Preventing Sexual Violence Through Program Interventions and Ideological Shifts

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Research report: meta-analysis on sexual violence prevention programs, published by Seth Ariel Green on March 25, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This post summarizes a new paper: Preventing Sexual Violence - A Behavioral Problem Without a Behaviorally-Informed Solution, on which we are coauthors along with Roni Porat, Ana P. Gantman, and Elizabeth Levy Paluck.
The vast majority of papers try to change ideas about sexual violence and are relatively successful at that. However, on the most crucial outcomes - perpetration and victimization - the primary prevention literature has not yet found its footing. We argue that the field should take a much more behavioralist approach and focus on the environmental and structural determinants of violence.
The literature as a whole
We surveyed papers written between 1986 and 2018 and found 224 manuscripts describing 298 studies, from which we coded 499 distinct point estimates.
We looked specifically at primary prevention efforts, which aim to prevent violence before it happens. This is in contrast to secondary prevention, which, per the CDC, comprises "[i]mmediate responses after sexual violence has occurred to deal with the short-term consequences of violence." We also didn't meta-analyze studies where an impact on sexual violence was a secondary or unanticipated consequence of, e.g. giving cash to women unconditionally or opening adult entertainment establishments.
We also didn't look at anything that tries to reduce violence by focusing on the behavior of potential victims, e.g. self-defense classes or "sexually assertive communication training."
We also didn't look at especially high-risk populations, like people who are incarcerated or sex workers.
Here are some graphical overviews:
Here is the distribution of studies over time, with three "zeitgeist" programs highlighted.
Three zeitgeists programs
We highlight three "pioneering and influential programs" that "represent the prevalent approaches to sexual violence prevention in a particular period of time."
The first is Safe Dates (Foshee et al. 1996), which "makes use of multiple strategies, including a play performed by students, a poster contest, and a ten-session curriculum." The core idea is that "perpetration and victimization may be decreased by changing dating abuse norms and gender stereotypes, and improving students' interpersonal skills including positive communication, anger management and conflict resolution."
The second is the Men's Program (Foubert, Tatum & Donahue 2006), which aims to prevent sexual violence by men by increasing their empathy and support for victims of sexual violence, and by reducing their resistance to violence prevention programs. E.g.:
Participants in the program watched a 15-minute dramatization of a male police officer who was raped by two other men, and then dealt with the aftermath of the assault. Trained peer educators then told the participants that the perpetrators were heterosexual and known to the victim, and attempted to draw connections between the male police officer's experience and common sexual violence experiences among women.
Participants were then taught strategies for supporting a rape survivor; definitions of consent; and strategies for intervening when a peer jokes about rape or disrespects women, and in situations where a rape may occur.
The third is Bringing in the Bystander (Banyard, Moynihan, & Plante 2007), which
puts helping others in danger and speaking up against sexist ideas (i.e., "bystanding") at the center of the intervention. As a result, the target behavior change is moved from decreasing perpetration behavior to increasing bystander behavior. The intervention is aimed not at men as potential perpetrators and women as potential victims but everyone as a potential person who can intervene and stop s...