BMJ 1995;311:748 (16 September)

Letters

Adult survivors of child sex abuse

Group therapies are also effective

EDITOR,--In their paper on the pilot service, Breakfree, for adult survivors (both men and women) of childhood sexual abuse David Smith and colleagues leave some points unclear.1 How many support workers were there, and how professionally trained were they? They were "initially supervised," but by whom and for how long? The average duration of a counselling session was 1.8 hours (no range was given), sometimes twice weekly. This seems a lavish use of resources. The scheme was found to be successful in this study, but care would have to be taken in replication to ensure the quality of supervision and counselling.

In testing the differences between scores at the start and end of treatment the authors have emphasised hypothesis testing by quoting z and P values. It would have been helpful, however, if they had given summary statistics, such as the median scores and percentile . . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

Adults with a history of child sexual abuse: evaluation of a pilot therapy service
David Smith, Linda Pearce, Mike Pringle, and Richard Caplan
BMJ 1995 310: 1175-1178. [Abstract] [Full Text]

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