Changing Children's Trajectories of Development: Two-Year Evidence for the Effectiveness of a School-Based Approach to Violence Prevention

Awareness of youth violence has increased in recent years, resulting in more interest in programs that can prevent violent and aggressive behavior. Although overall rates of violence among young people have declined since the mid-1990s, rates of some forms of youth aggression, violence, and crime remain high. National data reveal that, each year, about 15 percent of high school students are involved in a physical fight at school and 8 percent are threatened or injured with a weapon. 1 Urban youth are at particular risk for exposure to violence and victimization.

This report describes one of the largest and longest running school-based violence prevention programs in the country-the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP)-and discusses the results of a rigorous evaluation conducted by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. The evaluation provides concrete evidence that early, school-based prevention initiatives such as the RCCP can work and should be included in communities' efforts to prevent violence among children and youth.