Color Kids Scared: Sexual-Abuse Training Programs Raise Questions : Education: Programs range from coloring books warning that most anyone could be an abuser to classes. Critics fear effort could do more harm than good.

A coloring book asks, “Who COULD be a child molester?” and then answers with pictures of nearly everyone in a child’s life: a priest, coach, policeman, teacher, Mom, Dad.

A preschool curriculum instructs teachers to hold up a drawing of a girl sitting in her uncle’s lap and ask, “What if Donna’s uncle put his hand down Donna’s pants? Would that be OK?”

So much for childhood innocence. Between their ABCs and recess, schoolchildren now must ponder a darker world.

Sexual-abuse prevention programs for children have gained wide acceptance since they first appeared in the early 1980s, now reaching an estimated two-thirds of all U.S. children.

Trouble is, nobody knows if the programs really work, and some researchers say they may do more harm than good.

Critics say the programs have not been proved effective in preventing abuse and may confuse youngsters, possibly twisting their sexual development in later years. Even some advocates of prevention efforts say many programs are misguided, outdated and ineffective.

“These programs have been experimenting with kids since they started,” said Neil Gilbert, professor of social welfare at UC Berkeley and co-author of the book, “With the Best of Intentions: The Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Movement.”

Gilbert challenges the ideology behind many prevention programs, saying they wrongly borrow from feminist principles in assuming young children can be “empowered” to fend off sexual predators. In reality, he said, children are no match for adult abusers, physically or mentally.

“I think adults ought to be responsible for protecting kids,” Gilbert said. “We shouldn’t be saying, especially to young kids, ‘It’s on your shoulder.’ ”

Studies he conducted in California found that preschoolers and first-graders could not grasp some concepts presented in abuse-prevention programs. Many could not distinguish between good and bad touching, and training appeared to increase the number of first-graders who thought that any kind of touching was wrong.

The programs also may have unintended consequences down the road, Gilbert said.

“We don’t know the long-term effects of introducing children to the notion that sexuality is bad and dangerous,” he said. “When they have their first sexual experience, we don’t know if this will come floating back into their minds.”

Any assessment of prevention efforts is complicated by the hundreds of different programs in use, ranging from 20-minute puppet shows to two-month courses. All try to teach children to recognize sexual abuse, to say no, and to tell an adult. But the similarities end there.

Some schools use methods discarded years ago by experts, said Joan Cole Duffell, community education director for the Seattle-based Committee for Children.

Other schools, strapped for funds, turn to local advocacy groups that do the training cheaply but may have little knowledge of child development.

“I fear them,” Duffell said. “They’re really not prepared to know what kids are ready for at this age, and they don’t know how to teach them.”

Duffell’s nonprofit organization markets “Talking About Touching,” a six- to eight-week curriculum considered one of the nation’s most comprehensive. It reaches 300,000 preschool and elementary schoolchildren a year, she said.

Although Duffell believes abuse-prevention training is worthwhile if done right, she said it is often done wrong.

“Many of these programs should be looked at in a critical light,” she said. “Anybody who’s going to do a one-shot program with 5-year-olds about ‘the uh-oh feeling when someone touches you’ is only going to leave them confused.”

A child’s age also matters, she said. Many preschool programs start with 3-year-olds, figuring that if a child is old enough to be abused, he or she is old enough to learn about abuse. But Duffell’s group recommends waiting until children turn 4.

“Knowing what we know about learning and developmental issues, there really is no healthy point in telling a 3-year-old about sexual abuse,” Duffell said. “They’ll become confused, and the most you can hope for is that you’ll scare them.”

The first nationwide study of prevention programs, released last fall, yielded a mixed bag of findings.

The University of New Hampshire’s Family Research Laboratory conducted telephone interviews with a national sample of 2,000 children ages 10 to 16.

While 67% of the children said they had received abuse-prevention training, only 34% had been exposed to what the researchers considered high-quality, comprehensive programs.

A comprehensive program was defined as one with at least nine of 12 components, such as involving parents, having more than one class, letting children practice prevention skills, and exploring abuse by family members, not just strangers.

On the positive side, the study found that children with comprehensive training were more likely to tell someone after being sexually abused. They also were more likely to use preferred strategies such as yelling, demanding to be left alone, or threatening to tell.

“Overall, I take it to be encouraging,” said David Finkelhor, the study’s lead investigator. “What’s important about this study is that it’s the first to suggest that exposure to these programs may be able to affect what children do in these victimization encounters.”

But the study supplied critics with ammunition, too.

Children appeared to receive little benefit from the brief, less comprehensive programs, actually scoring slightly lower on a knowledge test than children with no training at all. Even the children with comprehensive training, while scoring better for knowledge, were no more likely to stop an attempted abuse from being carried out.

And in what Finkelhor conceded was “a troubling finding,” children with comprehensive training were more likely to be injured during abuse, possibly because they were more prone to fight back.

Given the uncertainties, Gilbert believes money spent on programs aimed at young children might be better spent instructing parents and teachers to be more vigilant.

But Finkelhor believes the programs should be improved, not scrapped. Any negative effects, such as scaring children, appear to be relatively mild, he said.

“Contrast it with the general fare of violence they get on TV,” Finkelhor said. “Most of that seems more threatening and scary than this information.”

Duffell considers abuse-prevention training a necessary evil.

“It’s too bad we have to do it,” she said. “It’s a trade-off that many parents and teachers are willing to live with, because they don’t want the consequences of their children being abused.”

But there’s a limit to what any school program can do, Duffell said.

One of the strongest findings in Finkelhor’s study was the benefit of parental involvement. Although school programs did not increase the likelihood that a child would thwart an attempted assault, parental instruction did. One of the greatest benefits of school programs appears to be the discussion they can stimulate at home, the study concluded.

“Some parents say, ‘Oh, my kid got personal safety this week at school, so I don’t have to worry anymore,’ ” Duffell said.

“In reality, parents have to be constantly worried about it. They need to work on good communication with their children. They need to be concerned about where their children are at all times. If you put all your eggs in the basket of teaching kids what to do in the event of a sexual assault, you’re not going to solve the problem.”