Safe Dates — School-Based Dating-Abuse Prevention Curriculum, North Carolina

Safe Dates was developed by Vangie Foshee at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is published by Hazelden. It combines nine 50-minute classroom sessions, a student-performed play and a poster contest, with community elements (support groups, crisis services, parent education). Topics include defining caring relationships, why people abuse, gender stereotypes and equal power in communication.
In the original trial, 14 public schools in a rural North Carolina county were paired and randomised to intervention or control, with about 1,700 eighth- and ninth-graders followed over five waves across four years. CrimeSolutions reports significantly less psychological, physical and sexual abuse perpetration and less physical abuse victimisation in the intervention group at four years, with no significant difference in sexual victimisation. Blueprints reports a 25% reduction in psychological abuse perpetration at one month and 56–92% less reported physical, serious physical and sexual dating violence at four years.
Caveats: only one study meets Blueprints' standards and it was run by the developer; attrition was about 50% by the four-year follow-up; and the booster-session group created an imbalance. Cost in Blueprints' worked example is about $17.40 per student in year one. CrimeSolutions rates it Effective (one study); Blueprints rates it Promising.

Read the full analysis: https://www.blueprintsprograms.org/programs/44999999/safe-dates/