Bystander intentions to intervene and previous sexual violence education: A latent class analysis.

Abstract

Objective: Further nuance is required in our efforts to understand how we conceptualize bystander intervention. The purpose of this article is to use person-centered analysis to develop classes of students' intentions to intervene in high-risk and postassault situations, and to determine whether membership in classes is associated with the amount of sexual violence prevention education received. Method: Latent class analysis was performed with a sample of 7,146 undergraduate student survey responses to determine patterns and subgroups of bystander intentions to intervene. Latent class was then used as the dependent variable in a multinomial logistic regression model with gender, previous education, awareness of resources, level of exposure to messages about sexual violence, and social desirability as independent variables. Results: We found that a model with five classes best fit the data. The five classes were always interveners, never interveners, female-focused interveners, authority interveners, and friend-only interveners. Multinomial logistic regression analyses demonstrated that previous education, exposure to messages about sexual violence, awareness of resources, and gender are related to membership in the five latent classes. For example, respondents in the never intervener class reported less exposure to education and information about sexual violence on campus than all other groups, and they were more likely to be male. Conclusions: The findings suggest that intervening is not an "all-ornothing" prospect and that students likely view various intervention situations differently and are influenced by gender and previous education. Bystander prevention programs need to move toward addressing the variability of potential intervention situations.

Exploring Socio-Demographic and Mental Health Differences Among Constructed Male Victim Severity Profiles.

“…Only few studies have conducted LCA on the broad topic of (sexual) violence (Ansara & Hindin, 2010;Cavanaugh et al, 2012;Clarke et al, 2016;French et al, 2014;Lysova & Dim, 2020;Macy et al, 2007;McMahon et al, 2019;Nelon et al, 2019;O'Connor et al, 2021). However, none of them focused on male victims of sexual violence in the general population, but rather focused on (sexual) violence within a sample of high school students, college students and children attending primary school (Clarke et al, 2016;French et al, 2014;Macy et al, 2007;Nelon et al, 2019), intimate partner violence (Ansara & Hindin, 2010;Cavanaugh et al, 2012;Lysova & Dim, 2020) or topics related to sexual violence such as bystander intentions and exposure to sexual violence messages (McMahon et al, 2019;O'Connor et al, 2021). Only one study specifically focused on male victims in the context of intimate partner violence in their ongoing relationship (Lysova & Dim, 2020).…”

The Questionnaire of Intention to Help in VAW Cases (QIHVC): Development and preliminary results

“…Findings have shown that a considerable number of cases of VAW occur in the presence of bystanders ( Burn, 2009 ; Gracia et al, 2018 ; European Institute for Gender Equality [EIGE], 2020 ; León et al, 2022 ; Sánchez-Prada et al, 2022 ) and suggest the need and relevance for working with these individuals and convert them into “actionists,” active agents of prevention ( McMahon and Banyard, 2012 ; Fenton and Mott, 2017 ; Fenton et al, 2019 ; McMahon et al, 2019 ; Rothman et al, 2019 ). This leads to the development of intervention programs to modify attitudes and beliefs held by bystanders (such as possible sexist attitudes or blaming the victim) and to strengthen their active responses (reactive and/or proactive) toward the victims ( UNWomen, 2015 ).…”

“…This leads to the development of intervention programs to modify attitudes and beliefs held by bystanders (such as possible sexist attitudes or blaming the victim) and to strengthen their active responses (reactive and/or proactive) toward the victims ( UNWomen, 2015 ). An important part of these programs, and the research on which they are based, has focused on cases of sexual VAW ( Crooks et al, 2019 ; Kettrey and Marx, 2019 ; McMahon et al, 2019 ; Mainwaring et al, 2022 ; Woods et al, 2022 ), although they have been applied to others forms of VAW, such as IPVAW ( Banyard et al, 2020 ; European Institute for Gender Equality [EIGE], 2020 ; Sprang et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Likewise, it is important to understand both the factors that facilitate active bystander response and the barriers that impede it ( Burn, 2009 ; Gracia et al, 2018 ; European Institute for Gender Equality [EIGE], 2020 ; Álvarez-García et al, 2021 ; Mainwaring et al, 2022 ). Overall, there is a fundamental need to have the most valid assessment tools possible ( Parrott et al, 2012 ; Banyard et al, 2014 ; McMahon et al, 2014 , 2017 , 2019 ; Jouriles et al, 2016 ; Bush et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Given that, to the best of our knowledge, there are no existing tools to evaluate bystander response in the case of these three forms of VAW, the main purpose of this work is to present the development of a tool that applies a scenario-based methodology and makes it possible to measure the probability of the provided responses with good evidence of content validity. To this end, it is important to emphasize that, while measuring real bystander response is important, so too is evaluating one’s inclination to intervene ( McMahon et al, 2015 , 2019 ) given that intention constitutes one of the primary predictors of subsequent effective behavior ( Ajzen, 1985 ; Fishbein and Ajzen, 2010 ), offers important keys to understand how to motivate individuals to participate as “actionists” ( McMahon et al, 2015 ), and also constitutes one of the most frequent positive results after applying intervention programs with bystanders ( Katz and Moore, 2013 ; McMahon et al, 2019 ). For these reasons, the decision was made to focus the measuring tool on the evaluation of intention or probability (in place of real response).…”