Evaluation of the effectiveness of the stay safe primary prevention programme for child sexual abuse

Objective: This child abuse prevention study aimed to evaluate the effectiv eness of the Stay Safe Programme in training unscreened 7 and 10 year old c hildren in personal safety skills. Subsidiary aims were to evaluate the pro gram's impact on children's self-esteem and parents' and teachers' knowledg e and attitudes of relevance to child abuse and protection. Method: Changes in safety knowledge and skills and sell-esteem of 339 child ren who participated in the Stay Safe Programme were compared with those of 388 waiting list controls. Children in the training group were also follow ed up at 3 months. In addition, the knowledge and attitudes of parents and teachers of children who completed the program were evaluated before and af ter the program and 5 month follow-up data were collected from teachers onl y. Results: Compared with waiting-list controls, trained children showed signi ficant improvements in safety knowledge and skills and these gains were mai ntained at follow-up. The greatest gains were made by 7 year olds. Children who participated in the program also showed significant improvements in se lf-esteem which were maintained at 3 months follow-up but only the 7 year o lds in the training group made significantly larger gains in self-esteem th an their control group counterparts. Children with a higher socioeconomic s tatus benefited more from the program than less privileged children. Both p arents and teachers. showed significant improvements in knowledge and attit udes concerning protection over the course of the program and for teachers, these gains were maintained at follow-up. Conclusion: The findings suggest that the Stay Safe Programme was effective in training children in safety skills and so may usefully be used as a pri mary prevention intervention for child abuse. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd .