Brett Holfield

Unfortunately, teen dating violence is a common experience for many high school students in Canada. Dr. Brett Holfeld is part of a team of researchers across Canada that attempted to increase educators' capacity to prevent teen dating violence and promote healthy relationships by providing new training, new resources, and new methods of disseminating the training.

The project, funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) was led by Dr. Wendy Craig (Queen’s University), intended to compare different methods of training for high school educators on dating violence and healthy relationships, and evaluate the effectiveness of this training on educator practice in four Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec). As a result of COVID-19, the project could not be completed as proposed. However, one-day training was delivered to educators in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec as well as pre-training data was collected from approximately 100 teachers and 700 students.

Despite the changes, several publications are currently in preparation to better understand the frequency and correlates of friendship and dating violence among Canadian high school students. A series of knowledge mobilization products will also be made available on the Promoting Relationships and Eliminating Violence Network (PREVNet) website including one on cyber dating violence that will be delivered by Dr. Holfeld in January 2021.

The research team is also in process of completing on alternate project to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on teen relationships.

"We are still examining experiences of teen dating violence, but examining how these experiences have changed during the pandemic within the context of relationships with friends, romantic partner, families, and with siblings."

The first assessment with a nationally representative sample of teens across Canada has already been completed with data for the second assessment coming in March, 2021. Dr. Holfeld said that this additional research will also yield several publications and help us to understand how Canadian teens are affected by the pandemic.