SUMMARY :
The "Daphné" project regarding prevention of child sexual abuse,
developed by the Istituto Di Sessuologia Clinica (Rome), in collaboration with
the European Federation of Sexology (Marseille) and the University of Barcelona,
was approved by the European Commission.
The initial program, which took place in Rome in 1998, and 1999 had as main
objective, in a prevention perspective, to motivate and to inform teachers and
parents, in order to develop future actions in a coordinate way, and to constitute
some territorial nets able to easily connect social services, schools and families.
This program consisted in two 30 hours-experimental courses, devoted to teachers
for one and to students’parents of primary and secondary schools for the
other.
The informative and training oriented methodology involved some three hours-meetings
(one hour for theory, two hours for group dynamics). The objective was to develop
exact knowledge and skills in the field of infantile sexual abuse, relying on
a more general information on sexuality and physical and psychological well-being
of developing youth, by in increasing the participants’capacity to communicate
about sexuality and to correctly decode signs of uneasiness expressed by minors.
Assessment called for structured questionnaires, and for gathering of opinions
of participants and external observers after each session. The main results
of this experiment was the necessity of reflexion workshops about stereotypes
and social representations that parents and teachers hold about this phenomenon,
about the identification of efficient intervention strategies, and about the
development of individual and group resources, in order to plan preventive actions
that could be shared by privileged interlocutors of minor people, and be exported
to other european countries.