The Ministry has been dealing with the question of the cooperation of individual areas of prevention and youth work/youth policy since the EU Presidency 1998. A special conference on the subject “Youth and Prevention” thus took place in 1998.
The 4th report on the situation of young people in Austria contains the sub-report "Youth work outside schools and prevention" (in German). According to this, a large proportion of youth organisations and open youth work institutions deal specifically with issues of prevention, whereby the main focus is on questions of “addiction/dependency”. “Drug misuse”, “violence”, “sexual abuse" and "AIDS/HIV" are also mentioned as important themes by youth institutions.
Conveying knowledge, affective analysis, alternatives to problem behaviour and the acquisition of competencies are seen as the main approaches in the prevention work of youth institutions.
Youth work outside the schools sector reaches an extremely wide number of young people, which also includes "special target groups" which according to the descriptions of prevention work theory are more at risk in some problem areas and are therefore also target groups for secondary prevention. The main focus of the varied methods in the area of preventive youth work is on leisure time- and experiential educational methods as well as activities whose objective is to raise the self-confidence of the young people.
The Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth promotes these approaches with appropriate financial support as well as the development of training models for youth workers (in cooperation with the provinces).
