Reducing child abuse amongst adolescents in low- and middle-income countries: A pre-post trial in South Africa

Background No known studies have tested the effectiveness of child abuse prevention programmes for adolescents in low- or middle-income countries. ‘Parenting for Lifelong Health’ (http://tiny.cc/whoPLH) is a collaborative project to develop and rigorously test abuse-prevention parenting programmes for free use in low-resource contexts. Research aims of this first pre-post trial in South Africa were: i) to identify indicative effects of the programme on child abuse and related outcomes; ii) to investigate programme safety for testing in a future randomised trial, and iii) to identify potential adaptations.