Sexual violence among adolescents remains a persistent social and public health issue. Prevention approaches tend to be designed and executed by adults, with young people serving limited roles. Getting young people involved in the field of prevention can be a lofty goal for community-based organizations, who often work with limited time, capacity, funds, and resources to build impactful youth programs. Young people have grown up observing injustices in their communities and have clear, actionable ideas for addressing sexual violence and advancing social change. Unfortunately, little has explained how and why centering youth voices and leadership matters in sexual violence prevention efforts and how it can be done. In this paper, a collection of youth leaders use interview data from a participatory evaluation of a groundbreaking youth-centered prevention program to introduce the Youth-Led Program to Prevention Model. Using members’ testimonies and co-constructed analysis, and inspired by ripple effect and ecological models, the Youth-Led Program to Prevention Model showcases how youth-centered activism and education can advance the goals of sexual violence prevention and impact young people, communities, and systems. Written by youth leaders themselves and based on their lived experiences in the evaluated program, this paper accompanies the Youth-Led Program to Prevention Model with actionable strategies for practitioners who wish to celebrate young people’s contributions and visions for change.
Hjelm et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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