One year follow up of long-term retention of children exposed to school-based prevention program against child sexual abuse

Abstract

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is an issue of public health, a "unique phenomenon" -according to the World Health Organization, that needs to be addressed. In Greece, a school - based intervention program has been adapted, entitled as the "Safe Touches" program. The objective of this research was to assess whether children in Greece exposed to the "Safe Touches" program, have retained all the valuable information addressed during this initiative, one year later. The sample was composed from a private elementary school located in Athens, corresponding to students (N= 161) from 2nd to 4th grade who participated in the intervention program. Knowledge retention was assessed via the Greek version of the Children's Knowledge of Abuse Questionnaire R-III (Tutty, 1995). Results indicated that there was a significant statistical increase of knowledge concerning CSA after a period of 1 year from the intervention. The aforementioned fact indicated that the intervention should be considered as useful for children up to the third grade. Therefore, this study can be considered as valuable input concerning the gap of literature of long-term effectiveness of school-based interventions.