School-based Child Abuse Prevention Education
Schools are an effective setting for implementing prevention programs, including child sexual abuse prevention programs. Children are more likely to prevent and disclose questionable experiences if they are taught how to identify such experiences, feel confident in their ability to stop or avoid their experiences, and have trusted adults with whom to discuss their experiences.
The Center team has conducted a handful of studies on the effectiveness of school-based prevention education.
Effectiveness of state-based legislation for school-based programs
The Center conducted a policy analysis to determine whether state mandates for school-based prevention education correlate to changes in official reports of child sexual abuse. The team collected information on presence of mandates from all 50 US states from 2005-2019 and all reports to child protection from 2005-2019 in the US.
The Center research team found that state education mandates were associated with an increase in the incidence of child sexual abuse reports made by education personnel but not reports made by non-education personnel. Thus, state mandates for child sexual abuse prevention education may increase disclosures from children and reporting to authorities by school-based sources. There is no evidence that state mandates increase false reports. More details about this study can be found here.
Effectiveness of school-based programing on agency reports of child abuse
Indiana has, like many US states, adopted laws requiring that public K-12 schools implement child abuse prevention curricula. Although several teams, like the Center, have found these curricula to be effective at improving children and youth’s knowledge of abuse, and some have found evidence of improvements in self-efficacy and protective behaviors, few have examined the impact of programs on abuse disclosures and victimization. This leaves a critical gap in our understanding of if and how these prevention programs really work to prevent abuse.
In an extension of our evaluation work with kNot Today, the Center partnered with the Indiana Prevention Education Coalition to create the first, county-level dataset of prevention program implementation across a single state. This dataset will allow researchers to study how counties that have high implementation use differ from counties with low implementation use in their reports of child abuse to the Indiana Department of Children’s Services.
This project is currently underway and is expected to be completed by January 2025.
Effectiveness of a school-based program
The Center team conducted two randomized control trials (RCT) to evaluate the knowledge acquisition of children who received the Monique Burr Foundation for Children’s Child Safety Matters(R) curriculum, a program designed to educate kindergarten to grade five children about multiple forms of victimization. In short, the program worked to improve children’s knowledge, even children as young as 5 years old. These studies also demonstrated that four learning sessions are better than two sessions and some concepts are easier to understand than others.