Audrie & Daisy Movie Night

In partnership with the Violence Free Coalition, Talbert House Prevention Services, Educational Service Center of Warren County, and GOVS, the Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition (SAPC) held a movie event that welcomed parents, guardians, and anyone else involved with the life of a teen youth to view the documentary, Audrie & Daisy. This documentary is a real-life drama that examines the ripple effects on families, friends, schools, and communities when two underage young women find that sexual assault crimes against them have been caught on camera. This film takes a hard look at America’s teenagers who are dealing with the social pressures of underage drinking, cyberbullying, and wanting to fit in.

Underage drinking is a big concern for our community, and we also see that there is a lack of family communication around underage drinking. Results over the past 3 years from the Pride Student Drug Use Survey, along with focus groups that we conducted with parents and youth about underage drinking, have also shown that there is a need for more underage drinking prevention and discussion in our community, specifically for college-aged young adults.

• Reduce prevalence of underage drinking and other substances in community
• Create an ongoing conversation about underage drinking and substance use prevention in the community

• Lack of interest from the community
• COVID-19 Delta Variant fears

Even though we had a smaller group of attendees than we had anticipated, we were able to overcome the challenges by getting to know the participants more intimately and having deeper discussions about underage drinking after the movie. For example, some parents who keep alcohol in their homes were under the impression that kids wouldn’t touch it because they know not to; however, youth report that one way they access alcohol is by getting it from their own home. This was good information for parents and youth to share so that we could discuss solutions to potential issues such as this one.

• Communities Talk website
• Communities Talk planning guides

We worked with several partners such as the Violence Free Coalition, the Educational Service Center, Talbert House Prevention Services, and Greater Ohio Virtual Schools. Our intended audience was parents, guardians, or anyone working with youth and teenagers who were 13 years of age or older, and young adults who were college aged. We reached our intended audience by advertising on social media websites with local schools, colleges, and community partners, as well as our coalition’s own social media (Facebook). Although our participation numbers were small, we did have the audience that we wanted to attend the event.

Yes. Because our county was seeing an uptick in cases of COVID-19 during the time of the event, as well as the fear of the Delta variant, we had far fewer registrations than we had hoped for. Although we provided a safe environment with appropriate social distancing for the event, community members were still reluctant to attend in-person.

Our event reached youth and parents as well as several educators. After they viewed the documentary "Audrie & Daisy" there were small group discussions organized around the risks of underage drinking, how parents can address underage drinking with their youth, how youth can be individuals that are not bystanders when they see something that is not right, and how to move forward with addressing this issue in our community.