In 2010, the same year he became principal of J. M. Atherton High School in Louisville, Kentucky, Thomas Aberli agreed to let his students take part in something called Green Dot.
The program uses a technique known as bystander intervention in an effort to help prevent sexual assault, sexual harassment, and other kinds of gender violence in schools. The concept of bystander intervention is simple, at least in theory: Many cases of sexual and dating violence can be thwarted if a bystander intervenes in time.
Green Dot provides an annual training session to students, then identifies “popular opinion leaders,” who receive additional training that they then pass on to their peers. Students are taught the “three Ds” of bystander intervention: direct, delegate, and distract. A direct approach might be offering someone a ride home if he or she appears upset or drunk. Delegating might involve asking someone else, such as a friend who better knows the people involved and might be more trusted, to intervene in a potentially abusive situation. Distracting could mean something as simple as butting into a conversation when someone appears uncomfortable and trapped. Other actions include telling a teacher when you notice your friend looks frightened during a fight with a significant other, speaking up to friends if they say something that feeds into rape culture, like that "someone deserved to be raped," and asking someone who looks distraught if they are OK or need help.
After adopting Green Dot, Aberli said he quickly noticed some positive changes among the students at Atherton High School, but he knew his observations were only anecdotal. “I think it’s been effective,” Aberli tells Teen Vogue. “But then again, it’s hard to measure things that don’t happen.”
New research from the University of Kentucky may provide a clearer answer. In the largest and longest study of its kind, researchers studied 26 Kentucky high schools over five years. Half of the schools used the Green Dot program, and half did not offer any bystander intervention training. They found that by years three and four of the study, victimization rates were about 12% lower in schools that offered the Green Dot program than in those that did not. That translated to 120 fewer incidents of sexual violence in the third year of the study and 88 fewer in the fourth year.
“This is really good news,” Ann Coker, the study’s lead author and the endowed chair of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Research on Violence Against Women, tells Teen Vogue. “It takes a lot of work to change behavior in a community, so it’s very exciting to have programs that actually reduce sexual assault and physical dating-violence perpetration and victimization. It’s key that colleges and high schools have the right information to pick effective programs.”
While Green Dot was the focus of the study, it is far from the only bystander intervention program, and high schools and colleges across the country have increasingly adopted similar initiatives in recent years. When the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act was signed into law in 2014, it included a provision requiring colleges to offer such training.
At the same time, there’s been little research on the effectiveness of bystander intervention programs in reducing instances of sexual violence. Earlier studies have found that students who go through the training do appear to engage in more active bystander behaviors, such as expressing concern to friends whose partners are acting overly jealous or controlling, speaking up when a friend is bragging about forcing someone to have sex, and making sure someone who has been drinking alcohol gets home safely.
The new study, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was published this week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, goes further and examines whether these changes in behavior could lead to fewer incidents of gender violence. Starting in 2010, the researchers recorded 300 incidents of sexual violence — including assault, harassment, stalking, and dating violence — in the schools that would offer the training and 211 in the schools that would not. The researchers returned to the schools each year and surveyed 89,707 students on whether they had experienced or committed sexual violence. By 2013, when Green Dot was fully implemented, the schools offering the training reported 161 incidents of sexual violence, and the schools without the training reported 281 incidents. In 2014, the trained schools reported 157 incidents, and the control schools reported 245.
“I was really surprised, but encouraged,” Coker says of the study results. “In epidemiology, we have a hard time saying that something is causing something else. But we’re really close here. You have the ingredients to make the case that it’s the intervention that’s really causing this reduction in sexual violence.”
Students looking to adopt Green Dot or other bystander intervention programs at their schools should talk to their teacher, principal, or other administrators about the training. Coker says having research like the new study can help schools pick the right kind of program to use. For example, she says, face-to-face programs like Green Dot work better than online training.
For Aberli, the study is validation of something he’s felt was true for the past seven years: Bystander intervention works. Atherton was one of the schools included in the study.
“The program has been good at bringing not only awareness to the issue, but also at giving students the skill set to handle difficult situations and the confidence to carry that message to their peers,” Aberli says. “A study showing it works is important. But even more important to me is the good, positive talk I hear from students and their desire to be involved. That’s been plenty enough for me.”
Related: How to End Bullying at Your School
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