Letting the Future In

Tricia Jessiman, Research Associate in the School for Policy Studies, reports on a study of therapeutic support for children affected by sexual abuse.

It has at times felt difficult to keep up with overlapping high profile Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) scandals dominating the UK headlines in recent years. Jimmy Saville, Operation Yewtree, Rotherham, the ‘Westminster Paedophile Ring’ – the headlines have kept coming in. There has been rather less media coverage on the impact of sexual abuse on those children who experience it. The academic literature tells us that CSA is associated with a range of psychological and behavioural symptoms in both childhood and adulthood including post-traumatic stress (PTSD), depression, alcohol and drug misuse, suicide, and self-harming behaviour. Children who have been sexually abused need help – but it may not be readily available. The NSPCC’s current campaign, It’s Time, seeks to highlight the scarcity of therapeutic support in the UK for children who have experienced abuse.

Even were it more widely available, it is unclear ‘what works’. Research on the effectiveness of therapeutic support for CSA is limited. Colleagues in the School for Policy Studies have published two Cochrane systematic reviews of the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. Geraldine McDonald led a review of cognitive-behavioural interventions (CBT), and concluded that “…CBT may have a positive impact on the sequelae of child sexual abuse, although most results were not statistically significant.” Most of the 10 studies in the review were American, and the most recent was published in 2004. William Turner’s review of psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychotherapy for CSA failed to find a single study that met the inclusion criteria.

Hence we are delighted to see the publication today of our evaluation of ‘Letting the Future In’ (LTFI), a therapeutic service for children affected by sexual abuse. Led by Professor John Carpenter, the study was conducted with colleagues at Durham University and is the first impact evaluation of a therapeutic service for CSA published in over a decade. It’s also a rare example of the use of a randomised control trial in social work research with children and families in the UK (and we certainly learned just how much time, effort and goodwill is required to conduct one).

LTFI was developed by the NSPCC and at the time of the study delivered across 20 service centres in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is available to children aged between four and 17 without a diagnosed learning difficulty who have been affected by sexual abuse. Children are offered up to four therapeutic assessment sessions followed by up to 20 intervention sessions (extended up to 30 if necessary) with a children’s services practitioner (CSP). CSPs delivering the intervention vary in their background, training and experience but most commonly are qualified social workers with additional training in therapeutic work with children. At the same time, the child’s safe carer (typically the non-abusing parent, but sometimes a grandparent or foster carer) is offered up to eight sessions to help them process the impact of discovering that their child was sexually abused, and to support the child in their recovery.

We conducted a randomised control trial (RCT) with waiting-list control of LTFI, as well as a process evaluation of its implementation by NSPCC teams, and qualitative case studies with 15 children and young people who received the intervention. A total of 242 children took part in the RCT, making it the largest trial of a CSA intervention ever conducted. Three quarters of them were girls and most had experienced contact sexual abuse – inappropriate touching or penetration. Unlike the high profile headlines would have us believe, the children in our study were not abused by strangers or celebrities. They were almost twice as likely to have been abused by someone in their family as by someone outside it and in four out of ten cases where the perpetrator was known, they were also a child under 18 years of age.

The study confirms that children who have experienced CSA need support. When they were referred to LTFI, over half of the children and young people over eight years old in our study reported ‘clinical’ level scores on a standardized measure of psychological and behavioural symptoms, rising to 70% when one or more ‘significant difficulties’ were included. Parents/carers reported ‘clinical’ or ‘significant difficulty’ level scores for nine out of ten younger children under eight. Many of the children in our sample had also experienced three or more other types of victimization, such as physical and verbal abuse at home and bullying by other children, in addition to sexual abuse.

Did receiving LTFI help? We won’t give too much away, because the findings of the study are published today and we want you to read them. In short, the impact evaluation revealed that LTFI had a significant effect on older children and young people (broadly speaking, those aged eight years and older) after six months. The report provides a detailed account of the service delivered, the evaluation design and results, as well as details of how much it costs to deliver LTFI. It also has a strong service-user element; our qualitative research with children and their families who had received the intervention revealed that they valued it hugely, in particular the bond or ‘alliance’ that developed between NSPCC practitioners and the children. One of the young people we spoke who had this to say about LTFI:
“If you’re in a really bad place like I was, they will definitely bring you out of it and you’ll see there’s so much more to life. It’s probably one of the best decisions I made to do LTFI. Before I met them I was really quiet, withdrawn, wouldn’t really talk to anybody. Now since finishing with them, I’m such a more positive, outgoing person and I have a lot of confidence. They did their job.”

This blog post is based on Carpenter, J., Jessiman, T., Patsios, D., Hackett, S. & Phillips, J. (2016) Letting the Future In: a therapeutic intervention for children affected by sexual abuse and their carers: An evaluation of impact and implementation. NSPCC
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/services-and-resources/research-and-resources/2016/letting-the-future-in-evaluation

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