The Early Relationship Abuse Prevention Program (Early RAPP) seeks to help middle schoolers identify unhealthy behaviors to prevent them from forming patterns of abuse while learning to build healthy relationship skills at a critical time in their development. Importantly, Early RAPP works to create a school culture that supports those respectful relationships, and creates safe spaces for young people to seek help for themselves and their peers. Community Educators facilitate interactive workshops for students, parents, and community members, as well as trainings to school staff.
The Early RAPP aims to improve student knowledge and understanding of the types of abuse and healthy relationships. In order to measure the changes in knowledge and attitudes resulting from their workshops and trainings, Community Educators conduct surveys before and after workshops. Every school year, Community Educators are required to conduct at least three workshops in the fall semester and at least three workshops in the spring semester, in which pre- and post-workshop surveys are conducted. Participant responses are anonymous. The Early RAPP pre- and post-workshop surveys are identical, consisting of fourteen standard questions about teen dating violence and healthy relationships with response options: Agree/Disagree (10 questions) and Healthy/Not Sure/Unhealthy (4 questions). The questions aim to measure each participant’s understanding of the topics covered in the workshop. This report provides a summary of pooled results from 1,325 pre- surveys and 1,093 post- surveys from workshops conducted with middle school students between January 30, 2019 and January 21, 2021.