School Collaboration and
Community Based Prevention
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This 15-year-old high school task force includes up to 30 students and is led by two volunteer teachers. Students emcee and lead the town’s annual domestic violence awareness walk, create prevention videos, conduct school-wide writing prompts, and conduct outreach within the school. The Ware River Valley Domestic Violence provides support, training, collaboration, and some project funding. How did it start? The Task Force asked a teacher who lives in the community to take it on and they said yes. The Task Force gave lots of support.
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Social norms is a research-based prevention strategy that works to increase health by correcting shared, negative misperceptions in a community. It is based on the idea that what we do and think is impacted by what we think is the ‘norm’ and if we learn that the norm is healthier than we thought it can impact what we do. An evaluation of Gateway High School’s campaign showed an increase in the number of students who did something to help a friend in an unhealthy relationship and increased the number of students who did or said something when they heard trash talk about other students. This strategy can be time and resource intensive, but the basic concept can be integrated into simpler campaigns. See https://socialnorms.org/ to learn more.
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This strategy requires a partnership with a school but does not take a lot of time. The entire student body is asked to write for 3-5 minutes a response to a given question i.e. ‘is it okay to make your partner share their password?” or “is asking for consent important? why?”. Student responses, written on squares of brightly colored paper are then posted in a visible place around school, on social media, and if possible are used as a starting point for student conversations. Some prompts are made into outreach posters using student art through collaboration with art or graphic design teachers - but simply posting hand-written responses themselves is also powerful. We recommend consulting with students to see which writing prompt questions feel most relevant to them. When possible, staff have conversations about the writings during Advisory or other periods but even without this, the writings generate useful conversation especially when posted in places where students aggregate.
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The Ware River Valley Domestic Violence Task Force created a list of A Dozen Books on Consent and Boundaries for ages 0-8. Sets of books were purchased with money from a community grant and given to willing partners including schools, libraries, and pre-schools. Task Force members read books and did theme related art projects with children from partnered sites. The Task Force believes prevention should start as early as possible.
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Visiting health classes is great, but if you can’t get in or want to do something different this is an easy way to reach students that doesn’t require more from a school than letting you set up a table during lunchtime. We recommend asking students to do something before handing out swag i.e. respond to a writing prompt or question. You can also visit lunch tables to give resource material, helpful QR codes, and healthy snacks to students. Be careful and trauma-sensitive when you talk to students and if they aren’t interested leave them alone. Remember they have to return to class and you are leaving shortly. Be sure to let counseling staff know you’ve been there. If you have students who can partner with you or sit at your outreach table this can help get students engaged.
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This 12 week program taught teens about both healthy relationships and effective dialogue skills. Teens then created a video and brought their learning back to their schools.
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