Evaluation of a sexual assault and dating violence prevention program for middle school students

Abstract

Sexual assault and dating violence among adolescents is a critical matter with potential life threatening consequences. Adolescence is a difficult stage in which personal choices (whether good or bad) can determine future lifetime successes or failures. This problem is of great concern to parents, educators and the community at-large in the United States. Among high school youth nationwide, approximately 9% of students reported that they have been forced to have sexual intercourse (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2004). Serious dating violence occurs in 1.6% of adolescent relationships...roughly 400,000 adolescents (Wolitzky-Taylor et al., 2008). Spurred by this information, a variety of programs have been developed to provide adolescents with the information and skills necessary to limit the occurrence of relationship violence. Evaluation of these programs is not mandatory and often prevention programs fail to impact students because of problems with implementation and retention of students. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to evaluate one such program, Project Awareness, a comprehensive, educational approach focusing on middle-school students. Sixty-six middle school students participated in the Project Awareness program and were administered pre- and post-program measures to examine differences in sexual assault and dating violence knowledge, attitudes and behavior. Participating in the program proved to impact female students more than males. Females gained both more knowledge about rape myths and demonstrated greater attitude change about sexual assault. Programs about sexually-related violence should be implemented in schools before high school, be conducted in single-sex classes and must be evaluated for effectiveness.