engleski

Victimisation prevention - development and pilot - implementation of BE SAFE Croatian prevention program

Prevention programs in the field of children’s victimization and runaways are widely present in literature and significant number of studies so far provided solid knowledge base for development of similar programs based on principles of effective prevention programs (Finkelhor, Asdigian & Dziuba- Leatherman, 1995 ; van der Kolk, 2005 ; Brenick, Shattuck, Donlan, Duh & Zurbriggen, 2014). Respecting the findings from literature, in the process of prevention program development it is necessary to follow few guidelines and principles in order to create a foundation for development of evidence- based intervention: (1) program is based on research findings in the field of missing children, runaways and victimization of children and youth as well as on the results of evaluation studies conducted within prevention program development and wide implementation ; (2) content is developed on the knowledge about risk and protective factors and it is based on needs assessment of target group for prevention program ; (3) it is mostly delivered through interactive methods of teaching and learning and use advantages of experience learning ; (4) respect the socio-cultural context regarding target population and environment of implementation ; and (5) involve critical thinking strategies and social skills development that empower participants in coping with future potential (personal or witnessed) victimization situation. Within the framework of the project «116 000 Hotline for Missing Children Croatia», led by Centre for Missing and Exploited Children Osijek, team from Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb (partner institution) developed and with training of trainers prepared the pilot- implementation of prevention program BE SAFE – prevention program of victimization of children and youth based on national and international examples and experiences of interventions in this field, the results of Croatian and international studies of runaways and missing children, and based on principles of effective prevention programs. BE SAFE is Croatian prevention program that deals with runaways and victimization of children and youth targeting students from elementary school aged 12-14 and children and youth from social welfare institutions (for children and youth without adequate parental care or children and youth with behavioral problems) aged 12-18. General aim of the program is to prevent victimization of children and youth through empowering them with self-protective skills and behavior. Specific goals of the program are following: (1) to empower children and youth for recognizing potentially dangerous situations and possible consequences of such a situations with special emphasize on runaways from home and institutions ; (2) to develop self-protective skills for situations of danger or personal or witnessed victimization ; and (3) to exercise social skills - problem solving skills, assertiveness skills, skills for supporting self-control and skill of help seeking. Program is consisted of structured series of 6 workshops, which combination opens the possibilities to use target population specific set of workshops and therefore program is actually consisted of 3 subprograms: 1. subprogram of universal prevention for students in elementary schools aged 12–14 (3 workshops) ; 2. subprogram of selective prevention of runaways and victimization of children and youth from social welfare institutions aged 12- 8 (6 workshops) ; 3. subprogram of runaways prevention for children and youth from social welfare institutions aged 12 – 18 (4 workshops). 76 Program BE SAFE is based on interactive methods of learning and teaching such as discussions, role playing, problem solving, critical thinking strategies and building on personal experience and examples from everyday life of program participants in order to gain insight in principles of self- protective behavior in potentially dangerous situations. Besides the mentioned, in program are interactive activities, exercises and games widely used with purpose of stimulating the creative problem-solving process. With the purpose of prearranging pilot-implementation of BE SAFE prevention program there was training of trainers conducted. One-day training (10 hours) was performed by authors of the program and was involving all important parts of program implementation: raising knowledge on theoretical and research base of the program and programs principles, characteristics and philosophy ; experience learning about the workshops by the Handbook for implementers ; preparation for workshops delivery and workshops delivery with other trainers ; and preparation for implementation of the program in specific environment. Trained trainers delivered the BE SAFE intervention with target populations during May and June 2018 as a pilot- implementation which means that program delivery involved smaller number of participants and more emphasize is given to process evaluation over effectiveness evaluation. Reason for that is the goal of piloting the intervention – it is aimed to testing the new intervention and improving the intervention itself according to provided feedback from participants and implementers about usefulness and adequacy of the program, more than to find evidence of effectiveness. For that purposes following instruments were developed that are tailor-made for this program: (1) Monitoring form – for trainers after each lesson/workshop ; and (2) Questionnaire for program participants – process evaluation survey on participants’ satisfaction and participants’ self-perception of program benefits. In this presentation feedback and experiences collected from implementers and participants of pilot-implementation will be discussed. Regarding the fact that in the moment of submitting the abstract data are still in the phase of collecting and analyzing no results are showed here, but it can be expected to learn about it from conference presentation.

missing children, victimization prevention, prevention of runaways, principles of effective prevention programs, pilot-implementation, process evaluation

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