The “Who Do You Tell?”™ Child Sexual Abuse Education Program: Eight Years of Monitoring

ABSTRACT

School-based programs have been the central strategy to educate children about the serious nature of child sexual abuse (CSA) in the hope of prevention or early intervention. While program evaluations consistently show significant improvement in children’s knowledge and skills, it behooves programs to monitor their impacts. Monitoring, or on-going assessments, can take several forms but in the current study refers to monitoring the outcome of knowledge of CSA prevention concepts. The “Who Do You Tell?”™ child sexual abuse education program has been offered for 35 years in Calgary, Canada and was previously evaluated in a randomized pre-test-post-test comparison study with strong positive findings. This article presents the results of subsequently monitoring program outcomes over an eight-year period (2010–2017), examining knowledge/attitudes in 6198 students in 50 schools in a Western Canadian city. All students significantly increased their CSA knowledge/attitudes with large effect sizes. Practice and policy implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Child sexual abuse
• school-based prevention
• program evaluation
• monitoring

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the City of Calgary’s Family and Community Support Services for funding the “Who Do You Tell?”™ program. Thanks also to the “WDYT?”™ educators for engaging young children in learning child sexual abuse education concepts. Thanks to the adults and school staff who made the program information accessible to the children and for inviting us to their school communities. Finally, thanks to the many children who took part in the program and the program monitoring.

Disclosure statement

No conflicts to report.

Ethical standards and informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from the parents of the students included in the study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leslie M. Tutty

Leslie M. Tutty, Ph.D., is a Professor Emerita with the Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Danielle Aubry

Danielle Aubry, MSW, is the Chief Executive Officer of Calgary Communities Against Sexual Abuse, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Laura Velasquez

Laura Velasquez, B.A., is the Education and Outreach Program Supervisor with Calgary Communities Against Sexual Abuse, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.