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Preventing Child Abuse: Problems and Promise
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17744 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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6 / 1990 |
6,025 Words |
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N. Dicknon Reppucci
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In 1962, Henry Kempe, a professor of pediatrics, and several of his colleagues at the University of Colorado School of Medicine identified the "battered-child syndrome" as a regularly occurring phenomenon. Many consider this event the discovery of the child abuse. During the following decade, child abuse reporting laws became a reality in every state. Their major goal was the protection of children from abusing parents. The number of reported cases has been rising ever since.
Although there was widespread documentation of child sexual abuse, and numerous clinical reports of harm to victims, it was not until 1984 that the problem was brought to the nation's awareness by the sensational McMartin day-care center case in Los Angeles, in which the owner and six teachers were accused of systematically abusing several children over a ten-year period. This case, which turned into the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the nation's history, came to an end only a few months ago. The publicity about this case and others that followed, including cover stories in Newsweek and Life and television reports on Sixty Minutes and Nightline, resulted in the proliferation of programs to prevent child sexual abuse. Millions of children have now been exposed to these programs.
The purpose of this article is to describe a few prevention programs for both physical and sexual child abuse that have been evaluated. (Although there are many programs for both types of abuse, few have been systematically evaluated.) In addition, the programs for the two types of abuse are quite different in focus and therefore must be discussed separately. Although information regarding physical child abuse has become a standard item in many, if not most, elementary school curricula, the major prevention programs have concentrated on "high risk" parents, especially during pregnancy and the first few years of the children's' lives. In contrast, programs to prevent child sexual abuse have focused almost exclusively on the children themselves. Usually the children are elementary-school age, but programs for preschoolers are also increasing.
My goal is to examine whether the programs are effective in accomplishing the goal of actually preventing abuse before it begins. This is known as primary prevention - it is distinguished from treatment programs for already abused children and secondary prevention programs that aim at early intervention with abused children in order to alleviate the abuse. First, I will discuss a few of the bet physical child abuse a few of the best physical child abuse prevention programs and then will consider the child sexual abuse programs, which have increased rapidly, have a definite primary prevention focus, and are most controversial.
Primary Prevention Programs for Physical Child Abuse
There are three main types of primary prevention programs for physical child abuse: (1) enhancing parental competency; (2) preventing the onset of abusive behavior; and (3) targeting high-risk groups.
COMPETENCY ENHANCEMENT PROGRAMS. Enhancing parental competency, resources, and coping skills that are thought to contribute to the development of positive parent-child relationships and to forestall the onset of dysfunctional interactions is one promising approach to preventing child abuse. Programs with this philosophy often focus on teaching
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