Prevention involves altering attitudes, behaviors and norms tо promote safer environments. Individuals can promote and practice healthy relationships, intervene against disrespectful conduct, believe survivors, etc.
Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), aligning with National Sexual Violence Elimination System (NSES) standards and effective prevention principles, shows promise іn decreasing sexual violence perpetration.
Understanding the legal consequences of sexual assault, including the potential for significant jail time and lifelong consequences, can also act as a deterrent. While factors such as the severity оf the offense and the offender’s criminal history can influence sentencing, it’s important tо be aware оf the potential least sentence for sexual assault and the serious nature оf these crimes.
Education and Awareness Campaigns
Education on sexual violence is vital to ending it. This includes educating students about healthy relationships and consent, as well as teaching them to recognize and intervene when someone is in distress.
Safe communities require everyone’s efforts, from survivors themselves to friends and family who believe in them and support them with believing them as survivors, treating them with respect, and providing the resources they require to stay safe.
Training typically emphasizes compliance and rules-based learning; education on the other hand involves complex understanding and critical thinking skills. We must move beyond training by providing deeper educational opportunities that address the root causes of problems while encouraging deeper comprehension through empirical research and theory development.
Teaching Consent
Consent can be an awkward topic to broach without immediately diving into more serious conversations about sexual violence, boundaries, and sexism. By creating a solid base with students early on, you can equip them withthe tools needed to have these conversations and make informed decisions later in life.
Consent lessons can be structured to avoid bias and stereotyping, with educators including it in other lessons such as bystander intervention and personal agency to ensure all their students understand their rights and responsibilities across multiple contexts.
Consent can also be obtained through nonverbal cues such as body language. Teachers can teach children to recognize signals to determine whether or not people have consent.
Healthy Relationships
Sexual violence affects not only its victims but also their family, friends, colleagues and community. Physical consequences include personal injuries, unintended pregnancy, STD infections, and the economic burden from medical and social service costs, while mental health impacts include anxiety, depression, and feelings of fear or distrust.
Studies indicate that strategies implemented at individual, relationship, and community levels of the social-ecological model can have the greatest effect. Examples include prevention programs that teach healthy sex practices, including bystander intervention skills. An effective approach for sexual violence (SV) prevention is incorporating lessons about sexuality, relationships and health as part of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE).
Programs meeting the National Sexuality Education Standards (NSES) include theory-driven programs that incorporate principles such as social learning theory, cognitive science research, and the social-ecological model into CSE programs – however, no published peer-reviewed research has evaluated how CSE meets NSES has an effect on unhealthy relationship behaviors or perpetration behavior.
Bystander Intervention
After the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, social psychologist Bibb Latane conducted research on bystander intervention in an attempt to prevent sexual violence. This work laid the groundwork for how we all can take steps against sexual violence.
Bystander intervention training empowers individuals to intervene when they witness harmful behaviors, such as sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination, occurring around them. It is an integral component of creating safe environments to combat sexual violence in schools, workplaces,s, and communities.
The Stand up, Don’t Stand By campaign – an initiative initiated by Uber in partnership with local law enforcement and nightlife communities – offers one community-based approach to preventing sexual assault. You can learn more here.
Educators and preventionists are working on understanding which factors may influence bystander intervention as self-report methods can be subject to reporting biases; laboratory approaches like bystander analogue tasks and virtual reality paradigms enable researchers to directly observe outcomes in an objective fashion.
