Preventing college women's sexual victimization through parent based intervention: a randomized controlled trial

Abstract

A randomized controlled trial, using parent-based intervention (PBI) was designed to reduce the incidence of alcohol-involved sexual victimization among first-year college students. The PBI, adapted from Turrisi et al. (2001), was designed to increase alcohol-specific and general communication between mother and daughter. Female graduating high school seniors and their mothers were recruited from the community and randomly assigned to one of four conditions: Alcohol PBI (n = 305), Enhanced Alcohol + Sex PBI (n = 218), Control (n = 288) or Unmeasured Control (n = 167). Mothers in the intervention conditions were provided an informational handbook and encouraged to discuss its contents with their daughters prior to college matriculation. Consistent with hypotheses, PBI, either standard or enhanced, was associated with lower incidence of incapacitated rape in the first year of college relative to controls. Path analysis revealed support for a hypothesized indirect effects model, by which intervention increased mother-daughter communication, which predicted lower frequency of first semester heavy episodic drinking, resulting in lower rates of alcohol-involved sexual victimization in the first year of college.

Fig. 1

Path model predicting incapacitated rape (IR) with all direct and indirect paths illustrated