WITHDRAWN: Empowering Places & Spaces?: The Role School-Level Factors Play in Influencing Adolescents' Bystander Behaviors

BACKGROUND: Teen dating violence (TDV) and bullying remain significant public health issues, with deleterious health outcomes for victims and broader communities. Broader school culture and climate play an important role in influencing adolescents’ collective responses to social issues (Zimmerman et al., 2011). While studies have documented individual level-factors that influence bystanders behaviors in response to TDV and bullying (Casey, Lindhorst, & Storer, in press), there has been limited investigation of the contextual factors that can hinder or encourage adolescent’s pro-social bystander behaviors in response to abuse in their social networks. Drawing from theories of empowerment and collective efficacy, this presentation seeks to address these research gaps by describing the ways that school environments intrinsically influence adolescent’s bystander behaviors—a critical initial step in fostering school environments that are intolerant to bullying and TDV.

METHODS: Data were collected from a series of focus groups with youth aged 14-18 (n=103).  A semi-structured interview guide was used to elicit participants’ examples of abuse and initiate a discussion about environmental and situational factors that influence their proactive response to abuse. Thematic content analysis involved multiple rounds of inductive coding. Matrices were used to compare codes within and across the focus groups.

RESULTS: Adolescent participants described complex school environments that presented challenges to proactively respond to abuse. For both bullying and TDV, participants reported that the structure of high schools (i.e. shared classrooms; size of schools; relationships with teachers), made it difficult to intervene. While some participants described instances where schools minimized or ignored abuses, they primarily recounted inadequate actions such as temporarily separating perpetrators and victims. Overall, these actions were perceived as ineffective at encouraging youth intervention or ameliorating abuse. Students reported feeling powerless, within the top-down structure of school environments, to interrupt abuse. Participants identified bullying related school-level interventions, but they believed these programs did not promote lasting changes to school culture. They noted, however, a lack of overt awareness of dating violence. Participants perceived that interventions to encourage bystander behaviors, could be strengthened from meaningful collaboration between teachers and students, ongoing prevention activities, and by facilitating leadership opportunities for students to initiate action-oriented prevention activities.

Conclusion: Schools environments play a critical role in nurturing youth involvement in response to TDV and bullying. High schools are contained spaces where adolescents are afforded few opportunities to positively engage with teachers and administrators, and there is limited substantive attention paid to dating abuse and bullying. Ultimately, fostering school environments that encourage active proactive bystander behaviors requires closer attention to the unique social contexts confronted by adolescents in school settings.