Online sexual violence prevention on a female college campus in India: Evaluation of the RISE-ON program

Abstract

Background

Sexual violence represents a severe problem for young Indian women and requires effective prevention. Since face-to-face prevention programs are limited in reach, we developed the online sexual violence prevention program RISE-ON consisting of three modules, namely Gender, Sexual Violence, and Bystander Education. The study's objective is to investigate the short-term effects of the RISE-ON modules on participants’ knowledge and attitudes.

Method

A total of N = 244 female college students from Delhi aged 17 to 22 were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups with two of the three modules. By design, each group functions as a treatment group for the two included modules and as a control group for the third, missing module.

Results

From pre- to posttest, there were significantly larger increases of participants’ knowledge on gender, sexual violence, and bystander education in the treatment than in the control group. Concerning attitudes, we found significant increases for gender awareness and bystander attitudes across all groups.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates that the RISE-ON modules are effective in terms of increasing knowledge, but there were no module-specific changes of attitudes. Thus, future online prevention programs need to focus increasingly on attitudes, especially attitudes about sexual violence, and behavior change.