Evaluating Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Policies in the United States: Lessons Learned

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a serious public health issue occurring in homes, schools, and other settings. School employee sexual misconduct and abuse of students is a particular subset of CSA that includes "both criminal and noncriminal behaviors, that are sexualized and inappropriate in adult-student interactions" (p. 19). Yet, CSA can be prevented before it happens. Policies intending to support this goal are a public health strategy addressing the conditions that allow CSA to occur. Over several decades, states have enacted CSA prevention policies using a variety of strategies, such as education and awareness, school personnel policies, standards of conduct, and legal accountability laws, to reduce or prevent CSA from occurring in schools. While these policy advances represent progress toward the upstream prevention of CSA, there is limited research on whether these state-level policies are achieving their goal of reducing or preventing CSA. We are funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to evaluate these enacted state school-based CSA prevention laws. Through Phase 1 of this work, we have identified three lessons learned when evaluating these CSA prevention policies, specifically (1) the lack of national, high-quality, and reliable surveillance data; (2) policy discrepancies, or "loopholes," are common; and (3) the need for policy implementation evaluation. This paper discusses these topics and provides future direction for CSA prevention policy evaluation research.