Abstract:
At primary prevention level, appropriate knowledge and awareness remain the first line of defence against child
sexual abuse. This article provides a gendered analysis of the influence of a lifeskills programme on the sexual
abuse knowledge of adolescents who live in impoverished and marginalised settings. A pre/post-test design
was used to gather data from 348 adolescents by means of group-administered surveys prior to and after the
weeklong residential programme. The pre-intervention results showed lower levels of knowledge among male
respondents regarding statements on what child sexual abuse is and statistically significant improvements in
this regard were recorded at post-intervention. However, their knowledge still remained lower compared to that
of female respondents. Respondents’ knowledge regarding the nature of child sexual abuse suggests the
continuation of gender stereotypes which may hamper effective identification and reporting of sexual abuse.
Nevertheless, the lifeskills programme demonstrated value in strengthening adolescents’ knowledge of child
sexual abuse. It is recommended that future programmes be sensitive to the gendered pre-knowledge of
adolescents when providing training on sexual abuse. Research is needed to determine why the programme
failed to impact positively on some adolescents’ knowledge about child sexual abuse.
