Increasing body security training and self-protection skills for children in women's shelters

Child sexual abuse is a widespread social problem seen in all social, economic and cultural societies all over the world and has a negative effect on the psychological side of the individual and has a traumatic effect on the quality of life. In order to prevent child sexual abuse all over the world, country policies are defined and primary measures are taken with social reform and education. Child sexual abuse is a risk for children living in a happy family environment, as well as an important risk for children under state protection who have problems in ensuring family cohesion. In our country, 39% of women who come to female guesthouses stay with their children. For this reason, services for children in female guesthouses should not be in the shadow of the services given to women. In the study, 17 of children whose ages are between 3 and 7 years and stayed in female guesthouses with their mothers, are worked on to improve their ability to recognize sexual abuse and improve their self-protection skills. The Body Safety Training program was applied to 7 children who were determined as experimental group and the effect of education was assessed by the "What If Situation Test –WIST". Test results applied to the experimental group were compared with 10 children in the control group and the test was repeated after three weeks to determine the permanency of the training. The obtained data were evaluated by nonparametric analysis and were determined by Kruskal Wallis, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and the Mann Whitney U tests. As a result of the research, the What If Situation Test showed that the sub-dimension averages increased in favor of the final test in the experimental group and no significant increase in the control group. This difference in the experimental group demonstrates that the Body Safety Training is an effective program to increase self-protection skills to prevent sexual abuse in children. Keywords: Children in women guesthouses, Physical security education.