Printer-friendly versionTeens opening the eyes of younger teens to dating abuse—through popular media they all relate to, using a shared colloquial tongue that’s full of drama but, thankfully, free of preaching:
That’s the novel idea behind abuse-prevention materials for middle schoolers recently dreamed up by trained high school “peer leaders” in 11 U.S. cities.
Start Strong: Building Healthy Teen Relationships, a program funded mostly by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, aims to prevent date violence and promote healthy relationships among 11- to 14-year-olds. Start Strong is testing innovative curricula in schools and investigating needed community policies. One unusual aspect of the program is a network of high school-age advisers, trained in the issue, who do workshops at middle schools and also develop creative teaching tools they believe will strike a responsive chord with younger teens.
“They’re the credible messengers. They’re the people a young teen is most likely to listen to,” insists Casey Corcoran, a former teacher who directs Start Strong in Boston.
How about using comic books, wildly popular with middle schoolers, to get the message across? In the Bronx, teen advisers wrote and drew their own, sharing it widely with younger kids. It has a day-in-the-life approach, following two young couples through a 24-hour period—one relationship is healthy, one is not. The cartoon-embellished comic shows healthy uses of texting, how a partner’s controlling behavior and guilt-tripping hurts kids, and the effects of physical aggression. It’s downloadable for free.
The New York teen advisers also created a film called Broken Harmonies, which can be downloaded at the same website.
Music lyrics, whose unhealthy relationship messages can influence teenagers, are cleverly scrutinized in a “nutritional impact” label created by Boston teen advisers. Designed to look like the labels on food, it has columns on “amount per serving” and “intensity level.” The ingredients include healthy and unhealthy aspects of dating relationships. The healthy column includes items such as “trust” and “equality.” “Possession-obsession” and “relationship=sex” are among the unhealthy. There are numerical values on the charts, and a total at the bottom that reveals whether a song is encouraging healthy (or unhealthy) teen dating.
“Kids love music, and it’s not that we’re telling them not to listen, but to think critically about the songs. It’s a great touchstone for discussion about abuse,” says Corcoran. The label is downloadable without charge.
