Parent -focused sexual abuse prevention program: A look at familial risk factors
Abstract
This study is an outcome evaluation of the effectiveness of a child sexual abuse prevention program, Project ASAP (Awareness of Sexuality Abuse Prevention Program) which is a project targeting parents and caregivers of a preschool population attending the Newark area Head Start Program. Parents/caretakers enrolled in Project ASAP attended a ten-session training program focused on preschool sexual behavior and sexual abuse prevention. Goals of the program include helping parents/caretakers establish modes of communication that facilitate child disclosure of problems, dispelling inaccurate adult concepts about preschool sexuality and atypical sexual behavior and teaching parents how to identify and effectively respond to sexualized environmental stimuli. Parents participated in a range of experiential activities as part of the program, including group discussions, role-playing, supervised practice with their children, and documenting their experiences in a journal. In addition, participants completed a battery of pretest and posttest measures to assess parenting attitudes, knowledge about sexual abuse, and preschoolers' sexual behavior. Results reveal that the program was not effective in changing the attitudes of caretakers who were assessed in the pretest phase to be “at-risk.” The “at-risk” group did show significant changes in attitude about boundaries with their preschoolers, and changed their attitudes about their children's sexual behavior compared with their counterparts. The “at-risk” group did not increase their comfort discussing sexual issues with their preschoolers, nor did they make significant gains in sexual knowledge when compared with those participants who were not determined to be “at-risk.”
Subject Area
Psychotherapy|Criminology|Social psychology|Adult education|Continuing education
Recommended Citation
Reed-Perricone, Kawana Montrese, "Parent -focused sexual abuse prevention program: A look at familial risk factors" (2003). ETD Collection for Pace University. AAI3069570.
https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/dissertations/AAI3069570
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