Programa piloto de prevención del acoso sexual y sexista centrado en los observadorespropuesta de innovación educativa de la Facultad de Ciencias

Abstract

As a result of an interdisciplinary collaboration, the Faculty of Sciences developed, during the academic year 2017-18, a pilot program aimed at the training of bystanders among the students of the center.The general objective was to prepare students to intervene early in the face of inappropriate behavior. In addition to informing and raising awareness about sexual harrasment and its consequences, the activities have been aimed at acquiring effective communication skills, conflict resolution and empathy. To evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention, a pre-post design with two groups (intervention and control) was used. An instrument with four sub-scales was designed to measure: a) the adequacy of different situations; b) the need to intervene in each of them; c) knowledge about how to intervene; and d) the willingness to intervene. The instrument was refined with students from other centers, demonstrating good psychometric properties, evidence of validity and discriminative capacity. During the Educational Innovation Conference we presented only the preliminary results of the exploratory study (N = 201), since we still did not have the final results. In addition to develop a new instrument, the results indicated significant differences by gender in several measures. Women rated harassment situations worse, showed more willingness and intention to intervene, and greater empathy towards those who suffer harassment than men do.The repeated measures analyses showed significant improvements in the intervention group in several measures (assessment of sexual harrassment, knowledge and willingness to intervene, and empathy).