Navigating healthy relationships: A skills-based empowerment approach to relationships education

The 'Navigating Relating' program introduced in this paper adopts a skills-based empowerment approach to minimising harmful relationship outcomes. Specifically, the program aims to reduce the risk of abusive dynamics forming in adolescents' current and/or future couple relationships by promoting personal responsibility and positive self-agency. Few programs in this area are based on clearly articulated, empirically supported theory (Murray & Graybeal, 2007; Whitaker et al., 2006), and programs notable for their strong theoretical framework and promising evaluation results (see Hickman, Jaycox, & Aronoff, 2004) are typically very demanding in terms of the class-time, community involvement, and co-ordination effort they require. 'Navigating Relating' is unique in that it is both research-driven and designed to facilitate widespread and sustained implementation in schools. This paper summarises the theoretical and empirical foundations upon which 'Navigating Relating' was developed, outlines the key features and components of the program and, finally, heralds plans for the program's future development.