Cumberland River Victims Services
It’s My Space
A middle school-level intervention aimed at reducing violence, harassment, and bullying.
It’s My Space
Middle School Level Intervention
It is a research-based curriculum that has been evaluated for effectiveness in New York and was found to effectively reduce sexual harassment, physical and sexual dating violence, and peer violence. This curriculum has been adapted by Kentucky for application in largely rural middle school populations.
Increasing Knowledge
Increasing knowledge and awareness of sexual abuse, harassment, and bullying
Promoting Prosocial Attitudes
Promoting prosocial attitudes, and nonviolent bystander intervention
Addressing Empathy
Addressing empathy and concern for how one’s actions affect others
Teaching Problem Solving Skills
Teaching problem solving skills necessary to resolve conflict in a non-violent manner
Promoting Connection
Promoting connection/commitment to school
Components
- Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students receive four unique classroom sessions focused on defining and understanding boundaries.
- Teaches students to identify boundary violations and how and when to act through classroom based modules.
- Encourages positive changes to the school environment by:
- Introducing the Respecting Boundaries Agreement, an anonymous reporting mechanism for boundary violations
- Completing school hotspot mapping, conducted during the final session for fifty students in each grade level. Hotspot mapping is used to identify areas of the school in which students do not feel safe. School officials receive an analysis of the mapping results along with ideas of environmental changes that could be made to make students feel safer. Hot spot mapping over time will allow the tracking of trends in the changing school environment as improvements are made to “unsafe” areas as identified by the students.
Requirements
- Point of contact to Schedule Classroom Sessions
- Internet access for both the facilitator and students
- Three one-hour classroom sessions for all students per academic year
- Map of the school
- An additional one-hour classroom session for fifty students from each grade level to complete the hotspot mapping
- The commitment of school administration to be available to review hotspot mapping activity and make changes to the school environment to increase feelings of safety
Benefits to Schools (Middle School Grades)
- Each student will be able to define what a boundary is and will be able to recognize when a boundary has been violated
- Each student will have an increased awareness of what actions can be taken to prevent boundary violations and what can be done in response to a boundary violation. Appropriate responses will be non-violent.
- The school administration will know locations in the school that the students consider to be higher risk for violence to occur and will be able to change the environment in those locations to make it less likely that violence will occur in those locations.