The impact of the body safety training programme on self-protection skills of children attending A preschool education institution

The study was conducted by undertaking several research designs to develop a training programme and a measurement tool, with the motivation of preventing child sexual abuse. The population of the study comprised of 2626 children from 38 Crèches and Day Care Centres. A power analysis was used to ascertain the sample size and a sample of 130 children was established. In the first phase of the study, the Methodology stage of the What If Situation Test (WIST), which as adapted to Turkish, was conducted on 70 children. The measurement tool tests childrens' skills in recognising sexual abuse and protection from sexual abuse by means of the responses children give to the hypothetical sexual abuse cases. A Cronbach's Alpha reliability and test-retest reliability (r) was conducted for each of the dimensions of the WIST undertaken in the study. The findings for the seven sub-dimensions were: 0,69 (r=,84) for "appropriate touching recognition"; 0,71 (r=,92) for "inappropriate touching recognition"; 0,68 (r=,88) for the "say skill"; 0,68 (r=,82) for the "do skill"; 0,69 (r=,74) for the "tell skill"; 0,90 (r=,48) for the "report skill" and 0,82 (r=,89) for the "total skill". The test-retest reliability for the sub-dimensions of the Personal Safety Scale (PSS), was also determined (r=,82). In the second phase of the study, the content validity of the trainer's version of the Body Safety Training (BST) Programme and the visual design of the book for the programme to be used on the experimental group was carried out. In the experimental phase of the second stage of the research study, 40 children comprised the experimental group and 43 children comprised the control group. The effectiveness of Body Safety Training Programme, supported with visual training aids was measured with a pre- and post-test of the WIST sub-dimensions on the experimental and control groups; the findings of this measurement showed that there was a high level significant difference the experimental group (p<0,001). Findings of the study showed that the WIST was a reliable and valid testing tool in Turkish and that the BST programme is an effective programme to increase self-protection skills/abilities towards preventing child sexual abuse in pre-schoolers.