Young women & alcohol abuse

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College-age intervention - My Student Body (USA), high-risk drinking prevention website for college students. Provides internet-based brief, tailored interventions to help heavy drinking college students reduce their alcohol use. Consists of 4 weekly 20-minute sessions to provide students with tailored motivational feedback about high-risk drinking. Because of the growing concerns about the drinking among college women, they evaluated the effect of the intervention according to gender. Outcomes were found to be especially effective for women and persistent binge drinkers. www.mystudentbody.com

Teen Parent intervention - ROCA Healthy Families Program (Boston, USA), an outreach and home-visiting intervention with teen parents. Home Visitors reach young parents through outreach, home visits, and referrals from community partners, health centres and Roca’s other programs. Home visitors run gender-specific school-based parenting groups at local high schools, an off-site Family Centre, and life skills/ parenting groups in collaboration with school-based health centres. One vision is to see “Young immigrant mothers raise their children in safety and be recognized for their contributions to society.” www.rocainc.org/strategy_relationships.php

Parent-involved intervention – Mother Daughter Computer Delivered Program (USA), a computer-delivered program for preventing substance use among adolescent girls. Aimed to enhance mother-daughter relationships and to teach girls skills for managing conflict, resisting media influences, refusing alcohol and drugs, and correcting peer norms about underage drinking, smoking and drug use.

BCCEWH is grateful to Health Canada and the Provincial Health Services Authority in BC for financial support for the projects underlying this work on girls and alcohol. As a second step, BCCEWH researchers will be examining in depth this girl-centred programming in an effort to understand the risk and protective factors being addressed, and outcomes achieved and working with agencies in Canada interested in developing/ adapting such programming.