Session: Towards a Comprehensive, Universal Childhood Sexual Abuse Prevention Strategy (Society for Prevention Research 25th Annual Meeting)

The incidence rate of child sexual abuse (CSA) has declined since the 1990s (Finkelhor et al., 2015); however, this decline appears to have plateaued. Approximately 60,000 new cases of CSA were substantiated each year for the past several years (USDHHS, 2013, 2015, 2016). Further, many cases are never discovered or investigated (Sedlak et al., 2010). There are numerous long-lasting consequences of CSA (Trickett et al., 2011). CSA is a pervasive and serious problem in need of prevention (Hammond, 2003). CSA prevention programs have been disseminated since the 1980s (Wurtele, 2009), however, no single program has demonstrated significant reduction in new cases of CSA specifically (Finkelhor, 2009). Only one strategy, to date, empirically demonstrated a reduction in the incidence of CSA: a statewide approach that disseminated multiple CSA prevention programs to adults in the community including provision of prevention materials, establishment of a statewide helpline, and implementation of various training programs for adults (Schober et al., 2011). This approach, although successful, had several important limitations including implementing interventions without a strong evidence base only to adults. While children cannot be solely responsible for preventing CSA (Wurtele, 2009), child-focused CSA prevention programs have successfully improved children’s CSA prevention knowledge (e.g., safe and unsafe touch discrimination; Pulido et al., 2015). Further, children with sexual behavior problems (SBP) can be targeted for prevention (Allen et al., 2016). Targeting at-risk parents may yield greater program effects than when parent-focused interventions are delivered to lower-risk parents (Casillas et al., 2016). Thus, targeting at-risk children and parents may be an especially important additional strategy. Evidence-based programs (EBP) are important (Gottfredson et al., 2015) and policymakers understand the importance of supporting EBP (Rubin et al., 2014). The proposed symposium will discuss a burgeoning statewide CSA prevention effort taking place in Pennsylvania that addresses limitations of the aforementioned statewide approach. A comprehensive prevention approach including three strategies will be discussed: a school-based effort (Pulido et al., 2015), an effort targeting children with SBP (Allen et al., 2016), and an innovative, newly developed parent-focused CSA prevention module for at-risk parents. We hypothesize that when evidence-based programs targeting multiple levels of influence (e.g., community members, children, and parents) are strategically coordinated and implemented at a statewide level, then the potential for reducing the incidence rate of CSA is maximized.