The challenge
Schools needed tested ways to prevent dating violence and sexual harassment among middle school students.
The case
Bruce Taylor, Nan Stein, Elizabeth Mumford and Daniel Woods randomly assigned the Shifting Boundaries interventions to 30 public middle schools in New York City, enrolling 117 sixth- and seventh-grade classes with over 2,500 students, to receive a classroom intervention, a building intervention, both, or neither. The classroom intervention was a six-session curriculum emphasising the laws and consequences for perpetrators of dating violence and sexual harassment, the social construction of gender roles and healthy relationships. The building intervention used building-based restraining orders, more faculty and security presence in safe and unsafe 'hot spots' mapped by students, and posters to increase awareness and reporting. Six months after the intervention, the building-only and combined interventions were effective in reducing sexual violence victimisation involving peers or dating partners, and the building-only intervention reduced sexual violence perpetration by peers. One anomalous result, an increase in reports of sexual harassment victimisation contradicted by lower frequency estimates, was judged by the researchers most likely to be spurious.
Why it worked
The researchers say the success of the building-only intervention is important 'because it can be implemented with very few extra costs to schools'.
Sources
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