About Choose Respect

Choose Respect is an initiative that helps teens form healthy relationships to prevent dating violence before it starts. This national effort is designed to help parents, caregivers, older teens, educators, and other caring adults motivate teens to challenge harmful beliefs about dating violence and take steps to form healthy respectful relationships.

The Need

Unhealthy relationship behaviors can start early and last a lifetime. According to research from the CDC, one in 11 teens report being a victim of physical dating violence. Even more startling, teens who report experiencing dating violence are also more likely to report binge drinking, suicide attempts, physical fighting, and engagement in high-risk sexual activity.

Goals

Choose Respect is designed to encourage teens to form healthy, respectful relationships and to form positive, healthy attitudes about their relationships with others. Choose Respect seeks to reinforce and sustain these positive attitudes as they get older and begin to enter dating relationships by:

• Providing effective messages for teens, parents, caregivers, educators, and other caring adults that encourage them to choose to treat themselves and others with respect.
  
• Creating opportunities for teens to learn about positive relationship behaviors.
  
• Increasing teens' ability to recognize and prevent unhealthy, violent relationships.
  
• Promoting ways for a variety of audiences to get access to information and other tools to prevent dating violence.

History

Launched nationally in May 2006, the Choose Respect initiative was implemented as an integrated communications effort in 10 major U.S. cities: Hartford, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Phoenix, San Antonio, Topeka, and Washington DC. The Choose Respect Annual Report presents highlights of the national launch, including information about the background and development of the initiative. Choose Respect community partners who used diverse ways to promote the initiative were instrumental to the success of the national launch.

Annual Report

The Choose Respect Annual Report presents the highlights of the initiative's national launch during 2006. The report provides an overview of the Choose Respect goals, background and development of the initiative, national launch events, and local Choose Respect partner events. Download PDF [11.4 MB]