up, children demonstrated retention of significant gains, relative to baseline scores. Findings suggest the promise of Safe Touches for promoting knowledge of CSA prevention concepts in a multiracial sample. The Safe Touches program has reached over 23,000 children in New York City, and was recently launched in Greece by the non-profit ELIZA. A pilot study with 468 students from a school in Athens was completed in 2016, using a Greek translated version of the CKAQ in a pre-post study design. Preliminary analysis indicated that knowledge levels increased significantly among second and third graders after the intervention, adding support to the effectiveness of the Safe Touches in helping children learn child sexual abuse prevention concepts.