Preventing Drug Use and Risk Behaviors in Adolescent Girls

Initiation of drug use and participation in sexual-risk behaviors such as having multiple sexual partners, unprotected sexual intercourse, and intercourse with drug users are all too common among girls with at-risk histories, such as those who have experienced poverty, abuse, neglect, or been in the juvenile justice system. Studies consistently find that these girls have disproportionately high rates of these problems that, in addition to increasing risk for negative outcomes, have other costly sequelae such as drug addiction, early pregnancy, sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV contraction, delinquency, and early mortality (e.g., Santelli et al., 2001; Stueve et al., 2005). In our prior work, the investigators showed that the investigators could prevent early onset sexual intercourse and tobacco and marijuana initiation in pre-teen girls in foster care. Although this intervention, delivered to girls who were 11-years old and had not yet entered middle school, demonstrated efficacy, the investigators know very little about how to prevent the more serious and costly sexual-risk and illicit drug use behaviors in at-risk girls during the high school years, a period of risk for engagement in such behaviors. This study builds from this prior work to develop a new intervention for teenage girls with early adversity.