Click on a class or seminar within each package below for more information
6-10 |
11-13 |
14-19 |
Young Children’s Program (6-10). Our approach children’s personal safety is similar to teaching children other safety skills, like how to cross the street or leave a building during a fire. It is not necessary to discuss details of being hit by a car to teach them to look both ways, or talk abut the perils of a burning building to teach safe conduct. It is also not necessary to discuss details of molestation and abduction to learn boundary-setting and self-defense. The class answers questions children may have already. Education often lowers anxiety by providing a plan and teaching self-reliance. Includes:
•6-Hour Experiential Workshop
In the Children’s Workshop, students practice listening to their intuition and stopping unwanted touch by using their voice and effective body language. They also learn to deal with related issues like guilt, bribes, threats and how to keep telling an adult until they get help. We also teach safety rules with strangers, and physical self-defense techniques to stop abduction and get to safety. We address how to deal with in-the-moment bullying without engaging the person bullying. Our educational model emphasizes concept-based, learned, repetitive role-plays. We teach positive reinforcement and learning through success. Simple safety rules are presented in a straightforward and understandable manner.
Tweens (11-13). Middle-schoolers are in a unique position as they begin to learn about the larger world. Adults want to be sure to shape their impression, but we do not want them to be fully exposed to the reality that we see. This package balances teaching them a healthy perspective on things they will soon be learning about without being too mature. Includes:
•Personal Safety 101 for Tweens
Personal Safety 101 teaches what an assailant is looking for and how to avoid being that target by teaching awareness skills, body language, and using one’s voice to prevent or stop an assault. We also address how our socialization and media images affect how we react in threatening or dangerous situations. We show a video of our courses so that people can see what we do in our experiential classes, but also so that students can see someone who looks like them (size, gender, age, etc.) talking their way out of a bad situation/defending/taking care of themselves. People simply can’t do what they don’t believe is possible, so it’s important to shift those expectations.
•Technology & Safety for Tweens
This seminar includes interactive activities which help connect the “unreal” world of technology to the “real” world. We explore the consequences of using these very public and seemingly – but not actually –anonymous media, which may affect the emotional health of others (by cyber-bullying), one’s reputation among peers (by posted pictures, sexting), or employers or colleges impressions (by “updates”.)
•3-Hour Experiential Workshop
Students learn about their own intuition and how much they already know about determining who might give them a hard time or be up to no good and who they can probably trust in a variety of situations. They practice stopping unwanted touch by using their voice and effective body language. They also learn to deal with related issues like guilt, bribes, threats and how to keep telling an adult until they get help. They learn physical self-defense techniques to stop an assault and get to safety.
Youth Activist Course. Many adults have the pleasure of leading young people who are very motivated by a sense of justice and want to make the world a better place. These classes help give these students a framework for changing the world they live in by educating them about the larger forces at play when discussing violence and injustice, including media influences, socialization, and abusive and healthy relationships. Since physical safety is one of the top concerns for people in the decision of whether bystanders intervene in situations, we encourage physical self-defense skills to be a part of the course to address that concern as well as to boost the student’s presentation overall by having experienced his/her own power. Includes:
•Personal Safety 101 Seminar
Personal Safety 101 teaches what an assailant is looking for and how to avoid being that target by teaching awareness skills, body language, and using one’s voice to prevent or stop an assault. We address how our socialization and media images affect how we react in threatening or dangerous situations. Students have an opportunity to question safety information they have received in the past to discover whether it is relevant or effective.
•The Roots of Violence Seminar
People are assaulted differently based on the way that they are perceived. These perceptions are based on cultural legacies around factors like gender, race, and class. This seminar explores the link between casual use of derogatory language and hate-crimes like gay-bashing or domestic violence. Participants in this seminar identify how the use of this kind of language serves to socialize the behavior of the group or culture they belong to and how this socialization limits personal expression and encourages the continuation of institutional oppression.
•Multi-Media Approach to Choices Seminar
Participants analyze popular images (newsprint, TV, songs, movies, etc) that portray boundary-setting, personal safety, or self-defense to understand the perspective and bias of the media and to better understand the factors of the incidents themselves. We use the media as a tool to identify the choices we have to make around interpersonal relationships.
Participants gain an expanded sense of how to deal with dangerous or complicated situations. They come to see that by making smaller decisions early on, they can avoid increasingly uncomfortable or dangerous situations later. Participants often feel safer by learning that the media usually portrays the most extreme cases of violence, and that they already have skills to avoid the most common situations.
•Consent on Campus Seminar
We shift the idea of consent from “not saying ‘no’” to saying “yes.” Some of the key concepts addressed are that: consent is verbal; obtaining consent is an on-going process in any sexual interaction; and if someone is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, they are not able to give consent. The seminar can be modified to be appropriate for students who are not yet sexually active (i.e. consent for hand holding, kissing, etc.)
•Healthy Relationships Seminar
This seminar examines the behaviors that constitute healthy and unhealthy, or abusive, relationships. We begin with interactive activity to understand the progression along the increasingly controlling and abusive spectrum of domestic violence. Students learn early signs of domestic violence and discuss personal boundaries and choices they make with “lower level” domestic violence. The discussion then turns to healthy relationships and helps the students determine what healthy relationships might look like, and which aspects are particularly valuable for each participant personally.
•3-5-Hour Experiential Verbal and/or Verbal & Physical Intervention Workshop
Participants learn practice a variety of concrete communication skills in realistic role-play scenarios with in-the-moment feedback. Participants learn effective body language and verbal skills to set boundaries appropriately, using strategies such as humanizing, empathizing, de-escalating, etc. These verbal techniques are put to use in intervention situations. In a longer class, participants learn how to stand up for themselves and other physically, which can profoundly change the efficacy of their tone, body language, and verbal skills in interventions.
Also see For At-Risk Clients for more youth services.
