The effectiveness of a psycho-educational program for child witnesses and victims of domestic violence (WC0000-000)

Background

Starting date: 01/10/2008

Children exposed to interparental violence are at a heightened risk for developing emotional and behavioral problems and posttraumatic stress symptoms (Kitzmann et al., 2003). In the Netherlands approximately 100.000 children are exposed to interparental violence every year (Ministery of Justice, 2008). For these children and their parents the psycho-educational program "En nu ik...!"("Now it's time for me...!") has been developed. The objective of this program is for children to learn how to cope with their experiences and to prevent problems in the future. The objective of the parallel sessions for parents is for them to learn how to support their child(ren). Children seem to benefit from participating in this program. However no RCT-study has been done yet, so it has not been possible to contribute the change in the behavior of the children to the program. The aim of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of "En nu ik...!" in a randomized controlled trial.