Educational and Skills-Based Interventions for Preventing Relationship and Dating Violence in Adolescents and Young Adults : A Systematic Review

Abstract

Relationship and dating violence is a significant problem among adolescents and young adults. Relationship violence includes a range of violent behaviours, from verbal abuse to physical and sexual assault, and from threats to rape and murder. Currently there are many programmes in schools and universities and within community settings that aim to prevent relationship violence. It is important to establish whether these programmes work and whether they result in long-term reductions in relationship violence. This review looked at the results of 38 studies. The results showed no convincing evidence that the programmes decreased relationship violence, or that they improved participants' attitudes, behaviours and skills related to relationship violence. The results showed that participants' knowledge about relationships improved slightly following the programmes. These results should be interpreted with caution, as individual studies differed in the types of participants and interventions that they used and the ways in which changes were measured. None of the studies looked at the effect of the programmes on physical and mental health. Further studies, which follow participants for a longer period of time and which look at the relationship between attitudes, knowledge, behaviour, skills and the number of times relationship violence occurs, are required to improve our understanding of how well these programmes work.