Sexual abuse prevention for developmentally disabled women

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate a program designed to teach developmentally disabled women the self-protective skills necessary to prevent sexual abuse. Twenty developmentally disabled women participated in the study and were randomly assigned to either the control or experimental group. Both groups were given a pretest to measure any preexisting self-protective skills. The experimental group participated in a seven session program. The training program used the following behavior modification techniques to teach the self-protective skills: modeling, role-playing, and verbal and physical prompts. To test the self-protective skills learned, both groups were given a posttest. The experimental group\u27s role-play mean increased from pretest to posttest while the control group\u27s role-play mean decreased. The predicted testing by treatment interaction effect was significant. To test the retention of the self-protective skills learned, a follow-up role-play test was given to the experimental group 3 weeks later. There was no significant difference between the group\u27s pretest mean and their follow-up mean which shows that there was no retention of the skills learned