Parent Education and Training Needs for Multiple-Forms of Violence Prevention: Results from a State-Level Survey

Background/Purpose

Prior research has identified the parent–child communication processes as a key mechanism for both preventing risky behaviors and promoting healthy behaviors in children and youth. Recognizing the role parents may play in prevention efforts for various forms of violence and self-harm, Iowa’s CDC-funded Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) program in collaboration with evaluation staff from the University of Iowa included a parent module in its first statewide survey of safety and violence (N=617) with the goal of determining where parent education and/or future engagement efforts needed to be directed.

Methods

The full survey was administered via a combination of phone and push-to-web in the summer and early fall of 2021. The Parent Module (N=299) included communication-focused questions related to various forms of violence including contact sexual violence, child sexual abuse, physical violence, psychological bullying, dating violence, and suicide. Descriptive statistics were generated for the unweighted data and X2 tests were utilized to identify statistically significant differences in the proportion of parent respondents that answered questions in the affirmative. Additional differences were then investigated based on parent demographics including race, ethnicity, marital status, income, prior violent victimization.

Results

Survey results indicate that while 83% of parent respondents talked with their child about the importance of not harming others, there were a number of statistically significant (α=.05) differences in the proportion of parents that did so based on the type of violence/harm being referenced (e.g., sexual violence vs. bullying vs. suicide), whether conversations included content related to preventing perpetration, and whether the conversation was about self-protective/risk-reduction behaviors. Statistically significant differences were also found in the age at which parents reported first speaking to their children based on the type of violence/harm being referenced. A number of differences based on parent demographics were also found. Full results from the parent module will be discussed in this presentation.

Conclusions

Future violence and self-harm prevention approaches may benefit from encouraging parent-child communication; however, efforts need to be made to ensure parents can competently speak to both perpetration and victimization prevention, and that parents know about and can engage in conversations with children and youth across different stages of development. Health equity also needs to be considered in terms of what demographic groups of parents may benefit most from parent education/training in this area.