This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Bringing in the Bystander® in-person program for preventing sexual and relationship violence at institutions of higher education.
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 policymakers. In the current evaluation of such a bystander program, participants were 948 first-year college students at two universities. Of these participants, 47.8 percent were women and 85.2 percent identified as White (15 percent also identified as Hispanic in a separate question), and were between the ages of 18 and 24. One of the universities was a rural, primarily residential campus, and the other university was an urban, highly commuter campus in the northeastern United States. To date, this is the first study to have found positive behavioral changes lasting as long as 1 year following an educational workshop that focused on engaging bystanders in preventing sexual and relationship violence. Even so, many questions remain to be answered about prevention and interventions 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 between and among the attitudes and behaviors related to preventing sexual and relationship violence. This article offers recommendations for designing and evaluating programs based on the findings of this study related to the importance of moderators, especially two key understudied ones, i.e., readiness to help and opportunity to intervene. (publisher abstract modified)