Customer Reviews

Positive Peer Culture (Modern Applications of Social Work)

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Positive Peer Culture is an indispensable asset to all those committed to helping young people reach their full potential as individuals and members of their communities. Vorranth's and Brendtro's writing is the result of a fruitful dialectic of theory and praxis; Positive Peer Culture is a model for youth treatment and empowerment grounded in effective practice. I know of no other approach that so effectively challenges young people to assume the task of caring, helping, changing, and living responsibly (and I've experiences several approaches).

The authors include the vital information necessary for both youth workers and adolescents to effectively implement Positive Peer Culture in residential and school-based programs. This volume also contains insights gained from the practice of Positive Peer Culture not available in the first edition, including discussion of common mistakes staff make during the implementation process and a chapter on evaluating programs based on PPC.

I have seen PPC empower many young people to live responsible and meaningful lives-young people who where labeled hopeless and unreachable. I first read the volume, "Positive Peer Culture," at age thirteen while attending a PPC based residential treatment program. At age twenty-three, I find the authors' concepts and methods as inspiring and compelling as when I first discovered them; they are set forth in simple and straightforward terms easily understood by professionals, laymen and youth alike.

Although PPC has been used primarily to empower adolescent offenders, the ideas in this book, if applied, are helpful for working with young people from a variety of backgrounds in a variety of settings-from community based programs, to public schools, to juvenile detention facalities. In addition to professional youth workers, teachers, ministers, parents, and youth themselves can benefit greatly from reading "Positive Peer Culture."

People who believed in empowering young people asked me to read this book and practice the principles it sets forth so that I might understand the power of caring. If you care about kids, I hope you will buy and read this book so that you may be better equipped to empower them to become the great men and women they have the potential to be.

Positive Peer Culture is an excellent resource for youth workers working with young offenders in a residential custody setting. Ten years of using the principals, which are so clearly explained in the manual, to create a climate of caring and trust with young offenders, has convinced me that Brendtro and Vorrath have got it right. There is no better system of behaviour management and cognitive restucturing in existence that I know of!

This book is the foundation for Positive Peer Culture; a very powerful treatment approach that mobilizes the natural and dynamic potential of adolescent peer groups. Working with delinquent and emotially disturbed youth in residential treatment for over 25 years I have found this to be an outstanding process for staff and youth alike and have utilzed it as our primary treatment approach at the Connecticut Junior Republic.

I have a teen age grandson who was getting into drugs and dropping out of junior high school but otherwise very bright and into music, piano and guitar, and lots of curosities about social problems and medical problems, a voracious reader. He is now in an alternative school and the methods used are those described in this book, and after six months is appearing to be straightened out and may be able to rejoin the "normal" outside world

The methods described in this book are nothing new and certainly were not invented or developed by therapists!

In 1974 the US Senate conducted a study of what was ostensibly a drug treatment program called The Seed in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. This commission concluded that The Seed used methods similar to the "brainwashing" methods employed by North Koreans against American servicemen during the Korean War. That report can be seen here:

[...]

Since The Seed was being funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, under NIH, which was then directed by Dr. Robert L. DuPont, Jr., the White House's second Drug Czar, Senator Sam Ervin, the chairman of the Senate investigating committee, directed Dr. DuPont and NIDA to require The Seed to issue NIDA human consent forms to Seed participants and to their parents acknowledging that they were participating in human experimentation as required by NIDA's own regulations. It was because of this stipulation, in large part, that Seed expansion programs like the one in Saint Petersburg shut down in the first place. Mel and Betty Sembler had a son in that Seed. When it closed Mel, Betty and some other Seed parents formed their own Seed which they called Straight. A half dozen directors left the new Seed in the first 18 months, one of them publicly comparing Straight to The Seed had inferred that Straight was worse than The Seed!

Having been affiliated with The Seed through family for roughly a dozen years and then been interred in it's follow-on program, Straight Inc., for the last two years of my legal minority, I can tell you that these methods are very, very effective! They are also extremely harmful. Unfortunately, the desired effects are short lived while the harmful effects tend to follow the sufferer for life. Once your faith in your own perceptions and very identity have been forcibly torn away for you, you never get them back. Once you understand from firsthand experience how easily that can happen to anyone, you will never look at this world or any soul in it the same way again. And you will likely never ever again know the peace and safety of trusting another human being ever again.

God help us if these methods become any more widespread in our culture. Be mindful, reader. There is nothing new under the Sun and if a thing appears to be too good to be true it's probably not true.