Strong partnerships, careful decisions rooted in good science – and several timely injections of serendipity – have combined to fashion the career of David Hawkins, once a dejected young probation officer, into one of the widest-ranging contributions to the emerging science of prevention.

"I was interested to know if we could do something to stop the problems of school drop out, delinquency and family breakdown that I was dealing with before a probation officer got involved. By then it was often too late. If you relied on the evidence in those days there wasn't too much encouragement. There were just a couple of handfuls of reliable evaluations – and they tended to suggest that nothing works."

The relationship aspects of David Hawkins’s career story began in collaborations with Josef Weis and Richard Catalano. "In those days the leading ideas in prevention came from Ron Clarke, the British criminologist who was working at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He’d worked out how to make it more difficult for criminals to commit offenses. We wanted to make it less likely that people would want to commit offenses in the first place."

The ideas of people like Travis Hirschi (that what you do reflects in part whom you hang around with) and Albert Bandura (that behavior is conditioned by the responses of others) were only partially helpful to the three young Washington hopefuls.

Their own analysis led them to devise the Social Development Model that has guided Hawkins’s work more or less ever since.

It hypothesizes that children who are provided with opportunities and skills and are rewarded for their greater involvement with their schools and families develop strong bonds within these social groupings. Such bonds set children on a positive developmental trajectory, reducing the risks of poor health and development into adulthood.

The science owes much to the Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP), a major longitudinal study of the causes and consequences of anti-social behavior.

The serendipity of Hawkins’s career rescued him from the vicissitudes of funding in the early days. "We'd put a lot of effort into establishing the SSDP. It was longitudinal, it was multi-site and, most importantly, it had an experimental dimension. The project was set up to evaluate the Raising Healthy Children program, a public health approach that targeted risks in the family, schools and peer groups.

"So we had it all set up; we had one wave of data in the bank – and then Ronald Regan was elected President, and like most social programs SSDP was reviewed. We received the visit and we got the verdict. 'Cut it all'.”

Local foundations kept the project going for a year while he and Richard Catalano searched for long-term support. "The National Institute on Drug Abuse was interested in us. We began to realize that the risks for delinquency were pretty similar to those for drug misuse. So NIDA began to support the project and our expertise widened.

"Their funding took us to when the children were 16 years. Almost as a point of principle I wanted to follow the sample until the 18th birthday. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation helped us along, by which time results were indicating that the Raising Healthy Children intervention was having lasting effects in terms of violence prevention and alcohol use.

“That made it easier to raise more money and in the last sweep, two years ago, when the sample reached 30 years, we began to see benefits in terms of sexual behavior and sexually transmitted diseases. So we ended up a long way that where we started, and a lot more knowledgeable ."

Chance played its part on the intervention side also. Getting support for implementing Raising Healthy Children in schools was straightforward while the federal dollars were flowing. But as the national politicians got the jitters, so did their local counterparts.

"Richard and I said to each other, we must not allow prevention efforts to be so dependent on central direction. We needed to empower local people to decide whether they thought prevention was important, and if so, to drive it forward."

The result of these discussions was Communities that Care, arguably the most widely used “operating system,” as Hawkins describes the approach, for helping communities, service providers and local government to marry good evidence on risk and protective factors to evidence on what works, for whom, when and why and to the enthusiasm and passion of local people to change children's lives.

All of this work has been brought together in the Social Development Research Group, the Center Hawkins established with Catalano at the School of Social Work in the University of Washington, Seattle. (Weis, meanwhile, had gone on the become one of the leading US experts in murder). SDRG now has more than 60 staff working on half a dozen projects supported by annual turnover of $10m.

Hawkins's work is widely recognized across his own country and far beyond. This week alone he has given support to government seeking to prevent drug misuse in Northern Ireland, to philanthropy looking to promote new "operating systems" in the Republic of Ireland – and to the City of Birmingham as it explores ways of turning its children's services workforce into a public health asset.

References
Catalano, R F and Hawkins J D, "The Social Development Model: A Theory of Antisocial Behavior," Hawkins J D, Delinquency and Crime: Current Theories, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Hawkins, J D, von Cleve, W and Catalano R F, "Reducing Early Childhood Aggression: Results of a Primary Prevention Program," Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1991, pp. 208-217.

Hawkins, J. D, Kosterman R, Catalano R F, Hill K G and Abbott R D, "Promoting Positive Adult Functioning Through Social Development Intervention in Childhood: Long-Term Effects from the Seattle Social Development Project," Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, Vol. 159, No. 1, 2005, pp. 25-31