A Parent-focused Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Program: Development, Acceptability, and Feasibility

Child sexual abuse (CSA) affects nearly 60,000 children in the U.S. annually. Although prevention efforts targeting adults in the community and school-aged children have been somewhat successful, there is a clear gap in the current prevention efforts: parents. Generalized parent-education (PE) programs have effectively reduced the rates of physical abuse and neglect; however, currently no PE program targets risk factors for CSA specifically. We sought to develop a brief parent-focused CSA prevention module to be added onto existing PE programs thereby leveraging the skills and implementation infrastructure to ensure sustainability.

In three phases, we developed the curriculum, refined content and presentation while simultaneously developing and psychometrically evaluating a measurement tool, and conducted an acceptability and feasibility pilot. These phases are described in detail such that intervention scientists wishing to develop a module to be added onto existing programs can follow our procedures.

The results of each phase are described so that the reader can see how information gleaned in one part of a phase informed subsequent phases of research. This was an iterative process of development, refinement, and piloting.

The resultant parent-focused CSA prevention module is designed to be added onto extant evidence-based PE programs. The module, and the additive approach of the intervention, will be evaluated in a future randomized controlled trial.