43 Gender, peer networks, and sexual misconduct prevention education

The ABCs of caring for sexual assault patients

This summarizes proceedings of a Scientific Research Planning Meeting on Sexual Violence and HIV transmission, convened by the Social Science Research Council on 19–20 March 2012 at the Greentree Foundation in New York. The Meeting brought together an interdisciplinary group of basic, clinical, epidemiological and social science researchers and policy makers with the aim of: (1) examining what is known about the physiology of sexual violence and its role in HIV transmission, acquisition and pathogenesis; (2) specifying factors that distinguish risks throughout the maturation of the female genital tract, the reproductive cycle and among post-menopausal women; and (3) developing a research agenda to explore unanswered questions. The Meeting resulted in a consensus Research Agenda and White Paper that identify priorities for HIV research, policy and practice as it pertains to the role of sexual violence and genital injury in HIV transmission, acquisition and pathogenesis, particularly among women and girls.

Lysistrata, #MeToo, and Consent:A Case Study Meghan Brodie (bio) The country is going to hell in a handbasket. Foreign policy is a disaster area. Military interventions stretch on for years. The motives and strategies (or lack thereof) of the men in power have become suspect, and women have had enough. But we are not at the most recent US Women's March or even in the current century. It is 411 bce. In Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the war-weary women of Athens and Sparta want to end the Peloponnesian War, and their tactic is radically simple: participate in a sex strike until the men lay down their arms. In this fast-paced comedy, lust is leverage and the personal is definitely political. But what does it mean to produce this classical play against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement?1 In spring 2017, several months before the movement erupted in the United States, I had planned to direct Ellen McLaughlin's adaptation of Lysistrata for Ursinus College's 2017–18 season. In the October 2017 wake of multiple sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, women used #MeToo to create public awareness about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault in their lives.2 As more and more of my students, colleagues, and friends shared their #MeToo experiences, I paused to consider how a production of Aristophanes' sex comedy, specifically McLaughlin's adaptation of it, might be interpreted in terms of commentary on consent in this changing cultural landscape.3 Surveying Sexual Violence on College Campuses The college sexual assault epidemic is just one of the sexual violence crises to which the #MeToo movement responds. In June 2017, Columbia University announced the findings of the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), "a major research initiative to study sexual violence and sexual health among Columbia University undergraduates." The SHIFT team "surveyed, interviewed, and observed students, assembling one of the most scientifically rigorous and comprehensive portraits of undergraduate sexual health and behavior ever compiled" ("Columbia Researchers Present"). Researchers first published their findings in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE: of the over 1,600 students surveyed, "[s]ince college entry, 22% of students reported experiencing at least one incident of sexual assault" and "[w]omen and gender nonconforming students reported the highest rates (28% and 38%, respectively)." The data compiled by the researchers "suggest a cumulative risk for sexual assault experiences over four years of college with over one in three women experiencing an assault by senior year," but also demonstrate that "freshman year, particularly for women, is when the greatest percentage experience an assault" (Mellins). Given such statistics, how might colleges proactively address sexual assault on campus and cultivate conversations about prevention and consent? Turning to Theatre as a Tool for Sexual Violence Prevention Several texts, including M. Candace Christensen's "Using Theater of the Oppressed to Prevent Sexual Violence on College Campuses," Sarah McMahon and coauthors' "Utilizing Peer [End Page 183] Education Theater for the Primary Prevention of Sexual Violence on College Campuses," and W. Gregory Thatcher's "Preliminary Evaluation of the 'Playing the Game' Sexual Assault Prevention Theatre Program," identify theatre as an effective tool for sexual violence education. For example, Speak About It, a not-for-profit organization, provides "[a]ffirmative consent education through performance and dialogue" to teach high school and college students about consent, boundaries, and healthy relationships. As of 2016, the organization reports that it reached over 300,000 students. In "Exploring and Sharing Strategies for Staging Affirmative Sexual Consent: 100 Shades of Grey and Beyond," Charlotte McIvor discusses her own experiences coordinating a theatre-based sexual violence prevention project at the National University of Ireland at Galway, and highlights similar projects at the University of Texas at Austin, Santa Clara University, Hobart and William Smith College, Michigan State University, and Rutgers University. Based on a model I developed in conjunction with AddVerb Productions and the University of Southern Maine, I coordinate and direct a performance-based sexual violence prevention program titled The Consent Event—a series of scenes and monologues about sexual violence and healthy relationships performed by an ensemble of student actors for Ursinus College's new student orientation...

The increase in popularity of higher education has improved the talent competitiveness of China on the global stage and highlighted the function of higher education in fostering social prosperity and development. But, as higher education has continued to advance, other issues have surfaced. Although enrollment chances have risen, there is still inequity in the distribution of opportunities, particularly across genders. The gender disparity in the growth of Chinese higher education is therefore examined and discussed in this article. The analysis and comparison approach is used to explain the causes and solutions to gender inequality in Hong Kong and Mainland China's higher education stages. It is discovered that there are gender bias-causing similarities and differences between Hong Kong and Mainland China. The study's findings are that traditional Chinese beliefs have an impact on gender inequality in higher education in Hong Kong and Mainland China. In several professions and textbooks in Hong Kong, there are very serious gender stereotypes, whereas, in Mainland China, gender inequality is greatly influenced by the urban-rural divide. The remedies for gender disparity examined in this research have a mitigating impact but do not actually solve the issue. China should establish policies in the future that are better suited to its own national circumstances and guarantee that the policies are implemented effectively.

Digital text has become the dominant medium for participation in higher education. Yet little is known about the consequences from the shift to digital text usage on the academic reading practices of specific groups of students. Using a unique data set of higher education students, we analyse differences in digital reading skills, practices, perception, and experience for female students and male students. Then we explain these differences by social inequality related to gendered reading practices and artifacts and reveal that the digitisation of academic reading is reproducing gender inequality in higher education.

There has been much research on gender inequality in higher education and the benefits of mentoring. However, since mentoring has been a predominantly male experience, most research with female students focuses on advising relationships. For women, there is a significant difference between experiences of advising and mentoring with problematic effects for them. Attrition rates are high for both men and women but the causes of female attrition are unique and possibly related to their mentoring experiences. Mentoring remains largely an informal activity in most graduate departments, and due to the patriarchal nature of graduate education, it has been a predominantly male experience (). In this paper, I provide an overview of the different types of advising/mentoring relationships for women in doctoral programs and the benefits of these for them. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications for graduate departments, suggestions for future research, and a call for developing and implementing feminist models of mentoring for all graduate students.

To address the widespread problem of sexual assault, many colleges and universities are providing primary prevention education programs. Although a number of such programs exist and appear in the literature (for review see Vladutiu, Martin, & Macy, 2011), the role of peer education theater offers a unique approach. Peer education has been demonstrated as effective for delivering health messages, is cost-effective, is well-received by students, and engages students in a potentially powerful way (White, Park, Israel, & Cordero, 2009). The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretically based approach to a campus sexual violence prevention program using peer education theater. We provide the results of an exploratory study that evaluates the impact of the program on students' rape myths and bystander attitudes and that determines whether the program produces positive outcomes by key variables such as gender, ethnicity, athlete status, and fraternity/sorority status. We conclude with implications for student affairs professionals and educators. Sexual Assault Prevention on College Campuses The primary focus of rape prevention programs on college campuses often is to change individuals' beliefs in rape myths, defined as false beliefs about rape shaped by sexism and other prejudices individuals hold (Burt, 1980). Addressing rape myths is important not only because they represent problematic attitudes, but also because they are cited as an explanatory predictor in the actual perpetration of sexual violence, or proclivity to rape (Hinck & Thomas, 1999). In addition to reducing rape myths, an increasingly popular strategy for the primary prevention of sexual assault is bystander intervention. This approach frames sexual violence as a community issue and suggests that all individuals have a responsibility to intervene in situations that may lead to sexual violence and respond during or after the assault occurs (Banyard, Plante, & Moynihan, 2004; McMahon, Postmus & Koenick, 2011). The bystander approach has been identified as holding particular promise for addressing sexual assault in college settings, where bystanders are often present during the pre-assault phase where risk markers appear, and if equipped with the correct skills, can interrupt these situations and prevent sexual assaults from occurring (Burn, 2009). Evaluation of a number of bystander programs have appeared in the literature and demonstrate promise for creating positive change in attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Banyard, Moynihan & Plante, 2007; Foubert & Perry, 2007). Hence, bystander intervention may be a potentially powerful prevention tool to ultimately reduce the occurrence of sexual assault (Banyard et al., 2004). As student affairs professionals consider implementing rape prevention programs, questions remain about how to best deliver such programs in a realistic, practical format for large, universal groups of college students. Although one-dose interventions have been criticized as having a limited ability to produce sustained change (i.e., Lonsway, 1996), reviews of the number of sessions necessary to produce change are mixed, with some studies even indicating short sessions can be as effective (see review by Vladutiu et al., 2011). Clearly, there is a need for further research to investigate this issue. From a practicality standpoint, the reality is that, many times, those who work with college students are afforded only one opportunity to provide universal prevention programming to students at large-setting venues such as new student orientation. Given these constraints, finding single-use methods that are most effective in producing change in large-scale settings is important. Black, Weisz, Coats, and Patterson (2000) suggested that one-dose sexual violence interventions may be more effective if they are carefully selected, delivered by peers, and able to evoke emotion, such as the use of peer education theater. Peer Education Theater Peer education has gained popularity in higher education over the past few decades to educate students about a variety of health behaviors. There is both empirical and theoretical support for using peer education as a method for delivering sexual violence prevention messages. Theoretical support is found within diffusion of innovation theories (DOI; see Turner & Shepherd's 1999 review). DOI recently has been put forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the key social change theories that should be considered when developing sexual assault prevention programs (Cox, Lang, Townsend, & Campbell, 2010). Based on the work of Rogers (1983), this theory is used to explain how ideas... Language: en

EDITORS' NOTE: Howz serious and widespread a problem is sexual harassment in our universities? What means will effectively diminish its incidence without violating the rights of individuals? Each of thefollowing essays answers one of these two questions. In the first, Bernice Lott, Mary Ellen Reilly, and Dale Howard describe the results of a 1979 survey that examined a sample of the entire University of Rhode Island population. Its purpose was to determine how many of the respondents in the sample group had personal knowledge of or had experienced any form of sexual assault, intimidation, or insult; how they had responded to assault; and their beliefs about harassment in general. In the second essay, Judith Berman Brandenburg delineates a response to the problem worked out at Yale University: the establishment of a grievance procedure administered through a specially selected board. The process of this honest search for answers uncovers other questions: Do we have a definition of sexual harassment upon which most people will agree? Is power thefactor that transforms what may be cajolery into harassment? If so, power in what forms? Do these forms make the problem invulnerable to any solution? With these essays we open a dialogue on such questions. We invite your letters in response, in the hope that through the exchange we canfurther advance feminist efforts to analyze-and to overcome-this pernicious form of sexual injustice.

This conceptual paper raises concerns about gender inequality in higher Education with a special focus on university based education in the context of the developing world and in Africa, particularly. Within the broad thematic area of gender, education and development, this paper uses documented evidence to appraise one of the most recent developments in educational transformation; which is online teaching and learning. World wide, higher education institutions are facing unprecedented challenges to introspect as they move into the information and knowledge age. As part of the knowledge society, these institutions are also regarded as hubs of innovative development ideas and practices and domains for the transfer of these ideas to society for sustainable development. These high expectations put pressure on these institutions to radically and positively respond to demands for reform. One of the key areas on which these institutions have been challenged to transform is that of gender inequity in their structures and programmes. This paper critically surveys how online teaching poses as a challenge to universities as they grapple with issues of gender inequality. The thesis of this paper is that technology mediated teaching and learning further disadvantages the already marginal group, women who are a large part of the populations of societies in these contexts. The paper is concluded by teasing out some of the factors that have made this challenge so hard to address by universities. Suggestions are made on some of the strategies that could be employed to deal with this challenge so that women could reach their full potential for contribution in sustainable development processes. Keywords: keywEducation, Sustainable Development, Gender Inequality, Online Teaching, Information Communication Technologies Studies in Gender and Development in Africa Vol. 1 (1) 2007: pp.43-58

A Call for Comprehensive, Disability- and LGBTQ-Inclusive Sexual and Reproductive Health Education

Responding to sexual violence in armed conflict

Sexual harassment of women and girls in public places is prevalent and well-documented in Egypt. In a 2008 study of about 1,010 women and 1,010 men in Greater Cairo, 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women respondents reported they had been sexually harassed (Hassan, Abul Komsan, and Shoukry 2008, 16). A 2013 UN Women study revealed that 99 percent of 2,332 women sampled from seven governorates across rural and urban contexts, including Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailia, Gharbia, Dakahleya, Assiut, and Qena, had been sexually harassed (El-Deeb 2013, 6). Additionally, a 2014 study by HarassMap reported that 95 percent of three hundred women surveyed in Greater Cairo experienced sexual harassment (Fahmy et al. 2014, 6).Collective sexual assault and rape by largely unidentified men were prevalent responses to protests in Tahrir Square between 2011 and 2014 (El-Nadeem et al. 2013; Langohr 2013, 19; Nazra 2014). Such violence added to the existing widespread problem of everyday sexual harassment of women and girls by men and boys in public places, as well as sexual violence against women activists by actors affiliated with state security and police forces (Amar 2011, 309; Hafez 2014, 178; Tadros 2013, 8). In a context characterized by lax security due to the withdrawal of the police from the streets after the 2011 revolution (Ahmad Zaki and Abd Alhamid 2014; Tadros 2013, 7), novel forms of street-level action-oriented initiatives emerged and intensified. These initiatives focused on bystander intervention and self-defense and aimed at changing individual behaviors and attitudes, particularly as sexual assaults against activist and nonactivist women and girls became a regular feature of life. Initiatives against sexual harassment and assault such as HarassMap, OpAntiSH, Tahrir Bodyguard, WenDo Egypt, Shoft Taharrush, Dedd el-Taharrush, and Harakat Bassma relied on large numbers of volunteers and used social media for mobilization (Ahmad Zaki and Abd Alhamid 2014; Langohr 2013, 19; Langohr 2015, 131). Such action-oriented initiatives were facilitated by growing mainstream and social media attention to sexual harassment and violence and the ease of mobilizing creatively on- and offline to expose and shame harassers, name experiences of violence, and discuss them (Langohr 2015, 132).Between 2005 and 2010, in contrast, anti–sexual harassment interventions in Egypt by women’s and feminist nongovernmental organizations had focused largely on raising awareness and improving laws and policies, although there were early efforts at bottom-up approaches that used art, music, and theatrical events; workshops and trainings held at El Sawy Culture Wheel, the Goethe Institute, and the campus of the American University in Cairo (AUC); and interactive information sessions that included the collection of survey data to understand people’s experiences at AUC (Rizzo, Price, and Meyer 2012, 471–72; Pratt 2005, 141). The new initiatives against sexual harassment and assault represent for Hind Ahmad Zaki and Dalia Abd Alhamid (2014) the rise of “an independent social movement” that includes hundreds if not thousands of volunteers. Dalia Abd Alhamid, who works with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, emphasizes the “tremendous change” that occurred after the revolution as anti–sexual harassment activism moved away from small-scale “workshops, reports, documentation” that reached few people.1In addition to analyzing reports and secondary source material, this article uses fieldwork research we conducted in Cairo to explore the strategies and work of two prominent anti–sexual harassment initiatives, HarassMap, established in October 2010, and WenDo Egypt, established in May 2013.2 HarassMap activists mobilize bystanders to intervene if they witness sexual harassment, and WenDo Egypt trainers offer self-defense courses that encourage women to verbally and physically respond to harassment and assault against themselves and other women. We conducted participant observation and interviews with four activists in HarassMap and four trainers in Wendo Egypt. Participant observation included Abdelmonem working in the HarassMap office and attending unit meetings, trainings, and street outreach between 2013 and 2014. Galán participated in three self-defense workshops organized by WenDo Egypt in 2014 and 2015. We also interviewed six representatives of organizations and initiatives working against sexual harassment and assault, one each from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Nazra for Feminist Studies, El-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, Harakat Bassma, Dedd el-Taharrush, and Tahrir Bodyguard. All interviews were conducted in English.HarassMap was launched in October 2010 by going live with an online crowdmapping system, Ushahidi, a GIS-based technology that asks users to anonymously describe their sexual harassment experience and pinpoint the location of the incident on a Google map (Peuchaud 2014, i115, i118; Skalli 2014, 250).3 The HarassMap cofounders include Rebecca Chiao, a US citizen employed as international relations director between 2004 and 2008 at the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR); Engy Ghozlan, an Egyptian citizen who managed the ECWR anti–sexual harassment program in 2007 and 2008; Sawsan Gad, an independent Egyptian researcher who affiliated with ECWR in 2009; and Amel Fahmy, an Egyptian employee of the UN Population Fund from 2008 to 2011.In late 2008 Chiao and Ghozlan separately left ECWR because, as they report, they each sought other work opportunities and increasingly disagreed with the organization’s political advocacy approach in response to sexual harassment. In 2005 ECWR initiated the “Making Our Streets Safe for Everyone” project to combat sexual harassment. Initially, the initiative centered on bottom-up strategies that engaged local people to raise awareness of sexual harassment as a problem. It was not externally funded and was run by Chiao and unpaid interns and volunteers until 2007, at which point it received a grant from the UN Population Fund (Rizzo, Price, and Myer 2012, 470). With funding, Chiao contends that ECWR moved toward top-down projects, such as conducting research and promoting draft legal amendments to criminalize sexual harassment in Egypt (ECWR 2009; FIDH et al. 2014, 74).4 Within Egypt’s militarized and neoliberal environment, ECWR and other NGOs sought to combat sexual harassment without breaching a variety of legal restrictions on their activities, including the 1958 Emergency Law and Law 84 of 2002, regulating NGOs (Rizzo, Price, and Meyer 2012, 464).HarassMap founders bypassed registration with the Ministry of Social Affairs, a practice that became widespread among anti–sexual harassment initiatives after the revolution.5 Initially, Chiao and Ghozlan worked part-time at other jobs while using their private cars and personal funds for the initiative and meeting with volunteers in cafés.6 They held the first outreach meeting with volunteers in December 2010, although the revolution accelerated their work as people began to speak more freely about sexual violence and the “barrier between people and the street” was removed.7 Amal ElMohandes of Nazra similarly reports that between 2011 and 2013 “public space was very open” and “very promising.”8 She continues: “everyone felt that they own the streets.” Between 2012 and 2013 HarassMap incubated with the capacity-building NGO Nahdat el-Mahrousa, which oversaw the use of funds from the Canadian-based International Development Research Center. HarassMap used these funds to hire staff to coordinate volunteers and pay for the use of a coworking space in Heliopolis. In 2015, given the government’s renewed enforcement of Law 84, HarassMap sought formal NGO status, which was approved in early spring 2016.HarassMap’s mission is to end the “social acceptability” of public sexual harassment and encourage people to stand up against it. Thus the primary focus of their work is to build community outreach teams comprising local people who speak to their neighbors and community kin to promote zero tolerance for sexual harassment and more recently to recruit schools, universities, small businesses, and corporations to become “role models” and devise internal measures—HarassMap calls these “escalation policies”—to manage sexual harassment claims. Initially, HarassMap activists hoped to use their Ushahidi-powered crowdmap to conduct community outreach in “hotspots” of sexual harassment. This idea was discarded soon after the first volunteer training in December 2010, when the cofounders decided that it made more sense to focus instead on the neighborhoods of their growing volunteer pool to more effectively impact the neighbors, friends, and family of participants.9HarassMap comprises several units. At the time this research was conducted, the Community Outreach unit worked with more than fourteen hundred volunteers in twenty-three governorates to coordinate monthly street campaigns. Within each governorate, HarassMap trains volunteers to become “community captains” who are responsible for building, training, and overseeing their own volunteer team to conduct a minimum of one or two outreach days per month to engage people and instill within them a sense of responsibility for solving the problem of sexual harassment and changing cultural sensibilities.10 The Safe Areas unit works with small businesses such as cafés, kiosks, and even taxis. The Safe Corporates unit works with companies such as Uber. The Safe Schools and Universities unit develops campus outreach teams. Additionally, the Marketing and Communications unit streamlines messaging, mediates media presence, and devises campaigns, while the Research unit manages the crowdmap, though this unit is currently being reformulated.Social movement theorists have long noted that social and political change depends on the mobilization of bystander publics, who have been described as “distal spectators” even if they are sympathetic (Snow, Zurcher, and Peters 1981, 31). Social movement actors often seek to sway bystanders to their cause and turn them into movement adherents to build a critical mass that will precipitate change (Benford and Snow 2000, 624). HarassMap seeks to end the bystander effect in relation to sexual harassment by convincing bystanders (al-nas illi waqifa), or those who “play stupid” (iʿmal ʿabit), to view it as a crime that is everyone’s responsibility to counteract. “Play stupid” appeared as a caption in a cartoon circulated on HarassMap’s (2013) Facebook page, showing a faceless woman on a crowded metro car being harassed while others ignored the situation. Bystanders, HarassMap activists argue, contribute to the social acceptability of sexual harassment.In a TedX (2012) talk, Chiao noted that bystanders use myths to excuse sexual harassment, for example by arguing that it happens only to foreign or unveiled women or that harassers are sexually frustrated because of delayed marriage. Referencing a 2007 political campaign poster of a lollipop covered with flies that encouraged women to veil to avoid sexual harassment, Chiao challenged this message, saying: “We believe that the only way that this problem will stop is if all the harassers stop harassing. And the only way they’ll stop is if we stop accepting these reasons. Stop ignoring, stop making excuses for them, and stop tolerating their behavior.” Like other activists, Chiao believes that men bystanders and harassers “actually interpret silence as welcoming.”11HarassMap’s Ebaʾa el-Tamimi argues that bystanders often consider harassers to be “cool” and believe that women want to be sexually harassed.12 To challenge common responses to sexual harassment, HarassMap launched a series of campaigns between 2012 and 2015, including “Byitḥarrash leh?” (“Why Does He Harass?”), “Mesh sakta” (“I Am Not Silent”), “Ṣaliḥha fi dimaghak” (“Get It Right”), “ʿAyyizin siyasa guwwa al-gamaʿa” (“We Want a Policy in the University”), “Di mesh muʿ aksa, da taḥarrush” (“It’s Not Flirtation, It’s Harassment”), and “Al-mutaḥarrish mugrim” (“The Harasser Is a Criminal”). El-Tamimi emphasizes that these campaigns either focus on or direct their message to bystanders:I’m not telling the harasser to stop harassing. I’m not telling him to “stop this long-term behavior that you’ve been doing all your life.” . . . I’m not even talking to him. I’m talking to people in the street who are generally passive and generally sit around and look at something happening, sometimes they even disagree with it. . . . The idea is to activate these people. You can do it on moral grounds, so you can go and do what the community mobilization guys do and talk to people and make eye contact and tell them this happens on your very street under your own nose and you don’t do anything about it.13In their fall 2013 biannual training workshop, called HarassMap Academy, activists conducted a performance activity in which they asked volunteers to compare how bystanders beat thieves and turn them into the police when a woman’s purse is stolen, whereas they are usually silent when a woman’s body or personal space is violated on the street. HarassMap seeks to “transfer the salience” of standing up to theft to standing up to sexual harassment (Von Atteveldt, Ruigrok, and Kliennijenhuis 2006, 2). As HarassMap’s former director of Community Outreach Hussein El-Shafei (2013) explained to volunteers in a training workshop held in Fayoum in October 2013, the initiative’s work depends on street awareness campaigns that gain people’s trust, transform their perceptions of sexual harassment, and obtain their agreement to speak up as witnesses in order to reshape the “social mentality” (al-ʿaqliyya al-igtimaʿiyya).The focus on bystanders and individual responsibility to stop harassment in a community avoids demonizing or alienating young lower-class men who are usually identified as harassers in popular discourse (Amar 2011, 317). This approach to combating gender-based violence has been criticized for shifting blame to bystanders, encouraging vigilantism, and endangering those who intervene (Elk and Devereaux 2014). These criticisms, however, do not address bystander approaches focused on producing social pressure that changes harassing behavior and creates new community norms, which is HarassMap’s goal.WenDo Egypt was established in May 2013 by Schirin Salem, a former gender project manager at the German Agency for International Cooperation. Being “half-Egyptian, half-German,” as she describes herself, influenced Salem’s decision to bring to Cairo WenDo, a women’s self-defense method created in Canada in the 1970s.14 “I have been coming to Egypt since my early childhood and always saw harassment,” notes Salem.15 She was surprised that her cousins and friends “never reacted” when harassed. Salem learned of WenDo when she attended a self-defense course as a thirteen-year-old in Germany. She recalls this experience as greatly increasing her self-confidence. Many years later she still remembered many self-defense techniques she learned. After she moved back to Egypt in the aftermath of the January 25 Revolution, she became certified as a WenDo trainer and decided to adapt this “Western concept” to the safety concerns of Egyptian women and girls.16 Salem trained weekly with a group of Egyptian women, practicing the exercises and modifying them to their needs and demands.WenDo self-defense training is addressed to women and girls of all ages, shapes, sizes, and abilities. It focuses on increasing women’s self-confidence and assertiveness in public places and on teaching women how to react against everyday sexual harassment through a wide range of strategies. The goal is to increase the number of women who walk confidently on the streets and react effectively and assertively to stop sexual harassment. Salem emphasizes that WenDo Egypt allows her to “see an effect right after” a training instead of waiting years for change.17WenDo Egypt basic training includes ten hours divided into two blocks. In the first, women learn how to enforce their boundaries through the look, voice, and body language. In the second block, they practice easy-to-perform kicks and punches that target vulnerable areas of a man’s anatomy. Since 2014 Salem has trained twenty-six new instructors from Cairo and Mansoura. WenDo trainers offer private self-defense courses to Egyptian and foreign women who can afford the lessons, which cost two hundred Egyptian pounds (about twenty-two US dollars), but they also train underprivileged women and girls on a voluntary basis in collaboration with children’s organizations, refugee service centers, and youth centers. Salem reported that by May 2015 around a thousand women and girls had been trained by WenDo Egypt, about seven hundred of them for free.18 Additionally, WenDo Egypt co-organized four igmadi (“be strong”) events, which combine self-defense, Zumba classes and awareness-raising sessions in cooperation with HarassMap, Nazra, and El-Nadeem. These events were attended by an average of 325 women and girls.19 Beginning in May 2015, WenDo courses are offered in youth centers across the country and new Training of Trainers courses have been planned in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Youth and Sports and the German Agency for International Cooperation, which provide funding to WenDo Egypt.Feminist scholarship on self-defense has demonstrated that norms of respectable femininity prescribe passive, helpless, compliant female bodies in need of male or state protection (De Welde 2003, 256; McCaughey 1997, 37). In public places, this gendered often into of rape and and 1981, of sexual harassment in Egypt that women respond to everyday and for of the into (Fahmy et al. 2014, Abul Komsan, and Shoukry 2008, they avoid public places, more and from or making eye contact with (Fahmy et al. 2014, trainer notes that women that if they look at they a . . . so they to by this of 1981, 2008, while women’s and awareness of WenDo Egypt in contrast, that women look up when on the street if back at the harasser into In the WenDo are up in and asked to at each other in a an that as to the exercises are to other and a look, voice, and convincing at the of a training, or raising their is to be so notes one of the after an that is or WenDo trainers the of using the to a message and for a space is to the WenDo their experiences of harassment without they will be for sexual They learn to a critical In addition to the look, voice, and body the of the WenDo training are to increase women’s self-confidence on the WenDo trainer emphasizes that women only need to use the voice, look, and self-confidence of the training to it is very to self-defense go from the training that . . . she can in the it such into practice in that of harassment while waiting for a on the or in the Trainers consider this one of the exercises because experiences and to them on their is voluntary and to others their they The harassed woman in a can the and for at The trainer often asks of the was and be in order to and With all manage to stop the who is by the This is very . . . that changes something them, because of them are very to of the and very and very of the end of the basic training, a with their using one of the learned the This more will than and as a of that the of which is in the that with and as a of their and Salem contends that WenDo to the of social that make sexual harassment by encouraging women to react against these sexual and other women who challenge sexual harassment on the 2008 Egyptian nongovernmental organizations the Sexual among other that sexual harassment be a The also called for the of and in the because the first the of rape to of a by a and the second to sexual assault as a of 2011, These which included article to and after the January 25 but have been ignored by the et al. 2014, a at El-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, emphasizes the of changing legal which do not consider by other than a to be as or men as of 2013, under the of the Ministry of the police a unit responsible for violence against women. 2014, after a sexual harassment incident at Cairo University to a public in of the to of the of so that and online sexual harassment be with of between six and years and of up to thousand Egyptian pounds of 2014). the is because it that an to gain a sexual which is to and depends on a In have because contact information is included in police reports, to the of the and often in As a the family of the will often the woman who the and her or so that their the state sexual harassment in response to “tremendous from notes that sexual harassment is the social of as by a series of by the Egyptian between 2014 and In October 2014 the Ministry of a new anti–sexual harassment women’s police the 2014). this unit has been criticized by anti–sexual harassment activists for being against sexual harassers and instead to and of their volunteers In early 2015 that all Egyptian anti–sexual harassment training workshops for who the training for the Ministry of Youth and Sports in 2015, was about the of such trainings given the of information on gender norms and the increasingly political such as Abd Alhamid similarly that the but not have the political will to sexual or make to women’s have legal and interventions do not transform gendered and and can even activate gender or when norms are not 2013, women will often use laws the laws women as who to They also men as men and women from to the 2013, The anti–sexual harassment initiatives that emerged after the revolution direct intervention on the streets as more than legal and political change strategies for gendered norms and although activists also encourage women to seek through and HarassMap activists Chiao and El-Shafei that people who do not the or political will seek to being when a WenDo Egypt’s Salem, the of the is a in the right but change” so that the and consider harassment as a this article we use the action-oriented to to against sexual violence after the on the of Dedd in 2012 to combat sexual harassment the “I had this that need to do something and do an that was the notes in relation to Harakat Bassma with that had . . . He had an idea and to it and had a stand to WenDo trainer and HarassMap Safe Areas reports that her was by a sexual harassment incident by a family The for an response what from Tahrir calls a approach that centers on people’s personal experiences in with the anti–sexual harassment initiatives were when the the on 2013, a and the Emergency Law between and In 2013 the Law and public of teams that had been in Tahrir Square between 2012 and 2013 their because of political in and security concerns in In 2014 the by anti–sexual harassment initiatives to as nongovernmental organizations under Law 84 of or of their the January 25 in Egypt, initiatives were organized or accelerated to combat public sexual violence through HarassMap and WenDo activists that people the changes they in and HarassMap activists that sexual harassment will only end when all people speak up and view it as WenDo trainers that self-defense is an of anti–sexual harassment activism that can bring change when all women react against sexual and each other in this initiatives promote gender and women’s in public places, working to new social with the goal of producing

Since the horrific murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, sociologists have been concerned with better understanding and hopefully, reducing incidents of the bystander effect. This study builds upon past work by examining the bystander effect in cases of sexual harassment and victimization with a focus on middle school students. Given the #metoo movement, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Judge Kavanaugh and the proposed changes to college campus policies on sexual assault proposed by Secretary of Education Betsy Devos, this study on sexual assault and the bystander effect is culturally relevant and timely. Past studies have found that prevention programs influence bystander participation. The research discovered that bystander participation varies depending on the diverse types of sexual assault and harassment. This research will examine the bystander effect in middle school adolescents dealing with sexual harassment, assault, or violence in schools. An analysis of adolescents’ belief on whether they can prevent sexual assault in their schools will be conducted. This research wishes to understand what characteristics contribute to students being active bystanders, someone who acts. The Experimental Evaluation of a Youth Dating Violence Prevention Program in NYC Middle Schools data set is utilized in this study. The sample size is 2,655 students from inner-city middle schools. All statistical analysis is conducted with SPSS. Chi-square, Gamma, and Cramer’s V are used to test statistical significance and strength of relationships. The results are interesting. Out of the seven hypotheses, three were found to be statistically significant. Gender, age, and in some cases attendance at a school prevention program had a significant effect on bystander intervention. In contrast, race and in other cases attendance at a school prevention program were not significant. The varying results towards student’s participation in prevention programs raises future questions on how prevention programs effect bystander effect.

Significant economic and social differences in the living and working conditions of men and women, structural changes in society actualize the need to research the prerequisites and consequences of the existence of gender inequality in the country. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the causes and nature of gender inequality in the long term. The object of the research is the sphere of education and science of certain countries of Europe and America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. The main hypothesis of the study is the assumption of a relationship between gender inequality in the field of education and indicators of the country’s social development (Human Development Index and level of education). Methodological tools of the conducted research are methods of trend and structural analysis. The information base of the research is data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum, and the United Nations, the research period is 1950-2021. The results of the analysis of the Gender Equality Index during 1950-2000 in terms of its four dimensions (health, socio-economic resources, gender disparity in households and gender disparity in politics) proved the presence of a significant gender gap in some countries of the world: the countries of Eastern and Western Europe are more developed compared to other regions of the world (South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa). According to the results of empirical calculations, the dependence between the level of human development and gender inequality has been proven: the higher the level of human development of the country, the lower the inequality in education. The study of gender inequality in the field of scientific research was carried out based on the analysis of publications in 50 international journals, book collections of Bengal Economic Association, Indian Economic Association and other professors of reputed institutions in India and abroad. Based on the results of the analysis, it was concluded that the publishing activity of women is lower than that of men: only 22.07% of publications in national and international journals, 23.65% of volumes of book collections and 27.90% of book chapters were published by women. The reasons for the low activity of women in the field of scientific research include: low opportunities for visiting the sites of scientific research institutions, field surveys or laboratory work; limited opportunities for training and advanced training at seminars and classes; lack of time to carry out research activities; discrimination based on personal interests and gender bias; much less interest in regular research due to social, psychological and physical reasons; excessive family load, etc.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students in higher education have not been a targeted demographic for sexual violence prevention and response resources, despite experiencing campus rape and sexual assault during the college years (Richardson, Armstrong, Hines, and Palm Reed, 2015; Wooten, 2014). Instead, gender normative, heterosexual women comprise the primary target of both the research on campus sexual violence as well as prevention and response resources. To challenge the traditional focus on campus sexual assault research, this study asks: what is the incidence rate of sexual violence for LGBTQ students; what are the factors or characteristics associated with the risk of sexual violence for LGBTQ students; what are the behaviors and decision-making processes of LGBTQ student survivors of sexual violence; and what are LGBTQ students’ perceptions of their universities regarding sexual violence response and prevention resources? The researcher obtained a sample of 526 surveys from self-identified LGBTQ college students using an online survey questionnaire distributed at four public higher education institutions in a Midwestern state during the 2015-2016 academic year. The survey questionnaire included an option for participants to submit a narrative of their experience with campus sexual violence. Analysis of the quantitative responses found that one in seven participants experienced a coercive sexual assault; one in seven participants experienced an assault while incapacitated; and one in fourteen participants experienced an assault through physical force. Notably, bisexual students and cisgender women were disproportionately victims of sexual violence in this study. Additionally, study findings revealed that campus residence and sexual orientation were predictive factors for experiencing coercive and forced sexual assaults. Preliminary analysis of the qualitative responses has found that LGBTQ students are sensitive to heterosexist themes in their sexual assault prevention curricula and may feel pessimistic about their university’s capacity to respond to all victims of sexual violence, including LGBTQ victims. The findings of this dissertation study provide much needed insight into how LGBTQ students experience sexual violence in higher education. The findings also indicate the need to shift away from traditional, and highly gendered, approaches to sexual violence prevention in higher education.