Albion Fellows Bacon Center has recently purchased the following curriculums to incorporate in our school presentations. Descriptions of these curriculums are described below.

SAFE DATES

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every year, 1 in 4 adolescents experience verbal, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse from a dating partner.
It is imperative to stop dating violence before it ever starts. Safe Dates, second edition, can help with that. This evidence-based program helps teens recognize the difference between caring, supportive relationships and controlling, manipulative, or abusive relationships. It is during the critical pre-teen and teen years that young people begin to learn the skills needed to create and foster positive relationships. With Safe Dates, young people are given the tools needed to build these skills.

Highly engaging and interactive, Safe Dates reflects the issues faced by today’s teens. The curriculum includes:

• Updated statistics and facts
• Information on dating abuse through technology
• All handouts and parent resources on CD-ROM
• New Families for Safe Dates program to get families talking about healthy dating relationships and dating abuse

Safe Dates has been designated as a Model Program by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and was selected for the National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP), receiving high ratings on all criteria.

Information taken from Safe Dates

Choose Respect

Choose Respect is an initiative to help adolescents form healthy relationships to prevent dating abuse before it starts. This national effort is designed to motivate adolescents to challenge harmful beliefs about dating abuse and take steps to form respectful relationships.

Unhealthy relationship behaviors can start early and last a lifetime. According to recent research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one in 11 adolescents reports being a victim of physical dating violence. Even more startling, adolescents who report experiencing dating violence are also more likely to report binge drinking, suicide attempts, physical fighting and current sexual activity.

Choose Respect is designed to encourage positive action on the part of adolescents to form healthy, respectful relationships. Research for the initiative shows most adolescents have positive, healthy attitudes about their relationships with others. Choose Respect seeks to reinforce and sustain these positive attitudes among adolescents as they get older and begin to enter dating relationships by:

• Providing effective messages for adolescents, parents, caregivers and teachers that encourage them to choose to treat themselves and others with respect.
• Creating opportunities for adolescents and parents to learn about positive relationship behaviors.
• Increasing adolescents’ ability to recognize and prevent unhealthy, violent relationships.
• Promoting ways for a variety of audiences to get information and other tools to prevent dating abuse.

Choose Respect reaches out to adolescents, ages 11 to 14, because they’re still forming attitudes and beliefs that will affect how they are treated and how they treat others. The initiative also connects with parents, teachers, youth leaders and other caregivers who influence the lives of young teens.

Information from Choose respect website. For more information on this curriculum, visit Choose respect website by clicking here.