Coaching Boys Into Men — Athlete-Coach Delivered Dating Violence Prevention

Coaching Boys Into Men (CBIM), developed by the US organisation Futures Without Violence, trains high-school athletic coaches to lead brief, scripted weekly conversations with male student athletes on respect, healthy relationships, recognising abusive behaviour and bystander intervention. Piloted as a media campaign from 2001 and developed into a structured curriculum from around 2004, it has since been disseminated internationally, including in India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The programme aims to prevent dating violence and sexual harassment by engaging male athletes through trusted coach relationships, using sport as an entry point for norms-change conversations rather than a stand-alone classroom lesson.

Coaches deliver a scripted sequence of short weekly discussions throughout a sports season, covering respectful behaviour, recognising abuse and how to intervene safely as a bystander.

A cluster-randomised controlled trial across 16 US high schools (N=2,006 athletes) found that at three months, intervention athletes showed significantly greater gains in intentions to intervene as bystanders and in positive bystander behaviour, with larger effects where the curriculum was delivered at full intensity — but no significant difference yet in gender-equitable attitudes or actual dating-violence perpetration (Miller et al., 2012, Journal of Adolescent Health). A 12-month follow-up of the same schools (N=1,513) found significantly lower self-reported dating-violence perpetration and negative bystander behaviour among intervention athletes, although the earlier three-month gains in attitudes and positive bystander intentions were no longer statistically significant (Miller et al., 2013, American Journal of Preventive Medicine). A secondary analysis of both trials (Jones et al., 2021, Prevention Science) estimated that, per 1,000 high-school athletes, CBIM prevented approximately 85 dating-abuse incidents, 48 sexual-harassment incidents and 20 sexual-assault incidents, associated with roughly $2.4 million in averted costs from the sexual-assault reduction alone.

The evidence base comes predominantly from one research team working with the same original school sample and its follow-ups, and all outcomes rely on self-report; independent replication by unaffiliated researchers has not been located.