Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) Scotland — Peer-Led Bystander Training in Secondary Schools

Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) is a peer-led bystander-training model originated in 1993 by Dr Jackson Katz at Northeastern University. The Scottish Violence Reduction Unit adapted the U.S. curriculum and piloted it in three secondary schools in the 2012-13 school year, training older pupils (S5/S6) as mentors who deliver role-played "Playbook" scenarios to younger pupils (S1/S2) on gender-based violence, bullying, sexting and coercive control. With support from Education Scotland and the Scottish Government, the programme has since scaled to more than 130 secondary schools across all 32 Scottish local authorities.
The only academic evaluation of the Scottish pilot (Williams & Neville, 2017, Psychology of Violence) is qualitative: interviews and focus groups with school staff, 33 mentors and 58 mentees. Participants reported positive experiences and mentors described gains in confidence and bystander behaviour, but the design used no control group and no quantitative outcome measures.
The evaluation surfaced an unresolved, gendered contradiction: at one school, boys said they had "changed and are much more respectful to girls", but girls in the same cohort disagreed, saying some "haven't changed at all". The Scottish Government's own evidence review classifies MVP as only "promising", stating plainly that bystander-programme evaluations mostly measure attitude rather than violence reduction, and that "attitude change does not guarantee behaviour change".

Read the full analysis: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/8092/MVP_anonymised_final.pdf