Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative

About

Since 2015, Penn State has partnered with the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency to develop, implement, and evaluate a comprehensive childhood sexual abuse prevention strategy, The Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative. Our overarching goal is to use evidence-based programs to prevent childhood sexual abuse.

Overseeing the implementation and evaluation, the SHCI PSU team is led by Jennie Noll (Project Co-Investigator) and Kate Guastaferro (Project Co-Investigator). The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency team consists of Kirsten Kenyon (Director, Office of Research Evaluation and Strategic Policy Development) and Christina Cosgrove (Program Analyst). 

Five Pennsylvania counties (Bucks, Cambria, Chester, Somerset, and York) were selected to participate in Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative via a competitive application process facilitated by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. Although the Initiative is only currently active in a handful of counties, the long-term goal is to move toward the sustainability of evidence-based childhood sexual abuse prevention programs and to scale up the effort across the Commonwealth and beyond.

Evidence-Based Interventions

The Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative implements three different evidence-based programs to three distinct populations that have an important role in the prevention of child sexual abuse: (1) adults in the community; (2) second grade children; and (3) parents enrolled in generalized parent education programs. These three groups receive a corresponding evidence-based program: Stewards of Children, the community-based intervention; Safe Touches, the school-based intervention; and Smart Parents – Safe and Healthy Kids, the parent-focused intervention.

Community-based Component: Stewards of Children 

School-based Component: Safe Touches

Parent-focused Component: Smarter Parents, Safer Kids

Parents are chief agents of change as well as the most proximal avenues of child safety. And yet, parents have not been fully engaged in primary prevention. The Center for Safe and Healthy Children seeks to fill this marked gap through its efforts to equip parents with skills-based, behavioral strategies to keep their children safe from sexual exploitation and sexual harm both online and offline. 

We developed Smarter Parents, Safer Kids, a single-session sexual abuse prevention strategy that can be added to evidence-based parent-education programs already supported by state child welfare systems through the Family First Prevention & Services Act. In a  randomized controlled trial, parents who received the intervention showed significant knowledge and behavior gains related to their ability to provide safe environment for their own children as well as for children livening in their environs. This intervention is now the focus of a large grant funded by the National Institutes of Health (PI: Kate Guastaferro) to take this program nationally in partnership with Parents As Teachers.