It's Time to Talk Day encourages conversations about healthy relationships

The United States campaign Love is Not Abuse is holding the annual NO MORE SILENCE: It’s Time To Talk Day on 4 February 2014. The campaign seeks to bring together parents, advocates, non-profit organisations, corporations and journalists to raise awareness and generate conversations about healthy relationships to prevent teen dating violence and abuse.

Alongside campaign events, people are encouraged to have a conversation about what it means to have a healthy relationship with a young person in their life. The campaign particularly focuses on parents and teens. The campaign website provides more details and tools to help start a conversation.

The Love is Not Abuse campaign is hosted by Break the Cycle, a non-profit agency dedicated to providing comprehensive dating abuse prevention programmes for young people. The campaign website provides dating violence research, curriculum resources for student education, workplace resources to identify partner violence, and educational interactive iPhone apps on dating violence.

Recently in New Zealand, a literature review by the Families Commission found that quality relationship education in schools can prevent dating and partner violence. The Ministry of Education is currently developing guidelines to help schools identify and choose evidence-based programmes.

Image: Always Kiss Me Goodnight by Courtney Carmody Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)