By nature adolescents engage in lifestyles and activities that are challenging and thrilling. These experiences enable them to develop skills and competencies in a critical stage of their personal development. Therefore, stimulating environments in community and leisure settings are necessary to provide learning opportunities in view of helping adolescents develop skills and competencies that are essential in adult life.
Adolescents living in a transitory period of their lives and need tools to understand that their lifestyle and behaviour make them subject to risks, and therefore to injuries, and the accompanying burden. Adolescents need to be included in interventions in a strong participatory manner. Ideally, young people should be provided with arguments and tools to allow them to assess and cope with risk-taking in order to reduce the toll of injuries.
Many of the prevention programmes aimed at adolescents are repressive and see young people as passive subjects, failing to involve the target group in a constructive way. New approaches are needed to prevent injuries among young people. The AdRisk project intends to tackle injuries among adolescents by empowering young people to help themselves in making the right choice when dealing with risks.
Through the efforts of the AdRisk project we will advocate for a safer environment for adolescents throughout Europe and involve younger people more in creating a safer environment that continues to challenge their skills. AdRisk will help empower adolescents to make the right choices for themselves.
