This Special Collection offers resources that promote strategies for creating environments where children can thrive with particular focus on enhancing capacity for resilience across the lifespan. While this collection emphasizes primary prevention strategies that foster healthy attitudes and behaviors, it also reflects our understanding of trauma as a common human experience, and explores post-traumatic growth as a positive framework for understanding trauma within the context of child development. Central to this collection is the belief that advocates working to end gender based violence are committed to the safety and well being of all children, and wish to create social change by investing in the potential that children offer – the promise of a new generation of non-violent, respectful young people and adults who resist traditional social norms that perpetuate violence against women and girls.
The resources in this collection are organized by intended audience and address all levels of the social ecological model. Here you’ll find materials for use by young people, parents and caregivers, teachers and school-based professionals, helping professionals, gender-based violence intervention and prevention advocates, and communities and organizations. Links to related Special Collections are also provided.
This collection was developed as a product of the Adult Children Exposed to Domestic Violence (ACE-DV) Leadership Forum, a project of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence established to amplify the voices and experiences of ACE-DV to enhance our movement to end gender based violence. Special thanks to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, the Vermont Network Against Domestic Violence, and the University of Minnesota School of Social Work for supporting the development of this resource.