LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Responsible Behavior With Younger Children: Results From a Pilot Randomized Evaluation of a School-Based Child Sexual Abuse Perpetration Prevention Program.

Photo by jannerboy62 from unsplash

Many efforts to prevent child sexual abuse (CSA) aim to teach children strategies for recognizing, resisting, and reporting victimization. There is limited evidence that victimization-focused efforts actually prevent CSA. Moreover,… Click to show full abstract

Many efforts to prevent child sexual abuse (CSA) aim to teach children strategies for recognizing, resisting, and reporting victimization. There is limited evidence that victimization-focused efforts actually prevent CSA. Moreover, these efforts often overlook the fact that many children and adolescents engage in problem sexual behavior against younger children. Responsible Behavior with Younger Children (RBYC) is a novel universal school-based perpetration-focused intervention that aims to prevent the onset of inappropriate, harmful, or illegal sexual behavior by adolescents against younger children.1 Responsible behavior with younger children was designed to provide adolescents and their parents with the knowledge and tools to help adolescents interact appropriately with younger children and avoid CSA behaviors. In this paper we describe intervention development, summarize lessons learned from implementing RBYC in four urban schools, and report results from our pilot randomized waitlist-controlled trial (RCT) with 160 6th and 7th grade students. Results indicate RBYC was associated with increased accuracy in youth knowledge about CSA and CSA-related laws, and with increased behavioral intention to avoid or prevent CSA with younger children and peer sexual harassment. Although the sample was small and the effects were relatively modest, the findings do suggest that RBYC holds promise for preventing the onset of problem sexual behavior.

Keywords: behavior; younger children; behavior younger; sexual abuse; child sexual; responsible behavior

Journal Title: Child maltreatment
Year Published: 2022

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.