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Recently, we turned our focus on family skills training in substance abuse prevention. This is a new area of interest to us, but we are very excited to start working on this because scientific research has proved it is a very effective approach to prevent children and youth from using substances and other risky behaviour.

In October we held a Technical Consultation Meeting in Vienna, where we invited researchers, practitioners and programme managers from 12 countries around the world. During the three day meeting the participants agreed on guidelines and principles for effective implementation and cultural adaptation of family skills training programmes. We are planning to publish these in early 2008 to provide guidance for policy makers and project managers who are interested in family skills training.

In fact, we started our work already before the meeting when we began to collect information on family skills training programmes that have been used in substance abuse prevention around the world. We want to identify as many examples as possible of evidence based family skills programmes for our review. So far, we have received quite many responses from most parts of the world and we are still looking.

The experts, who attended the Technical Consultation Meeting, also helped us to set the criteria for family skills training programmes that will allow us to find among the volume of responses we have received the programmes with best evidence, programmes with promising evidence, and the programmes with an evidence-based content. The idea is that at the end we will have a list of evidence based programmes, each with a short description. In this way, a policy maker or a programme manager that would like to start a family skill programme would already have a list of evidence based programmes to choose from. We hope to be able to publish this list online next year.

If you know of a family skills programme or if you are yourself developing or implementing one, we would like to ask you to fill in the forms to share the details of your programme with us. You can find the form in English, French, Spanish, Russian and Portugese.

Otherwise, keep watching this space for updates on activities!

  

These are tools that have been developed by the Global Youth Network project on the basis of both the experience of our Network members and of international research. The Global Youth Network has not produced tools on this prevention approach yet.

 

This section includes some articles about good practices in the field of drug abuse prevention that have been sent out on the youthnet listerv. The Global Youth Network has not published articles on this prevention approach yet.


UNODC works in prevention also through our Field Offices, who often produce prevention materials suited to different countries and regions.
We have tried to pull them together here, in case there is something relevant for your country and region. Moreover, like you, we are constantly looking around for interesting materials from other organisations and we provide you with a link or a scanned copy. Please note that in this case, UNODC is not responsible for the content of the site.

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New! New! New! New! New! New! New!

Strengthening Families Programme

This site contains the results of a research supported by The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service's Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) in 1999. The results are provided in the form of a list and a description of programmes which have been proven to be effective. Programmes are also cathegorised in a matrix according to the level of prevention (universal, selective, indicated) and the age of the children of the families (0-5, 6-10, 11-18, 0-18).

http://www.strengtheningfamilies.org/

Center for Substance Abuse Prevention - CSAP (U.S.A.)

Parenting IS Prevention training

This is a curriculum for training parents that will act as mobilisers in the community

http://p2001.health.org/PIP/pipttl.htm

 

Drugs Prevention Advisory Service - DPAS (U.K.)

Taking The Message Home: Involving Parents in Drugs Prevention

A paper reporting on a research study to find out more about the practicalities of involving parents in drug prevention activities and equipping them with valuabla new knowledge and skills.

http://www.drugs.gov.uk/publication-search/dpas/DPASPaper5.pdf?view=Binary

 

IREFREA (Europe)

Family: The Challenge of Prevention of Drug Use
Family Relationships and Primary Prevention of Drug Use in Early Adolescence

These are two publications by Irefrea, a professional European network for the promotion and research of prevention of drug and other child and adolescent problems. These publications are very research oriented, but they are less user friendly.

"Family: the challenge of prevention of drug use"
http://www.irefrea.org/pdf/family_2001.pdf

"Family Relationships and Primary Prevention of Drug Use in Early Adolescence"
http://www.irefrea.org/pdf/family.pdf

 

Northeast Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies - NortheastCAPT - (U.S.A.)

Family-based Prevention: Critical Components
Strengthening Families and Protecting Children from Substance Abuse

Two publications of the Northeast CAPT summarising evidence on effective family-based approaches. You can find them both at:

http://www.northeastcapt.org/products/critical/index.html

 

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Last updated 22 November 2007

 

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