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Media
Kit: Resist Media
Kit: Research Media
Kit: Software |
Past Press Release Could software prevent the next school shooting? San Francisco, CA - April 27, 1999 - The day after the Columbine tragedy, policeman Jim Hernandez, a former gang member who now teaches life skills to teens in Concord, California high schools, asked his students: could it happen here? Fearfully, students answered: Yes. "The way you can prevent this," Hernandez told them, "is to change the way you treat people. We need to move from mean-crude-and-rude, to nice-kind-and-polite." Hernandez has been working with a new software program called Ripple Effects for Teens to do just that. "This program is helping to make nice-kind-and-polite cool." As America does some soul searching in the wake of Columbine, it's easy to get caught in a cycle of blame: media violence, availability of guns, family breakdown, youth alienation. In the quest for solutions, it may seem preposterous to suggest that interacting with software could prevent the next school yard massacre. But one national leader in violence prevention, Alice Ray, thinks it can. Her grandfather was murdered when her father was just six weeks old. Her grandmother died while having an abortion. Her aunt died after an angel costume she was wearing caught fire. Every case of violence is different, and there are no easy solutions, as Ray's own stories make clear. Over a decade ago, Ray did some research on the problem of violence and found that all people who hurt people lacked at least one of seven key social-emotional skills. Out of that work, she conceived a groundbreaking curriculum for children that has been shown to work and is used in thousands of U.S. classrooms. She's been speaking, writing, training, and reflecting on these issues ever since. "Our problem is not that we know too little about youth violence, but that the huge mound of what we do know isn't practically available to us." So Ray turned to technology. "It's counterintuitive to think that computers could teach empathy to humans, but they can," says Ray. "For the first time, computers have enabled us to put together in one place the whole spectrum of proven strategies, and to do it in a way that engages young people." The result is Ripple Effects for Teens, a multimedia database of social topics and life skill training with a hip look and feel. Students can use Relate to get help with topics like teasing, being a loner, cliques, bullying and empathy. This month at the Relate web site, teens can learn about handling grief, preventing violence, and what to do if they hear a student making threats to kill. And they can do all this confidentially, approaching the material in whatever way they learn best. "In the wake of intense public focus on how media and technology are being used to spread hate and divisiveness, it's time to talk about how technology can be part of the solution," says Relate producer Sarah Berg. "In an era where many teens trust their computers more than they trust their parents," adds Ray, "Relate may offer the best coping strategy yet." Relate is the first in a series of social learning tools from San Francisco-based Ripple Effects. In response to the Columbine tragedy, Ripple Effects is making its School Safety Profiler available free on the web. To learn more, contact Ripple Effects at (888) 259-6618. Visit the teen website at www.rippleeffects.com/resist/teens. |
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