Speaker
Description
Authors: Su Hong (UNODC), Peer van der Kreeft (Ghent University College), Johan Jongbloet (Ghent University College), Wadih Maalouf (UNODC)
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) seeks to promote a culture of prevention in line with prevention science, including through meaningful participation of youth in prevention efforts. UNODC recently developed ‘Friends in Focus’, a new youth peer-to-peer drug prevention programme, through which young people learn about preventive thinking for themselves and how they can disseminate it amongst their friends. It leverages on the positive influence that peer interaction can have in promoting healthy attitudes, normative beliefs, and social skills. Friends in Focus supports youths on learning how to recognize risk and protective factors to drug use, to critically reflect and challenge normative beliefs and misperceptions, experience how group dynamics affect behaviour and can interfere with prosocial intentions, and how to become an upstander in situations of pressure.
Its development was innovatively guided by a large panel of global experts in prevention science and/or experienced with youth (academics and practitioners), as well as youth implicated in prevention initiatives by UNODC. Following the initial development, a prototyping exercise began in early 2025 in 8 geographical sites (Italy, Serbia and 5 Central Asian countries). The prototyping will collect field experiences from youth, which will be reviewed by the design team and shared with the peer review group, to assess the programme’s feasibility and understandability in youths. It will also report on the process of implementation and fidelity in training and application through the varying settings and modalities, including school-based, community-based, single-city/country, and multi-country contexts. Building on this feedback, UNODC aims to revise the programme to an improved version for testing its effectiveness and scale-up.
This abstract will report on this iterative process of development of this new tool and reflect on its potential to fill an important gap in youth active participation and engagement in peer-to-peer prevention.
| Conflict of interest | No conflict of interest |
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