Bystander rape-prevention programs facing questions

Associated Press

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.

Training programs around the country are trying to teach bystanders to stop sexual assault, and now is when they have to be especially alert. Campus sexual-assault reports are so common at the beginning of the fall semester, college administrators call this time of year the “red zone.”

Penn State University sends campus-wide text alerts when someone has been sexually assaulted. During the last academic year, there were 29 campus text alerts about sexual assaults at the university’s main campus, and half of them were issued in the first ten weeks of school.

“Maybe that’s why you showed up today,” said Katie Tenny, as she ran a rape-prevention training session at the school this year. “Maybe you’re tired of the text alerts, knowing that this is happening to people around you.”

Tenny is the leader of a program that seeks to teach people to do or say something to prevent a potential attack. It’s one of the hundreds of bystander intervention programs that have sprung up in recent years at universities, high schools and military bases, designed to involve whole communities in discouraging harassment and sexual assault.

Momentum for this good bystander movement has been building for several years, aided by some widely reported stories of heroic interventions. Though research is still evolving, studies so far suggest it is helping.

But now some assault victims and their advocates fear new obstacles, including a recent announcement by the U.S. Department of Education that it would jettison rules that had pushed colleges and universities to be more aggressive about sexual assaults.

A bystander is present in about 30 percent of cases of rape, threat of rape or unwanted sexual contact, according to an Associated Press analysis of 24 years of data from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey. In just over one third of those cases the actions of the bystanders helped, often by scaring off the assailant in some way.

In large national survey of students at more than two dozen U.S. college campuses in 2015, 20 percent said they’d seen someone acting in a sexually violent or harassing manner, but the most of them said they did nothing. When asked why not, about a quarter said they didn’t know what they could do.

A program called Green Dot, founded at the University of Kentucky about 10 years ago, teaches student leaders and others to identify potential sexual assaults and safely intervene to prevent them. The program has spread to hundreds of campuses, including Penn State, which calls its year-and-a-half-old Green Dot program “Stand for State.”

Tenny says there are a number of sometimes simple things people can do, such as starting a conversation with a potential victim, or getting a friend to intervene.

These programs seem to work, but evidence is limited so far, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.