Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Abuse in Out-of-Home Care: Prevention Skills for At-Risk Children

Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Abuse in Out-of-Home Care brings into the open current or past sexually, physically, or emotionally abusive behaviors between children or between children and their caregivers in out-of-home care and helps prevent future victimization. The curriculum gives you 20 exercises that promote respectful and nurturing interactions among caregivers and children by offering healthy concepts of touching, communication, and boundaries. By implementing the concepts in this curriculum, you’ll help create positive, healthy attachments for children in out-of-home care who may feel abandoned and alone.

Exercises in Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Abuse in Out-of-Home Care assist children and caregivers in understanding their rights and others’rights in residential treatment centers and group or foster homes. Exercises focus on:

• communication on a continuum--teaches children and staff about their own communication and the communications they receive from others
• a touch continuum--provides an excellent vehicle for discussing the comforting and soothing touch children need and how to differentiate this from eight other types of touch
• differentiating sexual play from problematic sexual contact between children--helps children and staff talk about sex
• personal space and boundaries--discusses these as areas of major violations in children who have been abused
• sexual knowledge--teaches the body parts and their functions
• discovering what a sex offender does to trick children into situations that end up in sexual abuse--asks the children to make rules that assist other children to recognize unsafe situations, and then gives them the opportunity to create a video, pamphlet, advertisement, or commercial to tell other kids these rules
  
  This curriculum is unique because it can be completed through children and adults talking together. It assumes that there will be difficulties and conflicts between staff and children and among children themselves and provides a forum in which to raise and discuss these issues. You’ll find the curriculum perfect for caregiver training or as exercises caregivers and children do together. You’ll also find it very useful for working with children’s families either in family sessions or in multifamily groups.