Ten years on from the Columbine high school massacre, there is a much better understanding of how teenagers end up violent and aggressive, and how to prevent this happening. Del Elliott, founder of Blueprints - a database of proven violence prevention programs - visits the UK this week to reflect on the good that has come out of such tragedy.

A comprehensive review of anti-bullying initiatives singles out a Norwegian program, based on firm theoretical foundations, for particular praise. Whether this theory can reach the same heights outside Scandinavia remains unclear.

Making sure young offenders get the right mental health services sounds like a winning formula. But even researchers promoting routine screening warn the drain on funding may be squeezing out prevention efforts in the community.

It’s the new apple pie: economists, neurobiologists and prevention scientists are united in their certainty about the importance of social and emotional learning to long-term well-being.

A US-made campaign to curb cigarette smoking among young people in India has become entangled in the cultural aspects of the country’s attitudes to tobacco.

Sex education classes don’t have much effect on teenage pregnancy rates, but an intensive form of foster care designed to combat antisocial behavior seems to reduce the risk. Does the evidence suggest that a broad approach to adolescent troubles may be more beneficial than some targeted interventions?

Research from Illinois questions the capacity of an exhaustively tested and widely accredited bullying prevention program to meet the needs of families living in poor neighborhoods.

A trial of US Multisystemic Therapy has failed in Sweden, even though in neighboring Norway a similar experiment succeeded. Was the problem a lack of fidelity or un-American social conditions – or are Swedish teenagers simply better looked after by the state?

The UK and the US have it wrong. Taking children into care in times of trouble is not a perilous alternative to leaving them with their birth families; it is a valuable means of providing family support. That’s how they regard it in Scandinavia, says a UK research team, and all the evidence suggests they’re right.

Worry Edward Melhuish with criticism of the quality of the evaluation of the UK Sure Start program, and he’ll carry you back to all too recent darker days when research evidence was lucky even to find space on a Government shelf where it could gather the dust.

Latest findings from the national evaluation of Sure Start show a reversal: the UK’s flagship program for disadvantaged children and their parents seems to have started working.

It’s a complicated picture, but research in Colorado suggests that setbacks in a young father’s teenage years have the power to do more damage when their own children reach adolescence.

Chair of the Centre for Social Policy at Dartington UK, Roger Bullock, remembers the career of the distinguished scholar and social policy activist, Professor Peter Townsend who died after a heart attack last weekend.

Think before you act, pull the weeds before you plant the flowers, build young people for the future if you can’t build the future for the young – Roger Weissberg carries wise words about social and emotional learning from London to Belfast.

Examining what evidence-based HIV prevention efforts have in common may provide a basis for a pragmatic approach to program development, say researchers from California.

Are the UK academics behind a hotblooded account of the relationship between inequality and the loss of well-being in the populations of the developed nations on the verge of re-inventing Utopian socialism?

"First develop and destruction test your program, then offer it on the open market…" The Washington conference of the Society for Prevention Research is left considering a challenge to the conventional wisdom of the classic “diffusion model”. Why not start with a scientific analysis of what the market will put to good use?

At the end of three days of a dawn to dusk debate, the Director of the Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development at Penn State University, Mark Greenberg, makes a stout defence of the virtues of listening and the timeless benefits of mindfulness.

The boy who broke your teenage heart, the girl who drove you to drink or poetry - did it ever occur to you that they might have abused you? New approaches to preventing inter-parental conflict and family violence suggest they might.

There’s evidence that the bar on alcohol consumption saves hundreds of lives on America’s roads, but at the same time, by their own admission, nearly half the country’s college students have been drunk during the past month. What are realists and prevention scientists to recommend?

“Only about ten per cent of health outcomes are attributable to health care. Your address is as important as your blood pressure…” at least, that’s how it will stay until epidemiologist Steven Woolf waves a magic wand over US public health.

Researchers at King’s College, London, who have been trying to establish from the available evidence whether programs that can justifiably claim to improve young people’s self belief can also change behavior, have found nothing much of substance in a catch of 2,000 studies.