Prevention with Youth

Our prevention programs with children, teens, and adults provide education on healthy relationships to break the cycle of violence. Whether delivering content in schools, leading professional trainings, or facilitating groups for men and boys, our work challenges the systems and social norms that perpetuate violence and empowers individuals to live safely throughout their lives.

Healthy Relationships

MAAV’s Healthy Relationships programs run at the Melrose elementary, middle and high schools. As children grow, the program addresses challenges they are likely to encounter in their relationships and builds understanding and skills to support healthy ones.

The elementary program focuses on the skills needed to create and maintain healthy relationships and the signs of healthy and unhealthy friendships. The program builds from that first lesson to seed other key understandings about boundaries, consent and bullying prevention through upstander actions.

At MVMMS, 8th graders start the Healthy Relationships program by attending an annual talk given by a teen dating violence survivor. During the week that follows, students participate in evidence-based workshops and interactive sessions centered on building healthy relationship skills before and as they start dating. The content and learning seeks to reduce behaviors that increase the risk for dating violence, like substance abuse and sexual risk-taking.

All participating 8th graders complete an evaluation of the course. In 2024, 100% of students reported that they could identify different types of abuse and 98% of students reported that they knew the ingredients of a healthy relationship.

Student Action Board

Established in 1998 to enable student input into MAAV’s prevention programs, the Student Action Board (SAB) has grown significantly over the past decades. Today, ~27 MHS students are selected to serve as SAB peer mentors each year following a competitive application process.

The SAB delivers healthy relationship promotion, teen dating violence and sexual assault prevention to 9th-grade MHS students, leading interactive discussions on topics such as alcohol and consent, boundaries, sexual harassment, and more.

The SAB also supports community awareness events.. SAB members plan and lead the Voices Against Violence community coffeehouse and represent SAB at the annual MAAV Walk & Candlelight Vigil. When their schedules allow, SAB members deliver programming to Melrose elementary and middle school students.

To further community awareness efforts, SAB member Amanda Lanza produced a video on sexual assault, “Every Two Minutes,” in 2003 that went on to win several student filmmaker awards. The video, updated in 2008 and then again in 2013, can be viewed here. In 2009, the SAB won Northeastern University’s Jackson Katz Award for Social Justice in honor of its work in the areas of teen dating violence and sexual assault prevention.

Group Mentoring

Research shows that facilitated teen support groups that provide group mentoring – and focus on early intervention and prevention – reduce teen dating violence.

For boys in particular, these support groups reduce rates of both physical and sexual violence perpetration and victimization. They also lessen reactive and proactive aggressive behaviors in both boys and girls who have already been exposed to violence. Further, support groups have been shown to mobilize youth leaders and promote safer schools and communities overall.

Leveraging this research, MAAV uses Expect Respect, an evidence-based curriculum “built on an ecological, trauma-informed model” to run boys and girls support groups at MVMMS. The support groups provide mentoring and skill-building around a variety of topics, including:

Healthy relationship skills
Healthy coping skills
Feelings identification & language
Active listening
Exploring past & current relationships
Warning signs in relationships
Gender norm exploration
Boundaries & consent
Reducing stress & symptoms of trauma