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Determinants of attitudes towards reporting child sexual abuse to the police: Group differences between professionals in school, child protection and law enforcement
Sat, September 6, 8:00 to 9:15am, Deree | Classrooms, DC 707Abstract
In Germany, school staff and child protection workers are not mandated to report suspected child sexual abuse (CSA) cases to the police. Whether or not law enforcement gets involved is therefore influenced by attitudes of these professionals. This is because parents might seek help first in counselling centres, seek out to the youth welfare office, or children disclose the abuse to their teachers, if not to their family or friends.
The aim of this study is to examine the influence of different determinants on the attitudes of child protection, law enforcement, and school-based professionals toward reporting CSA to the police.
Data were collected from 605 participants working in child protection (n=190), such as youth welfare office and counselling centres; schools (n=321), such as teachers and school social workers; and law enforcement (n=94), such as police officers and prosecutors.
This study uses partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the relationships between the constructs of emotional reactivity, naïve confidence, as well as criminal justice distrust and attitude towards reporting CSA, with experience with CSA cases and professional affiliation acting as mediators.
Preliminary findings suggest that emotional reactivity is linked to a positive, criminal justice distrust with a negative, and confidence with varying influence on the attitude towards reporting depending on the affiliating system. The results indicate differences between the professional groups in regards to the underlying attitude, showing that law enforcement professionals have a more positive attitude towards CSA reporting than school staff and child protection workers, who holt the least positive or even negative attitude towards reporting CSA to the police. The preliminary findings suggest also that prior experience with CSA cases partially mediates the relationship between the three latent exogenous variables on the attitude toward reporting CSA to law enforcement.