244272 Dance Your Prom Off: Self Respect on the Dance Floor

Monday, October 31, 2011: 10:50 AM

Alexandra Detjens, MA , Cambridge Public Health Department, Cambridge, MA
     
The Cambridge Public Health Department and the Cambridge Commission on the Status of Women launched Promtacular, a popular workshop designed to educate teen girls about healthy self-esteem and teen dating violence, in May 2010. The program brought 50 high school students together for an afternoon workshop that challenged their preconceptions of prom, dating, and self-image.

In the spring of 2010, daggering was the most popular style of prom dancing in the Boston area. This highly sexualized form of dancing commodifies teen girls. After the Cambridge prom, Promtacular organizers received feedback that daggering had “ruined the prom”. Teen girls' willingness to participate in daggering was partly due to lack of dancing skills and low self-confidence to say no to peer pressure.

Dance Your Prom Off: Own the Floor is about gaining self-respect, empowering teen girls to own their moves, and not worry about anyone else on the dance floor. Popular music with suggestive and racy videos is re-choreographed into a fun dance routine that encourages healthy and respectful dancing.

The girls only dance class gives self-confidence without a lecture. It focuses on very specific choreography treated as a fitness class with great physical benefit and attention to safety for joints.

Dance Your Prom Off: Own the Floor combines the dance and confidence lessons with the successful programming of Promtacular to infuse the dance class with healthy and safe dating skills.

Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Program planning
Social and behavioral sciences

Learning Objectives:
1. Design a highly interactive dance and dating violence prevention program. 2. Demonstrate the clear need and advantage of linking teen girls’ low dancing and dating confidence with dating violence prevention education. 3. Identify the great physical and mental health benefits of a girls only dance class.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am qualified to present because I designed, created, and implemented the dance and dating violence program.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

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