Supporting Victims and Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse: Rapid Evidence Reviews
- Victims & survivors
Project Team
Dr Michaela Guthridge
Professor Andrea de Silva
Alisa Hall
Alexandra Shriane
Background and Aim
The National Office for Child Safety (NOCS), a strategic partner of the National Centre, is responsible for the development and delivery of a Child Safety Research Agenda (CSRA). This agenda is a deliverable of the National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse (National Strategy), and is being informed, in part, by a series of Rapid Evidence Reviews.
Given our prioritisation of victim and survivor experiences of child sexual abuse, including drivers of and responses to abuse, the National Centre has been invited to undertake Rapid Evidence Reviews to inform development of the CSRA.
Two Rapid Evidence Reviews will be undertaken to focus on:
1. Understanding child sexual abuse: determinants, risk factors, and life course impacts for victims and survivors
2. Responding to child sexual abuse: identifying improvements in service delivery, including trauma-informed support
These reviews will utilise an inclusive definition of knowledge to explore, where available, lived and living experience, cultural, research and theoretical, practice and service, and procedural and systems perspectives.
Methods
Two Rapid Evidence Reviews will be conducted between June-December 2024, encompassing:
- academic and grey literature
- literature publicly available, and published in English
- literature from the last 5 years (2019-2024)
A series of evidence maps will be produced as a result of these Rapid Evidence Reviews, which will provide accessible illustrations of the evidence base. Evidence maps will be made publicly available on the National Centre website.
The NOCS CSRA will be meaningfully informed through the production of these reviews, ensuring that victim and survivors perspectives are captured and reflected in its development. Further, it is anticipated that these reviews will map current strengths and identify existing limitations in the evidence base, which will further inform targeted research efforts, including future funding rounds.
- Victims & survivors