Here be dragons: How personal safety training can promote better outcomes for vulnerable children How do you equip people to deal with an unknown threat in unchartered territory…? Can’t rely on primitive instincts or protocols. Need to give children transferable skills, a tool-kit that help them respond to a complex and changing environment… Does targeted personal safety training work? Katherine Davis et al (2000) – review of 27 studies of child sexual abuse prevention programmes. Effect size = 1.07 (an average child who had been through training performed better than 90% of a group who hadn’t received training). However… David Finkelhor et al (1995) found that such programmes don’t reduce incidents of victimization but noted children who had been through them: • • • • • •
More likely to make disclosures Children felt more confident dealing with victimization What they had done helped protect them Kept the experience from being worse Higher perceptions of self-efficacy Less self-blame
second order level of skills – not the avoidance of threat but the ability to manage threat. How we respond to adversity turns out to be just as crucial, if not more so in determining outcomes for children. Resilience ‘…manifested competence in the context of significant challenges to adaptation or development’ (Marsten and Coatsworth)