Parent-Focused Child Sexual Abuse Prevention: A Brief Overview of Curriculum Development and Pilot Testing

Broad-based child maltreatment (CM) prevention programs, specifically those targeting physical abuse and neglect, have achieved the gold standard of reducing rates of physical abuse and neglect (Chaffin et al., 2004; Chaffin, Hecht, Bard, Silovsky, & Beasley, 2012; Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2010). These broad-based CM programs achieve prevention of physical abuse and neglect, in part, by teaching parenting skills such as alternative discipline strategies (Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2010) and to recognize children’s illness symptoms (Chaffin et al., 2004) to parents at risk for maltreating their children. Child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention content is notably missing from these effective broad-based curricula and from reported reductions in rates. While important for increasing knowledge and awareness (e.g., Rheingold et al., 2014; Topping & Barron, 2009), current CSA prevention programs do not target at-risk parents and as standalone programs, have not shown reduction in rates of CSA. If targeting at-risk parents for physical abuse and neglect has been so successful, then it may be advantageous to embed (i.e., braid) a CSA-specific prevention module into these existing broad-based CM prevention programs as part of a comprehensive approach in tandem with other CSA prevention efforts. This presentation will detail the development of a one-hour module focused on increasing knowledge and preventive behaviors specific to CSA. This presentation will highlight the process of braiding the CSA module into a pre-existing parent-training program, rapid-prototyping phase of curriculum development (i.e., acceptability and feasibility) in a cohort of pilot families involved with the child welfare system, and pretest-posttest differences in CSA prevention knowledge and behaviors. The importance of this approach will be discussed in the context of a larger, comprehensive CSA prevention strategy that includes universal prevention for children in schools and targeted prevention for children demonstrating sexual behavior problems.