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Good practice Imported

Green Dot — Bystander-Training Strategy Against Sexual & Dating Violence, Kentucky High Schools

United States of America · Lexington · See the United States of America profile

Evidence: Randomised controlled trial Top 17% 89/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

A CDC-funded cluster-randomised trial across 26 Kentucky high schools found Green Dot's bystander-training model reduced sexual violence, dating violence and stalking versus control schools, though effects varied by outcome and by student gender.

13 / 13 schools
High schools in cluster-RCT (intervention/control) (2010-2014)
89,707
Completed student surveys (2010-2014)

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
University of Kentucky Center for Research on Violence Against Women; disseminated nationally by Alteristic
Period
2006–present (high-school cluster-RCT: 2010–2014)
Keywords
education, public health, violence prevention, youth

Context

Green Dot is a bystander-training strategy created in 2006 at the University of Kentucky, originally for college campuses and later adapted for high schools. It teaches a critical mass of students to recognise high-risk situations ("red dots") and intervene through direct action, distraction or delegation ("green dots"), combining a school-wide talk with intensive small-group workshops for peer-influential students.

Objectives

The strategy aims to reduce sexual violence, dating/domestic violence and stalking among high-school students by building a peer culture of active bystander intervention.

Activities

The strongest evidence comes from a CDC-funded cluster-randomised controlled trial across 26 Kentucky high schools (13 intervention, 13 waitlist-control), with students surveyed annually from 2010 to 2014, yielding 89,707 completed surveys.

Results

By Years 3-4 of full implementation, Coker et al. (2017) found fewer sexual-violence, sexual-harassment, stalking and dating-violence events in intervention schools than in control schools, and the U.S. National Institute of Justice's CrimeSolutions clearinghouse independently rates the programme "Promising".

Conclusions

Effects were not uniform: victimisation outcomes were more weakly significant than perpetration outcomes, and perpetration reductions were concentrated among female students with no significant effect detected for male students on some measures; no cost-effectiveness data were located.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
peer-influential student trainers, school-based Green Dot coordinators, university/nonprofit trainers (Alteristic)

Conditions for success

  • reaching a critical mass of peer-influential students
  • sustained multi-year implementation (effects grew by years 3-4)
  • combining a school-wide overview talk with intensive small-group skills workshops

Common failure modes

  • weaker effects for male students on some perpetration/victimisation measures
  • no cost-effectiveness data to guide replication budgeting

Where it fits

Governance type
public high school system
Scale
high school (district-level)
Income level
high-income (United States)

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes Philanthropic / foundation funding

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Replication kit

Reusable artefacts from this practice — as published by their sources.

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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