A Comprehensive Technical Package for the Prevention of Youth Violence and Associated Risk Behaviors

Course overview

This course is based upon material published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is available as an open access article. This course presents a select group of strategies based on the best available evidence to help communities and states sharpen their focus on prevention activities with the greatest potential to prevent youth violence and its consequences. These strategies include promoting family environments that support healthy development; providing quality education early in life; strengthening youth skills; connecting youth to caring adults and activities; creating protective community environments; and intervening to lessen harms and prevent future risk. The strategies presented in this course include those with a focus on preventing youth violence from happening in the first place as well as approaches to reduce the immediate and long-term harms of youth violence in order to prevent future violence. Preventing youth violence requires multiple, complementary strategies, and those outlined in the course reflect the mature research-base about how to strengthen individual skills and relationships to prevent youth violence. It also includes promising evidence about ways to address broader community issues that affect the likelihood of youth violence. This course supports CDCs STRYVE initiative for preventing youth violence. In particular, this course articulates a select set of strategies and specific approaches to achieve STRYVEs vision of safe and healthy youth achieving their full potential. This course on youth violence prevention is designed for social workers, professional counselors, psychologists, nurses, and substance abuse counselors, who do clinical work. This course is appropriate for beginning, intermediate and advanced level practitioners who wish to develop or increase their knowledge of youth violence and its prevention. The course material includes a review of interventions. It may also be useful for licensed clinicians who require clinical continuing education courses for license renewal. Authors: David-Ferdon, Vivolo-Kantor, Dahlberg, Marshall, Rainford, and Hall Learning Objectives: This course will provide the practitioner with detailed information regarding the prevention of youth violence. Specifically, a professional will: Recognize family environments that support healthy development Demonstrate how to connect youth to caring adults and activities Summarize strategies to create protective community environments Citation: David-Ferdon, C., Vivolo-Kantor, A. M., Dahlberg, L. L., Marshall, K. J., Rainford, N. & Hall, J. E. (2016). A Comprehensive Technical Package for the Prevention of Youth Violence and Associated Risk Behaviors. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.