Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Jan 29/99) - Though most Inuvik teens go on dates without fear of violence, a workshop allowing teens and parents to participate in role playing to help make potential scary situations more vivid will take place at Samuel Hearne school Feb. 4 from 7-9 p.m.

Workshop director Anita Roberts and facilitator Aaron White will come up from Vancouver to share knowledge gleaned in part from research taken from a book the two wrote called When does a date become a crime?

Both have extensive experience with assault- prevention workshops, with White focusing more on adolescent and adult men since the mid-1970s.

"There are all kinds of situations for date rape and there are all kinds of different ways to make yourself feel more safe in a relationship," says workshop organizer Carol Jordan, who is the acting executive director of the Fort Smith women's shelter called the Tawow Society.

Jordan says regardless of gender, building self-esteem by getting teens to better understand themselves can help them feel safe in a situation so it does not get out of hand.

She describes a scenario where a teen is walking from one part of the community to another when someone approaches, tries to get their attention and then grabs them aggressively.

The workshop will discuss how to handle the situation to emerge violence-free.

"There are different situations teens get into -- sometimes before anybody says anything or maybe there are one or two sentences that are said -- when the whole situation blows up in their face," says Jordan.

Those who fail to manage anger often blame others for their own temper loss, she says to indicate a phenomenon called blaming the victim.

"What is key for someone with a tendency to become angry is to understand this inclination when they're still in their adolescence or teens, learn how to handle anger in situations they get into and to identify their boundaries."

Workshop participants are set to learn theories about socialization and gender, victim-blaming and emotions such as fear and anger, while learning skills such as assertiveness, how to identify and defend boundaries, how to define sexual harassment, how to build self-esteem and how to handle disclosures.