This is depressing stuff, yet evidence that rape can be tackled is starting to emerge; it’s just that the most exciting results are not coming from prisons, nor from places where sexual violence seems especially common, like at colleges and in the military. Instead, they’re coming from middle schools. To be clear: If we’re to turn the tide of sexual violence, we should start by talking to eleven-year-olds.

One reason for this is that sexual predators start young. “We want to get to people before they engage in sexual violence for the first time,” says Sarah DeGue, a behavioral scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. In a 2008 study backed by the National Institute of Justice, 70 percent of men who admitted to sexual violence said they had committed their first offense by age seventeen. As any psychologist will tell you, it’s very difficult to change patterns of behavior once they have become ingrained.

Most importantly, we know that intervening in middle school can work. Some of the best evidence comes from archetypal small-town America. In November 1994, children at seven middle schools in predominately rural Johnston County, to the southeast of Raleigh in North Carolina, embarked on a program called Safe Dates.

Over the course of ten classroom sessions, kids at the chosen schools held discussions about healthy and abusive relationships, and how to help abused friends. They also learned strategies to avoid turning anger into abuse and to prevent sexual assault. By the time the program wound down the following March, the schools had each put on a play highlighting the issues they’d discussed, and children had designed posters to bring home the message, voting for the top three. At seven other middle schools across the county, lessons continued as normal, with no special focus on avoiding dating violence.

When researchers, led by Vangie Foshee of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, interviewed the kids one month after the program finished, they found less sexual violence occurring in the schools that had taken part in Safe Dates. What’s more, this positive impact persisted for at least four years.

A second program, Shifting Boundaries, recently proved its worth in the grittier surroundings of thirty of New York City’s public middle schools. At some, kids were asked to identify parts of the school where they felt unsafe, so that extra staff could be posted there. Posters were also put up to increase awareness of dating violence and sexual harassment, as well as the need to report either one. At other schools, the kids were given a series of lessons about preventing violence in dating relationships, based on the idea of respecting one another’s boundaries. A third group of schools got both parts of the program, while a final group was left unchanged.

The lessons alone didn’t seem to have much effect. But six months after the program ended, there was less sexual violence in both the schools that had the combined program, and those that changed just the school environment, in response to students’ concerns.

What explains the success of Safe Dates and Shifting Boundaries? Aside from the idea of “getting ‘em while they’re young,” one likely key factor is that both are implemented over an extended period, which fits with evidence from studies in college settings that longer-running programs are more effective than brief interventions.

Yet campus administrators seem reluctant to heed this message. “I have twenty-two hours of training materials,” notes John Foubert, of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, whose program aims to change attitudes and behaviors that foster sexual violence. “But the attitude of colleges is: ‘Okay, you’ve got an hour. Use it.’”

Crucially, the successful middle school programs have been evaluated using randomized controlled trials, the gold standard for research evidence, in which people are randomly divided across groups that receive different interventions, one being a control—having either the standard practice or no intervention at all.

Sadly, other studies of strategies to reduce sexual violence mostly have fallen short of this standard. Many have measured changes in attitudes toward sexual violence, but not actual shifts in behavior. Sample sizes usually have been small. Often there was no control group, nor any long-term follow-up. No wonder, then, that the effects have often been small, and hard to detect.

With solid evidence from middle schools finally in hand, the CDC is now rolling out a program called Dating Matters, based on methods with good scientific support, in up to forty-five schools in four major cities—Baltimore; Chicago; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and Oakland, California—involving some ten thousand children aged eleven to fourteen.

But this program and similar philanthropic initiatives are just drops in the ocean. Getting evidence-based approaches implemented in middle schools remains a tough sell. Many schools are reluctant even to broach the issue of sexual violence, given the inevitable push back they get from some quarters.

“It can take one parent in a middle school to shut things down,” says Dorothy Espelage, a psychologist in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Education. Just imagine how the idea of teaching eleven-year-olds about sexual assault—based on findings promoted by government health officials—could be spun by the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.