Use Your Strength: Mobilizing Young Men to Prevent Sexual & Dating Violence

Intermedia proudly offers the new title, Use Your Strength: Mobilizing Young Men to Prevent Sexual and Dating Violence. This film introduces Men Can Stop Rape (MCSR), an award-winning pioneer in youth development programs. In this film, MCSR presents a fresh approach to the problem of sexual violence and date rape. In contrast to traditional efforts, men are not identified as the enemy. Instead, they are treated as allies, vital partners in preventing sexual and dating violence.

Working in classrooms directly with male students, MCSR’s facilitators tap into young men’s native intelligence and good will to help them identify the most powerful male role models in their lives. By emulating these males, and by learning to trust their own logic and good sense, these young men draw conclusions about the proper treatment of women and learn what they must do to foster safe and equitable relationships.

With clarity and conviction, MCSR has offered a program to engage young men, enabling men to transform the dominant messages they hear into messages of integrity and genuine strength. A vital organizing tool.”

Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology, Stony Brook Author of Manhood in America and Guyland

Use Your Strength

Click here for more clips and purchasing information.

Confronting Dating Violence, reminds us: The incidence of assaults on intimate partners is rarely taken as seriously as it should be. And despite various educational campaigns encouraging witnesses to intervene, most people still see relationship abuse as the couple’s problem, not theirs.

Linda Dunphy, executive director of an Arlington, VA, organization called Doorways for Women and Families, wrote in The Washington Post late last year that calls to her office concerning domestic violence had jumped 56 percent from the year before. Some of the situations might have been prevented, she said, had a neighbor, friend, or family member offered help in some fashion.

Link to the Original Article

Teen Dating Violence Prevention Project

February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month! Explore these pages to learn what you can do to celebrate.
The Purpose of Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month

The repercussions of teen dating violence are impossible to ignore – the issue affects not just youth but their families, schools and communities as well. Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month (TDVAM) brings national focus to the issue of teen dating violence, highlights the need to educate our youth about healthy relationships, raises awareness among those who care for them and provides communities with a critical opportunity to work together to prevent this devastating cycle of abuse.
The History of TDVAM

The Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Initiative was spearheaded by teenagers across the nation who chose to take a stand and put a stop to teen dating violence. In 2005, the importance of addressing teen dating violence was highlighted by its inclusion in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

Now supported by dozens of national, state and local organizations, the call to end teen dating violence was formally recognized by Congress in 2006. At that time, both Houses of Congress declared the first full week in February “National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Week.”

For the first time this year, our leaders in Congress are dedicating an entire month to teen dating violence awareness and prevention. To celebrate, we are calling upon government representatives and agencies, public officials, advocates, service providers, schools, parents and youth to take part in programs and activities that promote awareness and prevention of teen dating violence.

Overall, rates of reproductive coercion among family-planning-clinic patients are suprisingly high: about one in five women report their partner having attempted to coerce them into pregnancy. “What we’re seeing is that, in the larger scheme of violence against women and girls, it is another way to maintain control,” says Miller, who studied 1,300 female patients culled from five family-planning clinics in Northern California. “You have guys telling their partners, ‘I can do this because I’m in control’ or ‘I want to know that I can have you forever.’ ” This may help explain previous findings of higher rates of unintended pregnancies in relationships with partner violence.

Click here for the entire article.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Attorney General Eric Holder and Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan are meeting with teen leaders, their parents and program directors from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Start Strong: Building Healthy Teen Relationships initiative to discuss teen dating violence. Youth representing four Start Strong communities: Bridgeport, CT., Boston, MA Providence, RI, and Bronx, NY, are participating, along with their parents, Start Strong site leaders, Esta Soler, President of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, the Start Strong National Program Office, and Kristin Schubert, Program Officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Today’s event is part of the Department of Justice’s year-long commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which is raising public awareness of the many forms of violence against women. Today’s meeting is being held in conjunction with nationwide events as part of the sixth annual It’s Time to Talk Day, organized annually by Liz Claiborne Inc. to draw national attention to the importance of talking about domestic violence, teen dating violence and intimate partner abuse.

Start Strong: Building Healthy Teen Relationships (Start Strong) is the largest initiative ever funded to target 11-to-14-year-olds to promote healthy relationships as the way to prevent teen dating violence and abuse. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Blue Shield of California Foundation* are investing $18 million in 11 communities across the country to identify and evaluate the most promising strategies to stop dating violence and abuse before it starts.

Link to the rest of the article.

A school-based program that integrates information about healthy relationships into the existing ninth-grade curriculum appears to reduce adolescent dating violence and increase condom use two and a half years later, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The effects of the low-cost intervention appear stronger in boys.

In an accompanying editorial, published with the study, Candice L. Odgers, Ph.D, of the University of California, Irvine, and Michael A. Russell, M.A., write:

“This study contributes to what we know about the prevention of adolescent dating violence in two important ways. First, randomization of adolescents to an intervention condition provides support for the position that school-based interventions can have causal effects on adolescents’ romantic relationships, although this may be true only for boys,” they continue. “Second, this study provides proof of principle that effective classroom-based interventions targeting relationship violence can be delivered by leveraging existing resources (e.g., teacher time and modifications to existing curriculum) and for the relatively low cost of $16 per student.”

…29 percent of teens reported having been the victim of sexual abuse, physical abuse or threats of physical abuse from a boyfriend or girlfriend, and 60 percent of teens said they know someone who was the victim of abuse.

Relationship abuse has many serious consequences and one of them can be harm to a woman’s reproductive health. Studies show that relationship or dating abuse can have reproductive health consequences, including unplanned pregnancy and exposure to sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS transmissions. This happens most often to young women.

Link to the complete article