Healthy Youth Relationships

Promoting healthy relationships for youth

Healthy Youth Relationships looks at healthy and unhealthy peer romantic relationships, focusing on communication and prevention skills.

This two-hour program helps young people identify:

• healthy dating relationships and supporting behaviours
• what makes a dating relationship abusive
• anger management techniques
• consent, protection and reporting procedures
• where to find support and community resources.

Trained prevention educators provide the legal definitions and ramifications of physical and sexual assaults, and identify warning signs such as emotional mistreatment. Written scenarios, group work and video support the information.

Youth leave with a summary of important points and community resource information.

 “It always seemed normal. I didn’t even know it was abusive until my friend pointed out that feeling trapped wasn’t healthy feeling in a relationship.” —Grade 12 participant

 “I wasn’t actually raped but had a close call. They should have more education early in high school. It happened when I was 14; if I knew then what I know now I would never have gotten in that situation.” —Grade 11 participant

Prevention Education works!

A formal evaluative study of What’s Love Got To With It?  hosted at the University of Winnipeg in 2002 found that about a week after receiving the presentation:

• half the students who had previously reported using violence in their relationships no longer reported using violence.
• students showed greater understanding of the real possibility of females being abusive towards males in relationships.
• knowledge about how to help a friend who is a victim of sexual assault increased significantly.
• students were more able to correctly identify emotional abuse in a dating realtionship scenario.
• the ability to identify factors that lead to physical assault in relationships was higher in students who had participated in a presentation than students who had not.

To learn more or book a presentation in Canada, e-mail RespectED or contact your local RespectED coordinator