About

Every day, youth make around 3,000 decisions. Factoring in things like social media use, recreational/addictive substance use, and sexuality, these decisions become imperative. Youth at Peace Over Violence are ready to publicly proclaim that they will make healthy choices to prevent violence in their communities. This public awareness campaign created by those youth is focused on encouraging peers to make the right choices within themselves, their relationships, their communities and in our society. Make A Choice gives people tools to help figure out how to create healthy relationships, one decision at a time.

The Make A Choice Campaign is a youth-created and youth-led teen dating violence prevention and awareness campaign. It utilizes social media to address the ways in which unhealthy relationships affect youth and to advocate for youth to have healthy, violence-free relationships. The campaign aims to educate youth on aspects of a healthy relationship, empower youth to be active bystanders when they hear and see violence, and engage youth in community organizing and mobilization around preventing teen dating violence.

The campaign also works to target parents, school staff, school district members, and other adult allies. Its goal is for adults to make a choice to believe in youth, support youth in their endeavor to end teen dating violence, and to provide appropriate supports and services to youth affected by dating abuse.   

The Socio-ecogical Model

At Peace Over Violence, the ultimate goal of the Prevention program is to stop violence before it begins. Prevention requires understanding the factors that influence violence, such as trauma, racism, sexism, classism, ableism and homophobia. We utilize a four-level social-ecological model to better understand violence and the effect of potential prevention strategies. This model considers the complex intersections between individual, relationship, community, and societal factors. It allows us to understand the range of factors that put people at risk for violence or protect them from experiencing or perpetrating violence. The overlapping rings in the model illustrate how factors at one level influence factors at another level.

In addition, the model suggests that in order to prevent violence, it is necessary to act across multiple levels of the model at the same time. This approach is more likely to sustain prevention efforts over time than any single intervention.