The effectiveness of a psycho-educational program for child witnesses and victims of domestic violence.

Each year about 100.000 children are exposed to domestic violence in the
Netherlands. These children are at a heightened risk for developing emotional
and behavioral problems, and posttraumtic stress symptoms. Although
psycho-educational programs for these children have been developed, these
programs have not been evaluated in a RCT so far.

The aim of this study is to evaluate whether and how much children exposed to
domestic violence benefit from the program "En nu ik...!" (Now it's me!).

The design is a pretest-posttest two group randomized control design with a
pretest assessment before the program (T1), a posttest assessment directly
after the program (9 sessions, three months, T2) and a follow-up assessment six
months later (T3, 9 months after first test T1).

Children and their parents who consent to take part in the research are
randomly assigned to either the intervention-conditon and will follow the
program "En nu ik...!" (Now it's me!) or the control-condition and will follow
the program "Jij hoort erbij" (You belong too). Both programs consist of nine
sessions of 1,5 hours each for children, with nine parallel sessions for the
non-violent parents. In "En nu ik...!" specific attention will be paid to the
domestic violence, while in "Jij hoort erbij" the same structure will be
followed, with storytelling, creative activities and gross motor activities,
but the topic of domestic violence will not be discussed.

The psycho-educational program "En nu ik...!" (Now it's me!) runs in different
institutions across the country for over more than ten years now, and
participation doesn't seem to be risky. Participation in the research could be
a small inconvenience for children, because during the sessions and while
filling out the questionnaires they may be reminded of the domestic violence
they witnessed. Children are monitored during the measurement times by trained
researchers and when participation is deemed too stressful for the child he or
she will be asked to stop (temporarily). In other researches at the
effectiveness of a similar program children experienced no negative
consequences of filling out the questionnaires.
During participation in the program "En nu ik...!" the domestic violence will
be a topic as well, but if children don't feel comfortable discussing the
violence they don't have to participate in the conversations, but can choose to
only listen. Usually children enjoy participating in play activities with other
children who experienced the same. During their participation in the program
children will be monitored closely and be referred to more individual help when
necessary. Six months after completing the control-program "Jij hoort erbij"
children can attend "En nu ik...!".
Children participating in both programs ("En nu ik...!" and the play group and
positive attention program"Jij hoort erbij" (You belong too)) seem to benefit
from participation. It is not known which program helps children the best to
cope with their experiences, so it's not clear whether participation in the
trial may lead to assignment to a non-effective intervention.