- [Voiceover] Welcome to
a PreventConnect podcast.
Where we explore the prevention
of violence against women.
This is a project of
The California Coalition
of Sexual Assault.
Hi I'm Allan Creighton
I am Social Justice Health Educator
at University of California at Berkeley
which means I do a lot work
programming on campus on
preventing violence against women
and working on racial inequity
and other kinds of hate violence.
- I'm Paul Kivel
I'm a violence prevention,
and social justice educator,
writer, and activist.
I work with young people and adults
trying to come up with
solutions to community problems.
Working across lines
of class, race, gender,
sexual orientation and other differences.
- Twenty years ago the
program that we developed
was based on work we were
doing in high school classes
with young people particularly on dating
and other kinds of sexual violence
between young people male to female.
So that volume included a
two-day script for such classes.
How to run a youth support group
for people who were survived,
young people who survived those abuse.
And background thinking about
how class and race and
other kinds of differences
operate in the classroom
and how that can affect
how we work with young people.
In the last twenty years
not only has the world changed
and many more issues are quite prominent
in young peoples' lives,
but we have developed
a lot of new materials to deal with
and face some of these issues.
Obviously in twenty years
there has been a huge wealth
transfer in the United States.
Schools are increasingly
problematic places,
education is harder to get.
Young peoples lives have been changed
by the social media and the internet.
Where in the United States i'ts had more
in several places than the world now.
And there are many more prominent issues
in young peoples lives for example
recent new changes around
gay youth and transgender youth.
So, what we intend to
do with this new volume
is sort of since we have
produced curricula since then
that work in classrooms and
develop scripts and stuff,
we decided to take this original volume
and change it and make
it kind of a base volume
to deal with the other
supports the other curricula we do.
This volume includes new material on
immigrant youth, on transgender
and trans-phobia issues on
dealing with disability and
ableism among young people.
Much more material on class
and economic differences.
New sections on Christian
dominance in the classroom.
Lots of new materials,
lots of new thinking.
- Really we started this work in 1979-1980
and we went into the classroom
and working with young people
and we had a set agenda
what we thought they needed
and very quickly they gave us
a lot of push back around that.
They said it's not actually,
of course there's we do some violence
in our relationships, but there's a lot
of different kinds of
violence in our lives.
There's gay bashing, and hate crimes,
and family violence, and gangs.
And there's also a lot of
institutional violence in our lives.
There's police brutality
and racial profiling
and look at the state of our schools.
And so we really listen to young people
carefully over the years to respond
to their needs to build community
which, you know, a lot
of violence prevention
is about individual change, it's not about
building community and
helping young people
develop the skills to actually
deal with their own problems.
So the community building became more
and more a central piece of our work.
And of course the standing for justice
is because people are already
out on the front lines
of social justice struggles.
They wanna make a difference and often
they're not given the tools and resources
and information to be able to do that.
In fact, every time they do come together
they're often interrupted by adults
and seen as dangerous or disruptive.
So, we really wanted this book
to be a tool that both
young people and adults
can use to come together
across differences
to identity their problems and move out
into the world and
really make a difference.
- I think in that way,
this book has really written us.
It comes out of many years
of working with a lot
young people and young people pushing us.
And not only pushing us,
but an extended array
of people who do this kind of work,
facilitators who are training community
that we have been involved with.
So, there are many many
voices that actually
show up in the thinking of in this book.
And certainly what shows up most
is what we have been learning.
Sometimes against our will
for the young people that we work with.
- I think traditionally young people
have been defined as the problem.
We blame them for using drugs,
we blame them for using
guns and using violence,
we blame them for being pregnant.
And, you know, it's adults
who manufacture guns
and bring them into the community.
It's adults who grow and profit from drugs
It's adult who deny
young people information
about birth control, sexuality,
sexual orientation those kinds of things.
So, they're facing a lot of challenges
they don't have good information
and good support from adults and
therefore sometimes
they make bad decisions
but they're trying to come
together and make a difference.
And so, it really is about, you know,
if you look at any of
the classic struggles,
movements for social
justice in our history,
young people have been at
the forefront of those.
And we wanna encourage and help develop
the skills and ability of young people
to continue to do that.
- Which means, for those
of us who aren't young
it means preparing ourselves.
A major part of the
first part of this book
is really sort of a training manual
or a guide for adults who
are working with young people
about how to support young people
to be allies to young people and to
kind of get out of the way
of the usual way
that adults can be around young people.
As an adult who does this work
given the place that I come from
I'm not likely to know a lot about
what's going on with immigrant youth,
or islamic you, or very low income youth
or other constituencies.
What do I have to learn and particularly
what do I have to unlearn in order
to be present in a classroom where
I want young people to be in a position of
deciding what's going to happen.
- I think one of the
things that is continuous
from the earlier work is the concept
we use of becoming allies and this book
is both about adults stepping up as allies
to young people but also
helping young people
develop the skills to
be allies to each other.
And not just to each other in terms of
their immediate, you know
know, peers and colleagues
and neighbours and
classmates, but stepping up
to build the community in wider sense
of including people, marginalized groups,
people who are not in
their immediate lives.
So, this concept of
becoming an ally is first
to identify oneself as part
of an extended community
and then think about how
do we stand with those
who are under attack in our communities.
- So when youth for example rise up
and want to make something happen
they can easily be
fractured from each other
even in that rising up around gender
or racial difference, or
ability, or disability,
or sexual orientation.
The concept of alliance is, well,
instead of letting yourself get separated
how can you find each other
how can you be present for each other
and support each other.
That's a central part
of why it's so crucial
to figure out how to provide
alliance building work
with young people and among young people.
- I think a couple of
different ways this book
is a tremendous resource
for folks working with
young people around any kind of issue.
First is, as Allen mentioned, it provides
lots of tools for preparing ourselves
to really be present with young people.
To listen to them, to
do the work ourselves
around some of the issues of oppression.
They get in our way and separate us
from each other and from young people.
So I think that's a crucial piece.
It also provides a
framework for understanding
how issues fit together
and what the roots of violence are.
We talk a lot about our
work as the root work
the work that gets below
just the interventions
the stopping particular
acts of violence between
young people or between
adults and young people,
but it gets down to the
institutional systems
that keep perpetuating and keep
perpetrating that violence.
So this provides a
framework for understanding
how that work fits together
and then how to integrate those issues
into a domestic violence awareness program
or a sexual assault awareness program
or teen dating violence prevention program
or a hate crimes or
gang prevention program.
It provides a lot of tools
for infusing that work
with a social justice, community building
framework and ability
for young people to go
further than just individual change.
- The sexual assault prevention movement
is where we really started
when we started The Oakland
Men's Project in 1979.
That's when it looked
like what was appropriate
for men to do was to take some role
in preventing violence against women
and understanding this is a man's problem.
We became part of the 30 year rape crisis
and rape prevention movement.
And in that movement as the movement built
and got deeper into
the situations of women
especially women and young
people who are looking for help.
We began to notice the differences
in what happened in the sexual assault,
differences around culture, around race,
around economic background,
around citizenship status,
around physical ability.
And the rape crisis movement has struggled
in various ways and sometimes not so well
and sometimes successfully to figure out
how to speak to those differences.
I think becoming more
having those differences more and more
present for us is what has pushed
not only writing this book
but the sense that this is really about
building a justice movement
across these identities.
And if we can figure out some way
to facilitate passing that
model among young people
then we've really done the work
that we wanted to do.
- And the other, I think,
important way that this
book is a resource is
that it really provides
a frame work for using our other curricula
we have a high school
curricula Making The Peace.
We have a middle school curricula
Making Allies, Making Friends,
and then we have a guide
for organizing in schools
called Days of Respect.
And we also have Young Men's
and Young Women's Gender
separate curricula.
So, we have a lot of materials
for doing specific kinds
of violence prevention work
and this book provides a guide
and framework and reference
for doing that work
effectively and powerfully.
There's two primary ways that people
can get information about the new book
Helping Teens, one is through
the publishers website
Hunterhouse.com,
and one is through my website
which is, Paul Kivel.
PAULKIVEL.com.
And the books can be ordered off there.
Any of the books in the series
and they can be other
resources, information,
exercises, can be also
accessed through that.
(calming music)
- [Voiceover] Thank you for listening
to this PreventConnect Podcast.
PreventConnect is project
of The California Coalition
Against Sexual Assault
with funding from
The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
The views presented on PreventConnect
are not necessarily the views of the
United States Government,
the CDC, or CALCASA.
To learn more about Prevent Connect, visit
www.preventconnect.org.
For more information
about CALCASA's mission
or to show your support, visit
calcasa.org.
That's CALCASA.org.
