NCJ Number
162566
Journal
Child Maltreatment Volume: 1 Issue: 1 Dated: (February 1996) Pages: 65-76
Date Published
1996
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This study evaluates the effectiveness of concurrent 11-week cognitive behavioral groups for 19 nonoffending mothers and their young sexually abused children.
Abstract
Evaluation included standardized assessment of maternal distress levels and maternal reports of children's behavioral functioning at initial contact, pretreatment, posttreatment, and 3-month followup. A series of one-way repeated measures indicated significant decreases in parental distress and children's sexual behaviors across evaluations. Post-hoc analyses suggest that these improvements occurred as a function of group participation and were maintained at followup. These group interventions are cost-effective and highly replicable, and appear to be effective in both decreasing parent and child symptomatology and improving maternal parenting practices. These interventions are worthy of further investigation. However, ethical concerns regarding no-treatment control groups suggest that they may best be conducted through an experimental design. Tables, references