The Impact of School-Based Education Programs on Preventing Child Sexual Abuse: A Systematic Review Study

Child abuse is an important problem that needs to be addressed in effective ways. One of the methods used to teach self-care behaviors to children is a school-based approach. The purpose of this systematic review study is to investigate the role of school-based educational programs in preventing child sexual abuse.
Source of Data: The present review study was conducted by searching english articles from databases including Science Direct, PubMed, Google Scholar, and Scopus and using Keywords (Education) and (School-Based), (Child/Children) and (Sexual Abuse/Abuse). Persian articles were also searched in the databases of Iran doc, SID, Iran Medex, and Magiran with the same keywords in persian. Only articles published from 2000 to 2017 were evaluated.

Jadad scoring criterion was used to evaluate the articles. Articles that scored more than 3 on this criterion were included in the study. Data analysis was done qualitatively.

The results showed that school-based educational methods to prevent sexual abuse increase the knowledge, attitude and learning of self-care behaviors in children.

This study showed a new approach of school-based educational programs on preventing child sexual abuse. Paying more attention to training programs and combining them with appropriate practical skills will empower children in self-care behaviors. These results can also be used in new specialized and social planning, improvement of existing services, or budgeting for educational programs.