For more information, contact Cindy Young, (937) 775-3232.

August 21, 1998

WSU VIOLENCE PREVENTION PROGRAM
EXPANDS TO TEENS IN 14 STATES

National headlines about youth violence are no longer reserved for major metropolitan cities. Rural towns like Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark., now share the notoriety of children killing children with cities like Chicago.

An Ohio program in violence prevention, one of two federally funded to address youth violence, has expanded to rural hamlets as well as urban areas in 14 states. Originally designed to teach violence prevention to at-risk African-American youth in an inner-city, Dayton, Ohio, high school, the program now encompasses all racial and ethnic groups at every economic level.

"We've concentrated the training in states where the homicide rate exceeds the national average," said Betty Yung, director of the Center for Child and Adolescent Violence Prevention at Wright State University. Professionals in Oregon, Arizona, Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, S. Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Michigan are being trained to bring the program into their local schools.

The Positive Adolescent Choices Training (PACT) program was developed by Yung and Wright State colleague Rodney Hammond 10 years ago to teach youth anger management and give them alternatives to using aggression. Today it is nationally recognized not only for its quality training materials, but also because it is one of the few violence prevention programs in the country to have tracked long-term behavioral outcomes. In 1995, PACT was one of only four national programs reviewed and endorsed by the General Accounting Office as a promising initiative for addressing school violence.

Thanks to a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, educators and health professionals across the country who attend WSU's Violence Prevention Training Institute learn not only how to implement the PACT program in their communities, but also how to train their colleagues in its techniques.

"Violence has always been considered a criminal justice problem," said Yung. "But when you consider that homicide is the second leading cause of death among teenagers, you have to treat violence as the health problem that it is. We're training school-based health service providers as well as educators and administrators."

The program teaches trainers to help kids from age 10 to 18 understand their feelings of anger and know what to do with those feelings. "We call it 'giving it, taking it and working it out,'" said Yung, whose interest in youth violence prevention began in the late 1960s when, as a youth probation officer, she first saw a 16-year-old in court for murder. "We train facilitators to work with kids on how to tell someone they are angry, how to deal with someone being angry with them, and how to negotiate and reach a compromise."

Other aspects of the training, such as group behavior management and parent training, prepare the professional to deal with at-risk youth. Yung recently observed two newly trained facilitators in a PACT program at a school in Louisville, Ky. "They were halfway through the program," she said," when the principal of the school told me that six of the 13 kids had already murdered someone."

With the exception of some cultural adaptations for different racial and ethnic groups, the program for city and rural schools is the same. "We emphasize tying the content of the program to the concerns of the adolescents we're dealing with," said Yung. "One of the changes we've made is to recognize that youth violence is a problem that extends beyond the African-American community."

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