Preventing Child Sexual Abuse: Integrating Research into Practice

This book addresses issues relating to the prevention of child sexual abuse (CSA), a pervasive public health problem that affects 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys. It provides an overview of current research and practice, with an emphasis on primary prevention. The book examines the settings where children are most at risk for CSA including the home, youth serving organization, and online environments, along with populations at elevated risk for victimization and perpetration. Prevention strategies are evaluated against the evidence supporting their effectiveness.  The book concludes with best practices, future directions, and presents the Swiss Cheese Model of CSA Prevention.

Key areas of coverage include:

• The short- and long-term consequences of CSA.
• Public health and socioecological frameworks for organizing prevention.
• Identifying red flag sexual grooming behaviors to prevent CSA before it occurs.
• Online CSA prevention.
• Educational programming for children, parents, and professionals.
• CSA prevention within youth serving organizations.
• Preventing peer on peer sexual harm and sexual abuse within the home.
• Situational, societal, and legislative approaches to preventing CSA.

Preventing Child Sexual Abuse is an essential resource for researchers, professors, graduate students as well as clinicians, mental health therapists, policy makers, and related professionals and organizations in developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychology, social work, public health, criminology / criminal justice, forensic psychology, and behavioral therapy and rehabilitation, and all interrelated disciplines.