Policy Recommendations

Every morning, parents send their kids off from home to school. But are schools creating the kinds of healthy environments in hallways and schoolyards that we want for our children? Parents and teachers can play a big role in making sure healthy school environments are a reality in every school and that teen dating violence prevention is included in school policies and practices.
To support schools looking to foster a culture of healthy relationships and prevent teen dating violence, Start Strong developed the “School Policy to Increase Student Safety.” This policy toolkit is unique because it offers schools best practices around the prevention of dating violence, as well as guidelines for early intervention and crisis response.

This technical package represents a select group of strategies based on the best available evidence to help communities and states sharpen their focus on prevention activities with the greatest potential to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) and its consequences across the lifespan. These strategies include teaching safe and healthy relationship skills; engaging influential adults and peers; disrupting the developmental pathways toward IPV; creating protective environments; strengthening economic supports for families; and supporting survivors to increase safety and lessen harms. The strategies represented in this package include those with a focus on preventing IPV, including teen dating violence (TDV), from happening in the first place or to prevent it from continuing, as well as approaches to lessen the immediate and long-term harms of partner violence. Commitment, cooperation, and leadership from numerous sectors, including public health, education, justice, health care, social services, business and labor, and the government can bring about the successful implementation of this package.

This policy brief presents the distilled research and critical thinking of a diverse group of local and national experts in the field of child sexual abuse and exploitation. Prevention Institute assembled this team and coordinated their efforts with the generous funding and support of the Ms. Foundation for Women. This brief focuses on strategies that hold the greatest promise for transforming communities and preventing child abuse and exploitation.

Social change leaders, policy advocates and nonprofit organizations spend a significant amount of time in response mode. We work diligently to address a social problem or issue with less thought as to how the problem came to be in the first place. We tend to focus on the immediate needs of groups and communities rather than the structures and systems that have created the problem or erected significant barriers to getting the problem solved.

Existing social problems and issues are made worse or compounded by public policies that do not take into consideration the needs of communities or fail to address the structures and systems that maintain inequalities and discrimi-nation.

Over the last three decades, we have learned a tremendous amount about organizing for social and policy change. One of the most valuable lessons is that for authentic change to happen, we must be mindful of our frameworks and approaches to movement-building and advocacy efforts.

Leading at the Intersections: An Introduction to the Intersectional Model for Policy & Social Change calls on all of us—from the small grassroots organiza-tion to the mighty foundation to legislators—to shift our frame and the way we think about social and policy change. It is a starting point and a tool to begin the conversation of how we turn this important corner without losing individuals, groups and communities along the way