What school abuse prevention actually delivers

School programmes against sexual abuse are the most widespread preventive measure in the world. Sweden, Australia, the United States and much of Europe teach children about body boundaries, secrets and who to tell. The question is what the research actually shows they deliver.

What is established

The Cochrane review by Walsh and colleagues from 2015 summarises 24 randomised trials with 5,802 children. Children who have been through a programme know more about abuse than children who have not. The difference is 0.61 standard deviations measured by questionnaire, and most of it is still there six months later.

A 2023 meta-analysis by Lu and colleagues, spanning 31 studies and 9,049 participants, adds two practical findings. Programmes with more than three sessions work better than shorter ones. Children from about age eight gain more than younger ones.

The figure that does not hold

The most quoted figure in the field is that children who attend a programme are more likely to disclose abuse. The odds ratio of 3.56 appears on many organisations' pages. It rests on three trials with 1,788 children.

But children sit in classes, not as individuals, and when Cochrane's own sensitivity analysis adjusts for that, the figure falls to 3.04 with an uncertainty interval from 0.75 to 12.33. It is no longer statistically significant. An organisation that publishes 3.56 without that caveat is quoting a headline, not a body of research.

What nobody has shown

No study has adequately measured whether the programmes reduce the number of abuses. That is Cochrane's own wording. What is established is knowledge, skills in practice situations, and an uncertain effect on the willingness to tell.

That does not make the programmes worthless. It means anyone buying or funding them should know what they are buying: an intervention with good evidence for knowledge and weak evidence for everything beyond it.

What a school should ask a provider

• How many sessions are included? Fewer than four has weaker support.
• What is measured afterwards, and by whom?
• What does the programme say to the child who is already being abused?
• Where is a child who discloses referred? The school needs that answer before the first lesson.

Marianco works with the adults around the child for exactly this reason. Knowledge in children is good. Adults who know what to do with what a child tells them are what makes that knowledge matter. Sources: Walsh et al., Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2015, CD004380. Lu et al., Research on Social Work Practice 2023.