Highlights• Dating and sexual violence prevention programs that promote bystander intervention are popular.• More information about what facilitates or inhibits bystander behavior in DSV situations is needed.• Youth perception of community norms were associated with action frequency for many bystander actions.Abstract There is enthusiasm for programs that promote bystander intervention to prevent dating and sexual violence (DSV). However, more information about what facilitates or inhibits bystander behavior in DSV situations is needed. The present cross-sectional survey study investigated whether youth perceptions of adults' behavior and community norms were associated with how frequently youth took action and intervened in DSV situations or to prevent DSV. Specifically, study hypotheses were that youths' perceptions of communitylevel variables, such as adults' willingness to help victims of DSV or prevent DSV, perceptions of community collective efficacy, and perceptions of community descriptive and injunctive norms disapproving of DSV and supporting DSV prevention, would be associated with how frequently youths took reactive and proactive bystander action. Participants were 2172 students from four high schools in one New England state. ANOVA analyses found that descriptive norms were associated with all actionist behaviors, and perceptions of community cohesion were also consistently associated with them. Injunctive norms were associated, but less consistently, with actionist behaviors. Findings suggest that DSV-related social norms, and descriptive norms and community cohesion in particular, might be relevant to youth DSV bystander behavior.

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There is growing attention to how social processes in communities may contribute to domestic and sexual violence (DSV) and be a target for prevention efforts. Three main variables are collective efficacy and descriptive and injunctive norms. To date, few measures exist that assess these variables in the specific context of violence prevention. The current study sampled 3,866 adults and high‐school youth in four communities in northern New England. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses examined the psychometrics of the scales. Scales reflecting collective efficacy, indirect public, and direct individualized descriptive norms, public and personal injunctive norms, and youth perceptions of adults’ prevention actions demonstrated robust factor structures and adequate reliability and validity. These measures may prove useful for a diverse audience (e.g., practitioner, researchers) for assessing the effectiveness of community‐level DSV prevention strategies.

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This study examined relationships between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, reasons for using Internet pornography, frequency of using Internet pornography during the last year, and the degree to which participants believed they were both confident in their efficacy and were willing to intervene to help prevent a sexual assault from occurring. Students volunteered to take an online survey as one of several options for course credit in a research participation system in a School of Education at a midwestern public university. Men's extrinsic religiosity was positively correlated with their use of Internet pornography and negatively correlated with willingness to intervene as a bystander. Men's intrinsic religiosity was negatively correlated with how many reasons they had for using pornography and negatively correlated with their use of pornography. Women's extrinsic religiosity negatively correlated with their bystander efficacy. Women's intrinsic religiosity was negatively correlated with their reasons for using pornography and their use of pornography. Women's use of pornography was negatively correlated with bystander efficacy. A regression revealed that three religiosity variables and two pornography variables predicted 19% of the variance in women's bystander efficacy.