Gender Equity: How Effective Are Generic Preventive Evidence-Based Interventions for Girls?

This Ted-like Talk session will include individuals who have been conducting research on the effectiveness of prevention EBIs for girls in order to address the question of “How effective are our EBIs for girls given the large increases in girls’ drugs and delinquency since 1995?” Despite this question being raised in Prevention Science over 10 years ago, a survey conducted for the UNODC found that only about 16 of the hundreds of prevention or treatment EBIs listed on US and EU websites have conducted a gender sub-group analysis and only a handful of gender-specific EBIs exist. Of these EBIs mainly the family EBIs reported effectiveness for girls and youth-only EBIs reported more effectiveness for boys. Unfortunately, family EBIs are expensive and with not as good cost/benefit ratios, they not implemented as much, which can result in increasing behavioral health problems in girls. These drug-involved girls are also future mothers. Without nurturing parenting, more children are lost to costly foster care and accumulate higher health care costs because of more accumulated ACEs during childhood. The presenters from the UNODC and various EU and US universities will discuss this issue and present recommendations on how to make EBIs more gender appropriate or create gender-specific EBIs. Bringing the implementation costs down to encourage greater dissemination will be discussed including use of web-delivery to ethnic girls and their mothers. One very effective web-based gender-specific EBI for girls alone will be presented.