Nearly 1 in 4 women in the U.S. is raped or otherwise sexually assaulted during her college years, according to a 2015 survey, involving 92,306 undergraduates, for The Association of American Universities. This unwanted, forceful sexual contact often occurs during a woman’s freshman or sophomore year and is generally perpetrated by someone she knows. The rate is similar for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning) individuals, while around 5 percent of male undergraduates experience non-consensual sexual contact.
To combat this disturbing reality, many colleges and universities have stepped up their sexual assault prevention efforts through a variety of measures, including teaching and encouraging the use of bystander intervention skills. These often involve impartial people identifying potentially problematic encounters; stepping in and confronting dangerous behavior in a direct and clear but non-confrontational way; distracting the perpetrator’s behavior before it becomes harmful; and enlisting help from acquaintances or law enforcement professionals to change the course of the encounter. All of this sounds good in theory, but there have been lingering questions about how effective these programs really are.
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Now there are some answers — and the results seem to be mixed. In the last year, several studies have found that some of these programs do have a positive influence on bystanders’ confidence and willingness to intervene. In a 2016 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, researchers compared the effects of a single 90-minute bystander education program with a traditional awareness education program and a no-education control group: At the two-month follow-up, the results showed that the bystander education program was more effective at changing people’s attitudes and beliefs, their sense of self-efficacy and intentions for intervening, and self-reported behaviors for bystander action compared to the two other groups.
Another 2016 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence investigated the effects of an intervention aimed at preventing dating violence among students at two Virginia colleges and identifying red flags for such behavior, based on The Red Flag Campaign, a project of the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance. The researchers found that a 30-minute presentation during new student orientation led to an increase in behaviors such as talking to friends about how to watch out for each other at parties, trying to help friends who are being abused get out of that situation and get help, and calling campus security when two people are arguing loudly or getting physically aggressive with each other.
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“By having a variety of bystander behaviors and skills within one’s tool-belt, students can then choose and use the behavior most appropriate for a given situation,” says study lead author Amanda Borsky, a researcher formerly with the American Institutes for Research in the District of Columbia who is now an advisor at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. One of the strengths of these programs is they use peer leaders to deliver the bystander training. “When students see people they identify with doing the behaviors, they [develop] more confidence to engage in the behaviors themselves,” Borsky says.
Yet, research has found that these programs have less of an impact on “high-risk” males. A 2016 study conducted at Oklahoma State University and the University of Arkansas found that men who frequently watched violent or degrading pornography were less likely to intervene as bystanders to help someone experiencing sexual violence. (The same was not true of those who watched non-degrading pornography.) “When people consume violent pornography regularly, they begin to think that violence in real, live sexual encounters is natural and acceptable,” explains John Foubert, a professor of higher education and student affairs at Oklahoma State. “So it doesn’t occur to them to intervene in a situation of potential sexual violence — and that is the rub: As people view more violent porn, they begin to think violence is OK, and they do nothing about it.”
Besides viewers of violent pornography, men are considered “high risk” and less likely to intervene as bystanders if they have perpetrated any form of sexual misconduct in the past, ranging from unwelcome touching and sexual assault, to posting inappropriate or sexist content on social media and making sexist or inappropriate jokes or comments, says Nada Elias-Lambert, an assistant professor and Master of Social Work, or MSW, program director in the department of social work at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. “These high-risk men have developed attitudes and behavioral tendencies that condone or legitimize sexually aggressive inclinations. As a society, we often don’t recognize the behaviors at the lower end of the continuum, such as sexist jokes, as sexually violent behaviors. By not recognizing those behaviors and allowing them to continue, we are giving high-risk men permission to continue moving up the continuum, and their behaviors become more and more sexually aggressive.”
For men in these groups, experts say, bystander intervention training isn’t enough to change their attitudes. A critical step is to alter their underlying beliefs and behaviors and to put an end to rape-myth acceptance — including notions that a woman “is asking for it” if she wears revealing clothing or drinks too much at a party, Elias-Lambert says. Another measure that’s been found to help: “When we teach men how horribly traumatic rape can feel and get them to think about how they could prevent a rape from happening in their own environment, something clicks inside them and they go from passive observers to active interveners,” Foubert says. “That is what we need to change the culture.”
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Until these attitudes shift on a high-altitude level, experts advise college students to err on the side of intervening in a situation that looks like it could lead to sexual violence or coercion. “Usually, the worst thing that could happen is that you get a reputation for being a ‘cock blocker’ or prude — so what?” Foubert says. “Nobody needs to be the sex police for consensual encounters — those are decisions for individuals to make freely with their own moral standards. [But] if it looks like a man is about to attempt sexual relations with a woman who is weakened by alcohol or who is threatened, it is time to be a leader, step up and help get her out of that situation.” That’s a scenario where everybody wins, since you could end up preventing one person from committing a crime and the other from becoming a victim.
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Bystander Intervention Programs: Do They Curb Campus Sexual Assault? originally appeared on usnews.com
