Starting Strong: Teen dating violence prevention via a youth-driven social networking website

Teen dating violence is a national epidemic. Approximately one in three adolescent girls in the United States is a victim of abuse from a dating partner. Start Strong Atlanta is part of a national teen dating violence prevention initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation aimed at moving peer norms towards healthy relationships in an effort to prevent and end teen dating violence. In addition, research suggests that young people take social cues from media influences therefore youth must also address societal level norms about relationships. In order to achieve meaningful changes in youth behavior, youth need to have a safe space within which they can address norms surrounding relationships. Youth often communicate norms via web-based communication channels. Thus, Start Strong Atlanta developed a website to provide youth with space to voice their own norms about relationships and challenge harmful ones. It is an established tenet of social marketing that effective health promotion efforts are based on an understanding of a target audience's own felt perceptions and realities. Therefore, it was determined that the website needed to be shaped and developed by youth themselves to produce culturally competent and factually sound content that best reflects Atlanta's youth community's perceptions and realities. The focus of this presentation is on the development and implementation of the website, including: 1) the rationale and theoretical underpinnings of the website; 2) a description of our three-tiered approach to youth involvement; and 3) a discussion of the successes and challenges in developing a youth-driven website.