Encouraging Responses in Sexual and Relationship Violence Prevention

Abstract

Colleges and universities are high-risk settings for sexual and relationship violence. To address these problems, institutions of higher education have implemented prevention programs, many of which train students as potential bystanders who can step in to help diffuse risky situations, identify and challenge perpetrators, and assist victims. The impact of bystander sexual and relationship violence prevention programs on long-term behavior of bystanders has remained a key unanswered question for those who seek to offer the most effective programs as well as for policy makers. In this study, the researchers experimentally evaluated the effectiveness of the Bringing in the Bystander® in-person program. Participants were 948 1st-year college students of whom 47.8% were women and 85.2% identified as White (15% also identified as Hispanic in a separate question) between the ages of 18 and 24 at two universities (one a rural, primarily residential campus and the other an urban, highly commuter campus) in the northeastern United States. To date, this is the first study to have found positive behavior changes as long-lasting as 1 year following an educational workshop focusing on engaging bystanders in preventing sexual and relationship violence. Even so, many questions remain to be answered about prevention and intervention of this type. More prospective research is needed on bystander-focused prevention of these forms of violence to help understand and better predict the complicated relationships both between and among the attitudes and behaviors related to preventing sexual and relationship violence. In this regard, we make specific recommendations for designing and evaluating programs based on our findings relating to the importance of moderators, especially two key understudied ones, readiness to help and opportunity to intervene.

Conveying campus sexual misconduct policy information to college and university students: Results from a 7-campus study

“…With few exceptions, 26 as a whole, evaluations of programs aimed at preventing sexual assault on college campuses indicate that they are effective at producing, at the very least, short-term positive outcomes. [27][28][29][30] Several meta-analyses of these campus sexual assault prevention programs have been conducted over the years, with agreement that a greater dose of or exposure to educational materials produced greater knowledge and attitude and behavior change gains.…”

“Campus Craft”: A Game for Sexual Assault Prevention in Universities

“…Moynihan et al 22 found that bystander approaches were effective at the 1-year post-test only among students who had a higher level of awareness about the problem of sexual violence prior to the prevention program. These findings provide a research-based trajectory for implementing SAPE wherein an awareness raising program such as ''Campus Craft'' could be implemented during students' first year on campus followed by implementing bystander interventions with students in subsequent years.…”

“…In fact, Bowman 21 stated that first-year students may not be as inclined to endorse the bystander intervention model because doing so would require students to break from the group when intervening-something that these students might be reluctant to do. Moynihan et al, 22 however, found that bystander-focused SAPE was more effective at a 1-year follow-up for participants who had a higher level of awareness regarding sexual assault on campus. These findings speak to the need for multifaceted approaches to SAPE, which include initial awareness followed by techniques that require in-depth reasoning such as bystander interventions.…”

Intimate Partner Violence on College Campuses: An Appraisal of Emerging Perspectives

“…It was found that it offered a promising new direction to prevention programs. Tran theoretical model was "one of the first attempts to operationalize and create specific measures to quantify readiness for change in the context of sexual violence prevention and evaluation" (Banyard, et al, 2015).…”

“…One strategy to prevent dating violence (and IPV) on college campuses is to focus on intervention efforts targeting the bystanders (Borsky, McDonnell, Turner, & Rimal, 2016). This can be accomplished by implementing prevention programs that train students from being potential bystanders to those who can step-in to help diffuse risky situations, identify and challenge perpetrators, and assist in support of victims (Moynihan, Banyard, Cares, Potter, Williams, & Stapleton, 2015).…”