© 2005 Behavioral Health Research Institute of the Southwest
612 Encino Place NE / Albuquerque, NM 87102 / 505.244.3099 / www.bhrcs.org

Triage Peer Groups—An Intervention for Teens by Teens in the Juvenile Justice System
Funded by the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department

We have launched a teen-to-teen intervention program in which teens themselves create interventions for their peers. We hope to discover how such programs can be most effective in reducing high-risk behaviors among our youth.

This intervention begins when each participant completes the Y-STOP. It also consists of two six-session Triage Peer Groups and a skills-based treatment group. Seventy-two adolescents will be served. These Triage Peer Groups will use a new approach in which the juveniles are tasked with designing a list of suggestions (a "change plan") for a peer who is experiencing problems in the areas of substance use, family violence, or other problems. The goal of the project is to reduce recidivism — to reduce the rate at which these teens re-offend and to decrease the prevalence of high-risk behaviors, especially substance abuse.

A skills-building group will be offered once a week and will rotate through six modules: coping with cravings, anger management, problem solving, refusal skills, enhancing social support networks, and relapse prevention. Following project completion, we will develop a replication manual for the Triage Peer Groups program, so that other organizations across the state and the nation can take advantage of this approach.