Some clinical and methodological implications of a treatment outcome study of sexually abused children

The clinical implications of the results of a treatment outcome study are presented for 47 sexually abused children and adolescents attending a specialist psychiatric facility. The children and their nonabusing parents or caregivers were randomly assigned to contrasting treatment programs. The treatment focused on family members allocating blame for the abuse appropriately, optimizing family relationships, and dealing with causes and effects of the abuse. Clinicians rated the children and the mothers on 12 family treatment aims before and after treatment; on the same occasion additional standardized measures were used to assess behavior and mental state of the children and mental state of the mothers. On the standardized measures mothers made more significant progress than their children in the year of treatment, but there were no effects of type of treatment on the progress made by mothers or children. By contrast, clinical ratings suggested that those following the additional group work made better progress than those following the treatment without group work. The implications of these results for the clinical programs are discussed.