GlobalConsent — Web-Based Sexual-Violence Prevention Trial for University Men in Hanoi

GlobalConsent is a six-module, web-based 'edutainment' intervention adapted from the US RealConsent programme by Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health with the Center for Creative Initiatives in Health and Population (CCIHP) in Hanoi. It combines behaviour-change modules with a locally produced serial drama and narratives from Vietnamese celebrities to change social norms around consent and bystander intervention among university men.
A double-blind, 1:1 randomised controlled trial enrolled 793 heterosexual or bisexual men aged 18–24 at two Hanoi universities in September 2019, comparing GlobalConsent against AHEAD, an attention-control adolescent-health programme. At nine-month follow-up, GlobalConsent participants showed markedly lower odds of escalating to higher levels of sexually violent behaviour than AHEAD participants (1.3 times versus 2.7 times baseline odds), and higher odds of prosocial bystander action (0.7 versus 0.5 times baseline odds, reflecting a smaller decline). Results were published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance in 2023 and reported by Emory's Rollins School of Public Health.
Building on these results, the same team secured $3.5 million in US National Institutes of Health funding for a national implementation trial (SCALE) testing how to roll GlobalConsent out across Vietnamese universities. Evidence gaps: the trial measured self-reported behaviour rather than official records, was limited to two urban universities, and assessed outcomes for heterosexual/bisexual men only.

Read the full analysis: https://publichealth.jmir.org/2023/1/e35116