Prevention is the systematic practice of intervening to remove or reduce social, health, and/or behavior problems. The field of prevention is where practitioners attempt to change behavior, often by building core, social-emotional abilities.

Social Emotional Abilities Can Be Taught - With the Right Strategies

Unfortunately, much of what we know about how they can be taught has been developed in treatment settings, where convicted offenders are reeducated after the fact. The community based treatment of choice for convicted rapists is empathy - and it works. The treatment of choice for convicted batterers is anger management training. The treatment of choice for many child molesters is to pair empathy with impulse control training.

But not every prevention strategy works. For many years the field of prevention considered itself exempt from the kind of rigorous self scrutiny other disciplines routinely undertook. The feeling seemed to be that good intentions, plus anecdotal evidence, plus a compelling social need, inevitably would result in a good program.

Unfortunately, reality proved otherwise. The good, the bad, and the just plain goofy existed together until research results began to come in. That research has shown that some things can be taught, and how to best do it.

Teaching kids to "just say no" didn't reduce drug or alcohol use - but teaching broad social skills (the Ripple Effects approach) did.

Telling sales people to identify more with customers doesn't change their results , but giving them systematic training in empathy related behavior, such as active listening, does.

Telling kids to trust their intuition could not effectively shield them from sexual molestation, but teaching them who to tell - and how - (as Ripple Effects programs do) could shorten their victimization.

Getting people to understand what to do in difficult situations was not hard; having them demonstrate how to do it is more problematic, has to be modeled (see Ripple Effects social learning system, peer modeling), and won't "stick" unless the behavior is "fixed" through repetition and transfer training (see Ripple Effects social learning system, transfer training). For access to an online walkthrough of Ripple Effects social learning system, please send us an e-mail.