UNODC LINE UP, LIVE UP Trainer Manual: Life Skills for Crime Prevention

The UNODC LINE UP, LIVE UP programme is a life skills training through programme designed to prevent crime, violence and drug use.

Sport and physical activity are vital to the development of young people as they foster their physical, social and emotional health. They can also provide positive experiences to both boys and girls, such as a sense of belonging, loyalty and support, and can pro-mote positive changes in relationships by encouraging collaboration, understanding, tolerance and acceptance between participants from different backgrounds. What is more, sport has clear educational benefits, as it can help skills development to empower young people to make positive changes in their own lives and their communities.

The Doha Declaration, adopted at the thirteenth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice held in Doha, Qatar, in April 2015, stresses youth participation in crime prevention efforts. Responding to this Declaration, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) launched a global youth crime prevention initiative that uses the power of sport to build resilience in young people by enhancing their life skills, and to increase their knowledge of the consequences of substance use and crime, with a view to positively influencing their behaviour and attitudes, and pre-venting antisocial and risky behaviour. Besides awareness-raising, a key component is the development of this evidence-informed life skills training curriculum, Line Up Live Up, which can be used as part of existing sports programmes.

The design of Line Up Live Up, including both programme and evaluation design, is evidence-informed and based on a ‘Theory of Change’ that centres on the assumption that through the selected training methodology and risk factors addressed, the initiative will lead to short- and medium-term changes in attitudes and behaviour of young people. Through these changes, the programme helps them to stay away from violence, crime and drug use.

Ideally this life skills training programme is complemented by a larger set of community- based interventions in order to target all relevant risk factors in a young person’s life, including activities focusing on youth development more broadly.