Activating bystanders
Empowering students in India to address gender based violence.?
By Malhar Acharya , Kaavya Arakoni , and Krittika Gorur
With contributions from Aditya Jagati , Ananya Jalan , and Jonathan Karl
Imagine being a college student in bustling Delhi, trying to keep up with classes and the pulse of the city. Suddenly, you witness an act of violence against a girl. Your heart races as you grapple with what to do. Do you step in? Do you stay silent?
We recently collaborated with Breakthrough Trust and Quilt.AI to conduct a study that explored the motives and considerations of college students in Delhi and Lucknow in this very scenario. In an attempt to uncover what drives them to step in as potential bystanders and how we can empower them to act, we explored how a community and youth-centred approach can address individual acts of gender violence and the system-level neglect that perpetuates it.?
Our main outcome was a youth’s inclination to step in during instances of gender violence. We gauged this by crafting a measure inspired by Latane and Darley's classic 1968 study on bystander intervention. This model outlined five crucial steps:
We combined these steps into a single index to evaluate a shift in youths’ inclination to intervene as a bystander.?
Understanding human behaviour is at the heart of social science research, especially when it comes to preventing gender violence. We targeted three key barriers by drawing from a qualitative diagnostic we conducted into the complexities of why youth do not intervene and what might inspire them to act. They were:
We engaged over 2000 first- and second-year students from 16 colleges in Delhi and Lucknow and narrowed our pursuit down to two main questions:?
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Neither of our interventions, delivered through Facebook and Instagram ads (online-only) and enhanced with on-campus activities (online and offline), shifted bystanders' overall readiness to intervene in gender-based violence. However, both interventions did yield some positive suggestive results in specific bystander steps, and revealed intriguing gender and city-based disparities.
In our online-only intervention, students in the treatment group initially perceived more social approval from their online communities for intervening compared to the control group.
Interestingly, according to digital engagement metrics, our most successful set of intervention media (which included both videos and static media) were those emphasising social approval associated with intervening. Yet, this effect faded after 6 months and during the introduction of in-person activities.
In the combined online-offline treatment, we found that youth felt a stronger sense of responsibility to act.
This result was largely driven by male students, who reported higher levels of felt responsibility. Some preliminary effects we found also varied significantly between Delhi and Lucknow, with Delhi students perceiving more severe consequences of gender-based violence than their Lucknow counterparts.
Our findings underscore the importance of tailoring interventions to specific demographics and circumstances.
While our interventions did not translate into a higher inclination to intervene as defined by the Latane and Darley model, they do highlight the complexity of influencing bystander behaviour and the need for innovative, targeted approaches that possess predictive value in everyday life.
Further research should explore how to effectively motivate bystanders to intervene in real-world scenarios, and how to boost different components of the bystander model to ultimately foster a genuine desire to take action.
Empowering bystanders is a crucial step in combating gender-based violence. As we move forward, we hope these insights from our study will help shape more effective strategies to encourage action and foster change.