Relationship Violence Prevention Education in Schools: What's Working, What's Getting in the Way, and What are Some Future Directions

Abstract

This article summarizes five K-12 school-based dating violence prevention curricula/programs that have gone through some form of evaluation and peer review. These programs were selected as a result of a broad and comprehensive review of the relationship violence literature that has been published in the past decade. Program objectives, components, outcomes, and evaluation procedures are compared and discussed. The programs that were reviewed were generally found to be not very effective at preventing relationship violence in the short term, and less effective in the long term, suggesting the need for more program depth, length, and a systematic, longitudinal process for collecting and analyzing data. Reasons for a lack of overall effectiveness in addition to suggestions for future programs and evaluations are discussed.