Over the past 8 months, Prepare has undergone an outreach campaign to meet researchers, community partners, and other experts in the violence prevention field. We’ve been thrilled to connect with over 20 groups working toward similar goals, to learn from them, and share our resources. What we discovered was external validation for Prepare’s approaches – our topics and methods were strongly supported by research and best practices.
Identifying & Responding to Child Sexual Grooming Behaviors
We met several researchers focused on preventing child sexual abuse. As they shared their evidence-based programs, it was validating to see that Prepare’s curriculum covers many of the topics they emphasize. This includes telling kids that they have control over their bodies, that someone they know can hurt them, that touch shouldn’t be a secret, and that it’s never the child’s fault. Similarly, we practice assertive boundary-setting responses and identify whom to go to for help.
Prepare takes these lessons further by working with students across multiple sessions, meeting them at different developmental stages, and practicing skills via interactive role plays in realistic scenarios with individualized coaching.
One of the research teams identified a Sexual Grooming Model with 5 stages and 42 behaviors strongly correlated with child sexual abuse. We noticed that our lessons for children, faculty, and parents already addressed how to identify and respond to these very behaviors, such as isolation, favoritism, sexualized comments, drugs and alcohol, secrecy, threats, and more. When we invited the research team to observe our class, they felt that Prepare’s program was a strong response to sexual grooming behaviors, and we used their feedback to make it even stronger.
We’ve collaborated with them to do program evaluation, which launched last month. The evaluation measures whether our program improves children’s abilities to recognize and respond to sexual grooming behaviors, and we expect strong results.
Restorative Justice
Circles of Peace uses peacemaking circle techniques and restorative practices to bring individuals who have been abusive together with willing family members, supporters, a trained facilitator, and community volunteers. We learned about this program through researchers at NYU’s Center on Violence and Recovery, and were intrigued to find overlap with our own work.
“Experiencing personal power is healing.” This was a main takeaway from Peace Circles, which breaks down hierarchies and promotes open communication by giving everyone an equal opportunity to participate (or not), affirming each person’s agency. Prepare’s programs also allow students to experience embodied power by physically resisting a credible threat, thus giving power back to survivors who’ve had it taken away from them and creating a healing effect, according to research. Prepare also affirms students’ agency by offering options for participation and respecting each person’s decision to pass.
Both programs are experiential – you can read about them, but you won’t really understand their transformative nature until you go try it for yourself. Both thrive because of group support and community-building. Both create safer spaces, where participation is encouraged but not required. And finally, Prepare is already using some circle approaches in its opening and closing circles in class!
After all this, we couldn’t help but wonder: What might happen if we combined these two powerful programs?
Working With Men & Boys
While anyone can commit violence, men are much more likely than women to be both perpetrators and victims of interpersonal violence. Approximately 5% of boys experience child sexual abuse, a number that is likely underreported. Ensuring that our messages resonate with boys and young men is therefore critical to primary violence prevention.
We connected with Equimundo, A Call to Men, and No Harm Life, three nonprofit organizations that engage men and boys to promote healthier lives, gender equality, and a reduction in violence. We immediately noticed significant overlap between the topics in their work and what we teach: unpacking gender roles and what they mean for safety, examining healthy and unhealthy relationships, practicing emotional regulation, learning consent education, and integrating bystander intervention approaches.
We also discovered “Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies That Work – And Why” by Michael Reichart and Richard Hawley. The book outlines 8 key strategies that lead to engaging lessons for boys, and it turns out we’ve already incorporated many of these. For example, we practice motor activity with our physical resistance skills and role play, and performance with our verbal skills. We plan to incorporate more strategies where possible to ensure our lessons are engaging for all students, including men and boys.
Intimate Partner Violence Treatment Programs
Finally, we also met social workers who had worked on an innovative treatment program for Intimate Partner Violence, and again, there was significant overlap in goals and methods. Common program elements included understanding violence, emotional regulation under stress, communication strategies, analyzing gender roles, and understanding healthy relationships. The methodologies were also familiar: sessions are done in a group setting, which builds community, grounding techniques are practiced so that participants can respond calmly under pressure, relevant examples are analyzed, and response options are brainstormed, and skills are modeled and practiced via roleplays.
Our Approach
It’s not just about what we teach, but how we teach that was validated. Our trauma-informed, non-victim-blaming approaches aligned strongly with other program methodologies. Our program is inclusive, with gender-neutral language and acknowledgement of how race, sexuality, gender, and other intersecting factors may affect someone’s options and decisions. We also saw broad agreement that group programs help build connection and support. A common recommendation from similar programs was how important it was to work with the whole school community – faculty, administrators, and parent engagement is essential. Also, programs need to be age-appropriate, and our classes have been adapted to be relevant for students at every stage in their development.
These are only a few examples of the range of experts we met with. We also met with inspiring people researching non-traditional treatments for trauma therapy, working to prevent sex trafficking in neighborhoods with a high prevalence, creating assessments to identify the risk of intimate partner violence, or training hospital staff on how to care for survivors of domestic violence. We enjoyed each of these meetings and have learned so much from those who took the time to speak with us.
Ultimately, Prepare’s program already incorporates many aspects of similar evidence-based programs. Our skills have broad applicability, and many interventions would benefit from incorporating Prepare’s curriculum. And finally, one thing was incredibly clear – the need and demand for violence prevention programs like ours is stronger than ever.