Feeling Safe: An Israeli intervention program for helping children cope with exposure to political violence and terrorism.

This chapter addresses the impact of conflict and terrorism on children and presents an intervention strategy designed to promote children's resilience in the face of such circumstances. The primary intervention program described here was developed and tested in Israeli schools, but the procedures can be applied in other settings. The Feeling Safe program is a primary intervention in the educational setting aimed at strengthening factors shown to foster resilience among adolescents faced with chronic violence. The program addresses social, cognitive, and emotional aspects of adolescents' functioning that ideally can be integrated smoothly into regular classroom curricula. The program targets three of the factors found to function as resilience variables: mobilization of social support, problem solving, and attribution of meaning. The program was administered to all grades in four public middle schools--approximately 1,800 students--from different parts of Israel from 2003 to the present. The program involves a teacher-training workshop in which teachers and school advisors of students aged 12 to 15 participate. Afterward, teachers implement the activities in the classroom over a five-week period. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)