Rebecca Janke

Tools for Violence Prevention, Part II

In the last issue of the Public School Montessorian we looked at 5 of the 11 programs featured in The Blueprints for Violence Prevention Initiative that have been scientifically demonstrated to reduce violence. This column looks at the remaining six which, unfortunately, are all too timely due to recent school shooting at Red Lake High School in Minnesota.

It’s imperative to know what works with youth who are demonstrating anti-social behavior. There are no quick fixes. Troubled young people need multi-faceted approaches within their environment.

Life Skills Training

The most common approaches to substance abuse prevention have involved either the presentation of information concerning the dangers of drug use or the use of classroom discussion and classroom activities designed to enrich youth’s personal and social development. These approaches do not address the risk factors for substance abuse among youth and are largely ineffective.

Life Skills Training (LST), however, is based on an understanding of the causes of tobacco, alcohol and drug use and has been designed to target the psychosocial factors.

LST provides drug-related resistance skills training and general life skills training to students, beginning in sixth or seventh grade. The three-year curriculum includes 15 sessions taught in the first year of the program by regular classroom teachers with booster sessions in years 2 and 3.

The three basic components of the program teach youth:

• self-management skills (e.g., decision-making and problems solving, self-control skills for coping with anxiety, and self-improvement skills)
• social skills (e.g., communication and general social skills)
• information and skills designed to have an impact on youth’s knowledge and attitudes concerning drug use, normative expectations and skills for resisting drug-use influences from the media and peers.

LST has been found to cut alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use among young adolescents by 50- to 75 percent. Long-term results of program reveal a 66-percent reduction in polydrug use (use of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana), a 25-percent reduction in pack-a-day smoking and a decrease in the use of inhalants, narcotics and hallucinogens. Long-term follow-up data reveal that reductions can last through grade 12.

lifeskillstraining.com

Midwestern Prevention Project

Midwestern Prevention Project (MPP), also known as Project STAR, integrates a school-based program with parent, community, mass media and local policy components for promoting significant and lasting changes in youth’s drug-use behavior.

The school program teaches active social learning technique (e.g., modeling, role-playing, discussion) and assigns homework designed to involve family members. The parent education campaign involves parent-child communication training and a parent-principal committee that meets to review the school drug policy. The other three components deliver a consistent message to the community supporting drug-free living.

Collectively, the components focus on promoting youth’s drug-use resistance and counteraction skills, parents’ and other adults’ prevention practices and support of adolescent prevention practices and the community’s dissemination and support of social norms and expectations against drug use.

MPP has reduced marijuana use and daily cigarette smoking by approximately 40 percent among program participants, with smaller reductions in alcohol use. These reductions were maintained through age 12. Reductions in daily smoking, heavy use of marijuana and use of some hard drugs have been shown through early adulthood (age 23). MPP also has helped decrease parental alcohol and marijuana use and increase positive parent-child discussion about drug use prevention.

Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Southern California, 1441 Eastlake Av., MC9175, Los Angeles, CA 90089-917, (323) 865-0327.

Functional Family Therapy

Mounting evidence suggests that removing youth from their homes and families is costly and ineffective. Punitive programs that separate youth and their families can be detrimental to a youth’s long-term progress. Youth’s behavioral problems are deeply embedded in their family and community. To be effective, therefore, interventions should treat youth while addressing their complex multidimensional problems.

Functional Family Therapy (FFT) is a short-term program that has been applied successfully to a wide range of youth and their families. Researchers designed this program to help diverse populations of under-served and at-risk youth and their families who often enter the system angry, hopeless, and/or resistant to treatment.

Phase 1 addresses maladaptive perceptions, beliefs and emotions and helps youth and their families increase hope, expectations of change and respect for individual differences. It promotes understanding of differences in values and trust between family and therapist. Phase 1 also helps reduce resistance and overcome the intense negativity within the family and between the family and community that can prevent change.

Phase 2 develops and implements intermediate and long-term behaviors-change plans that are culturally appropriate, context sensitive and tailored to the unique characteristics of each family member.

Phase 3 FFT clinicians help families apply positive family change to other problem areas and/or situations, maintain changes and prevent relapse. To ensure long-term support of changes, FFT links families with available community resources.

Success has been demonstrated and replicated for more than 25 years. Costs are lower than other treatment programs.

fftinc.com

Multisystemic Therapy

Multisystemic Therapy (MST) was developed to provide cost-effective, community-based treatment to youth with serious behavior disorders who are at high risk of out-of-home placement. MST views individuals as living within a complex social network encompassing individuals, family, peers, school and neighborhood. Behavioral problems can stem from problematic interactions within the social network and MST specifically targets the factors that can contribute to antisocial behavior. MST uses the strengths in each youth’s social network to promote positive change in his or her behavior.

The overriding purpose of MST is to help parents deal effectively with their youth’s behavioral problems; help youth cope with family, peer, school and neighborhood problems and reduce or eliminate the need for out-of-home placements.

To empower families, MST also addresses barriers to effective parenting (e.g., parental drug abuse, parental mental health problems) and helps family members build an indigenous social support network involving friends, extended family, neighborhoods and church members.

Treatment is designed with input from the family being served. Therapists with small caseloads are available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week to provide treatment. They assign developmentally appropriate tasks to youth and their families.

To address the known causes of delinquency, MST focuses on the individual youth and his or her family, peer context, school/vocational performance and neighborhood/community supports. Family interventions seek to promote the parents’ capacity to monitor and discipline their children. Peer interventions remove youth from deviant peer groups and help them develop relationships with pro-social peers.

School/vocational interventions enhance the youth’s capacity for future employment and financial success.

mstservices.com

Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care

Incarceration of youth is costly and may have negative long-term effects. Placing youth in group care with other juvenile delinquents may facilitate further bonding and social identification among group members.

A viable and cost-effective alternative to group care, Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC) recruits, trains and supervises foster families to provide participating youth with close supervision, fair and consistent limits and consequences and a supportive relationship with an adult.

In MTFC, a youth’s contact with delinquent peers is minimized. The youth are supervised closely at home, in the community and at school and mentored by their MTFC parents. MTFC parent training emphasizes behavior management methods to provide youth with a structured and therapeutic living environment.

Evaluations of MTFC youth show they had significantly fewer arrests during a 12-month follow-up than a control group of youth that participated in residential group care programs. MTFC also has been shown to be effective for youth ages 9-18 leaving mental hospital settings.

Quantum Opportunities Program

The Quantum Opportunities Program (QOP) was developed and implemented to benefit youth from families receiving public assistance. QOP provides participating youth with an intensive array of coordinated services and a sustained relationship with peers receiving similar services for the four years they are in high school.

QOP was designed to provide youth with an environment conducive to success, enhancing their skills levels and reinforcing their achievements and positive actions.

A QOP coordinator, who acts as surrogate parent, role model, advisor and disciplinarian, provides services to a small group (no more than 25) of high-risk youth just entering the ninth grade. The group environment helps youth bond with each other and with a caring adult and this bonding appears to make the largest difference in student motivation and success. The program includes 250 hours per year of • educational opportunities (e.g., peer tutoring, computer-based instruction) to enhance basic academic skills

• development opportunities (e.g., family planning, career and college planning, cultural enrichment, personal development) and
• community service opportunities (e.g., volunteering, working at public events).
Financial incentives are offered to increase participation, completion and long-range planning.

oicofamerica.org/QOP.asp

Funding and Training

The federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, at the Training and Technical Assistance Division, supports the replication of Blueprints programs and has helped create a complete package of programs, technical assistance and process evaluations for states, communities, schools and local agencies that are attempting to address the problems of violence, crime and substance abuse.

ojjdp.ncjrs.org

Rebecca Janke, a former Montessori teacher and owner of Hudson (WI) Children’s House, is co-founder and executive director of Growing Communities for Peace, a non-profit organization specializing in training K-12 peace educators and providing human rights and peace education resources to teachers, parents and children at www.humanrightsandpeacestore.org. She is the co-author of Peacemaker’s A,B,C’s for Young Children and The Compassionate Rebel which shows how ordinary people are working for nonviolence and social change. She serves on the Executive Board of Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers and can be reached at pe...@umn.edu.