A behavioral intervention program for child abusers was evaluated using multiple outcome criteria. Families were assigned to treatment (N=8) and control (N=8) on a first-come basis. All families were supervised by protective services and none had requested help voluntarily. A treatment program involving group parent training in the clinic and competency-based training and rehearsal in the home was provided by trained clinical psychology graduate students. The results strongly suggest that training abusive parents in child management and self-control techniques leads to improvements in parent effectiveness as measured by observations of parenting skills and parent/child interactions, parental report of child behavior problems, and caseworker report of family problems. Ten-week follow-up revealed that these improvements were maintained, and at one-year followup no child abuse had been reported to or suspected by caseworkers for those families completing treatment. Findings support the social learning model of child abuse and point to efficient methods by which to train abusive and "at-risk" parents in appropriate child management techniques. (Author)