Online violence prevention education for students

Citation: Flood, M. (2025). Online violence prevention education for students. Queensland University of Technology, unpublished.

Note that these notes also may be downloaded in PDF here.

In the university context, providing violence prevention education to students faces the challenge of how to reach large student populations. Prevention programs often have used small group, face-to-face formats, and this is resource-intensive and has limited reach and sustainability. An obvious alternative is online delivery. The use of the internet has important advantages over in-person interventions, including “lower cost of intervention delivery, greater reach, maintenance of fidelity, the possibility of delivery in a wide range of settings, and ability to tailor content to a variety of users” (Salazar, Vivolo-Kantor, Hardin, & Berkowitz, 2014, p. 2).

A growing range of violence prevention education programs are delivered online, including among university students. Such programming is completed by three other forms of violence prevention education among university students or staff:

• Undergraduate university curricula focused on domestic and/or sexual violence and violence prevention. At QUT, this includes the undergraduate units “Domestic and Family Violence” and “Preventing Gendered Violence”.
• Postgraduate curricula aimed at professional workforces, including graduate certificates and other qualifications. At QUT, this includes the Graduate Certificate in Domestic Violence Responses, the Graduate Certificate in Preventing and Responding to Sexual Violence, and the Graduate Diploma in Responses to Gendered Violence.
• Staff training: Education and training for academic and administrative staff. 

There is a small body of scholarship evaluating the impact of online programs for violence prevention education. The Appendix summarises a range of studies, focusing on programs implemented in university contexts and among students. This scholarship is complemented by scholarship on:

• University curricula on violence and violence prevention (Cavanaugh, 2019; Lederer, Liddell, Johnson, & Sheffield, 2024; Liddell, Sheffield, Johnson, & Lederer, 2024; Łyś et al., 2025; Sheffield, Liddell, Johnson, & Lederer, 2025; Turan, 2022), and on
• Violence prevention education and training for professionals and practitioners, including in online formats (Hsieh, Herzig, Gansky, Danley, & Gerbert, 2006; McAndrew, Pierre, & Kojanis, 2014; Oehme, Prost, & Saunders, 2016; Rheingold, Zajac, & Patton, 2012; Short, Surprenant, & Harris Jr, 2006).

Other digital violence prevention strategies developed for university students or other young cohorts include prevention and response apps (Potter, Moschella, Smith, & Draper, 2020), game-based mobile apps (Saial et al., 2025), and online but live-facilitated group programs (Edwards et al., 2024).

Focusing on violence prevention education aimed at university students and in online formats, some points that emerge from this literature are as follows:

• Online violence prevention programming is both feasible and acceptable among students.
• Regarding impact, online violence prevention programs show mixed effects. Some programs showed positive effects, while others had no positive impact.
• In an exploratory Australian study of an online module designed for and implemented in the University of Queensland (UQ), interviews with 13 students who had completed the module documented that they found the module informative, relatable, and relevant. They valued the online format as “it supported privacy, accessibility, self-paced learning and ability to go back and refer to information” (Heard, Evans, Buckley, Hatchman, & Masser, 2023, p. 85).
• In a US study of the development of a four-session prevention intervention for student-athletes, participants reported that the program was feasible and acceptable in terms of content and delivery (Jaffe, Jones, & Angelone, 2023).
• In another US study of an online sexual violence prevention programme, college men reported preferring an online format because of privacy and the opportunity to complete the programme at their own pace in their own time (Thompson et al., 2021).

Regarding acceptability, for example:

Evaluations show many of the typical limitations of violence prevention evaluations:

• Assessment only immediately after the intervention, and either no longer-term follow-up or short timespans to follow-up
• No control or comparison groups
• Lack of evaluation of perpetration or victimisation

Evaluation studies’ ability to test the impact of prevention programs also is limited by small sample sizes and by ceiling effects, in which participants’ violence-supportive attitudes, perpetration, or victimisation already are at low levels.

There is, nevertheless, an emerging consensus on the features of effective practice in violence prevention education, including in online formats. The following begins with features of effective practice, and then offers some further notes on programming.

Principles for effective practice

There is an increasing consensus on the approaches and strategies that are most likely to provide positive and substantial change among participants in violence prevention education. They are summarised here in terms of five key elements. Interventions should:

1. Be informed
2. Be part of a whole-of-institution approach
3. Be based in engaging teaching and learning processes
4. Be relevant and tailored
5. Be supported by evaluation and continuous improvement

The most effective programs are those that compare well against most if not all five criteria.

These five criteria can be understood in more details as follows. It is assumed here that the reader is familiar with the more detailed discussion of these principles in Flood’s recent report (Flood, 2024, pp. 14-26).

1. Informed

Programs should:

• Incorporate an appropriate theoretical framework for understanding violence, that:
  • Addresses the links between gender, power, and violence, examining violence-supportive constructions of gender and sexuality, and fostering gender-equitable and egalitarian relations
• Address both domestic and sexual violence
• Address established risk factors for or drivers of this violence
• Incorporate a theory of change – an account of the ways that program content and processes will be used to achieve intended outcomes

2. A whole-of-institution approach

Programs should be part of a whole-of-institution approach, that operates in university contexts across:

• Curriculum, teaching and learning
• University policy and practices
• University culture, ethos and environment
• The relationships between university, home and the community

Violence prevention efforts in universities should seek to generate change at multiple levels and using multiple strategies.

The evidence is that education programs’ impact is moderated by wider features of university prevention strategy. For example, in an evaluation of a bystander intervention program on a US university campus, the effects of the program “were moderated by students’ perceptions of campus responsiveness to sexual violence, with more potent effects when students perceived their institution as responsive to reports of sexual violence” (Jouriles et al., 2020, p. 5653).

3. Effective curriculum delivery

a) Curriculum content

Program curricula should:

• Be informed by scholarship on domestic and sexual violence
• Address various forms of violence
• Target the risk factors for or drivers of violent behaviour

Additionally, it is recommended that:

• The program’s content should not focus solely on sexual consent. It should situate issues of violence, coercion and abuse within a broader framing of healthy and unhealthy relationships.
• To promote active learning, the program should use tools such as:
  • Real-time assessment and feedback
  • Case scenarios: fictional case studies narrated from the perspective or one or more participants
  • Video role play demonstrations, modelling desired behaviours
  • Simulation-based learning: Digitally-sim­ulated scenarios in which learn­ers are actively involved in exploring or manipulating the storyline (Willard, Mennicke, & Coker, 2024).
• To maximise engagement and relevance, the program should include realistic stories, based on real life interactions and incidents (Wilson, 2024, p. 87).
• The program should use language that acknowledges both that most or much sexual and domestic violence is against women and by men and that men may be victims and/or women may be perpetrators. It might do this, for example, by having three ‘real life’ stories (as above), in which one involves a scenario of same-sex domestic violence.

b) Curriculum delivery (teaching and learning methods)

Programs’ teaching and learning methods should:

• Be participatory and interactive
• Incorporate behaviour change techniques
• Include activities focused on skills development
• Involve the use of quality teaching materials
• Be respectful
• Address cognitive, affective, and behavioural domains

Given that online violence prevention programs for university students generally will be asynchronous, there will be no place for person-to-person interaction among participants. However, online programs should foster active learning through behavioural and cognitive interactivity. Behavioural interactivity includes the use of drag and drop functions and pop-up interactions with the program. Cognitive interactivity includes the use e.g. of prompts for critical reflection or critically reflective journaling (Willard et al., 2024). More interactive online interventions are more engaging and more likely to generate behaviour change (Hurling, Fairley, & Dias, 2006).

Behavioural change techniques are a vital part of effective online interventions. A systematic review of the use of the internet to promote health behaviour change finds that online programs tend to have larger effects when they have included more behavioural change techniques (Webb, Joseph, Yardley, & Michie, 2010, pp. 6-7). These include, for example, modelling of the behaviour, relapse prevention/coping planning, facilitating social comparison, goal setting, action planning, and provision of feedback on performance.

Students’ access to the online program should be easy and flexible across time and locations (Wilson, 2024, p. 81). Students’ access to online programs is facilitated by ‘single sign on’ or ‘bulk action’ processes (Willard et al., 2024).

There are emerging technologies being taken up in online violence prevention education that may be incorporated into campus programming, including:

• Virtual reality, involving computer-generated immersive environments with scenes and objects that appear to be real, and augmented reality, involving interactive experience of a real-world environment, but where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perception information (Pascoe, Wells, & Esina, 2021b).
• Gamification, the use of elements of game design in non-game contexts, to engage and motivate users, including points, achievements, levels, a story or narrative, goals, feedback, and challenges (Gini et al., 2025; Pascoe, Wells, & Esina, 2021a; Roumelioti et al., 2023).
• Artificial intelligence (AI), such as the use of AI chatbots to answer learners’ frequently asked questions (Willard et al., 2024).

c) Curriculum structure

Programs should:

• Be of sufficient duration and intensity to produce change
• Be timed and crafted to suit participants’ developmental needs, including their developing identities and social and sexual relations

The most significant constraint on online violence prevention education in the university context concerns its duration. 

In the violence prevention field, there is widespread endorsement of an association between program duration or intensity and program impact, as noted in detail elsewhere (Flood, 2024, p. 21). Programs that have achieved statistically significant changes in participants’ violence-related attitudes and behaviours typically are at least four or five hours long, and some are considerably longer. One-off and short-duration education sessions may have impacts that are small, short-term, or confined only to participants’ knowledge, and they are unlikely to achieve substantial and lasting change in violent attitudes or behaviours (DeGue, 2014, p. 8). As a recent US review of an online education program on a university campus states, “it is unlikely that a standalone, brief online prevention program will be able to significantly alter attitudes, knowledge, and behavior in ways that will ultimately reduce the occurrence of sexual assault on college campuses” (Kimberly & Hardman, 2020, p. 437).

Assuming that online violence prevention education for students at some universities will comprise no more than 30 minutes of programming, then:

• It should be taken as given that this will contribute only small or short-term changes to participants’ attitudes and behaviours;
• To maximise its impact, it should be complemented by other strategies in other settings and at other levels of the university (see below).

Extending the program’s impact: It would be useful to extend the program’s impact through booster sessions: short educational interventions and supplemental activities after students’ participation in the program that boost its impact (Orchowski, Zinzow, Thompson, & Wood, 2023, p. 1994). Also see discussion of dose-response research in digital health interventions (McVay, Bennett, Steinberg, & Voils, 2019).

Structure: Assuming programming of no more than 30 minutes, the program could comprise multiple modules, e.g. two 15-minute modules or three 10-minute modules. These may be more impactful than a format involving one-off completion (Wilson, 2024, p. 93).

d) Staff: teachers and educators

Programs should:

• Be designed by skilled teachers and/or educators, supported by resources, training, and ongoing support

Although online programs do not have synchronous and live teaching, those designing such programs should have content expertise and skills in participatory online teaching methods.

4. Relevant and tailored practice

Programs should:

• Be informed by knowledge of their target group or population and their local contexts and tailored to this
• Address local risk and protective factors related to domestic and sexual violence
• Be attentive to a range of forms of social difference and inequality, including class, ethnicity, sexuality, and (dis)ability, addressing both disadvantage and privilege

5. Impact evaluation

Programs should involve a comprehensive process of evaluation, which at minimum:

• Reflects the program framework and logic
• Includes evaluation of impact or outcomes, through
  • Pre- and post-intervention assessment
  • An experimental or quasi-experimental design
  • Long-term follow-up
• Is used in a process of continuous improvement

And which ideally includes:

• The use of standard measures or portions of them
• Measures of not only attitudes but also behaviours, particularly violence perpetration
• The collection of both quantitative and qualitative data

The online delivery of violence prevention education allows the collection of detailed data on learner engagement and participation, assessment outcomes, and completion rates (Willard et al., 2024). This should not, however, be seen as a substitute for the collection of robust data on the program’s actual impact.

Further notes on programming

Informing students of the program: It is assumed at this stage that completion of the education program will be voluntary, not mandatory. (Studies among students do find considerable support for mandatory completion, but I leave that aside here.) Given this, universities must find ways of alerting students to the program. A study at the University of Queensland found that many students had not known about the violence prevention module (Heard et al., 2023). Similarly, a qualitative study at a New Zealand university documents that many students were unaware of the respectful relationships program and had missed or ignored emails about it (Gibbons, 2024). 

This suggests that it would unwise for universities to rely primarily on emails to inform students of the program. Instead, universities should:

• Use a variety of media to alert students to the program and inspire their participation, including advertising
• Consider accessibility barriers, and ensure that the program is accessible through a range of devices (Gibbons, 2024, p. 82)
• Use motivational appeals – see below.

Motivating students to participate in the education program: There are ways to frame the violence prevention education program among students that may increase participation. A qualitative study of the implementation of online respectful relationships modules at a New Zealand university suggested that students were more likely to complete the module if they:

• Perceive sexual violence as a community-level issue and engaging in the modules as preventing sexual harm
• See addressing sexual harm as the university’s problem, that is, as a collective effort
• See the modules as providing new information relevant to the new settings and experiences of university (Wilson, 2024, pp. 81-83)

This last point means that it may be productive to frame completion of the module as part of preparation for attending university (Wilson, 2024, p. 83).

Similarly, a second qualitative study of this same respectful relationships program found that factors that motivated students’ completion of the modules included:

• Having a clear sense of the benefits of completing the program, including personal benefits
• Perceived benefit  to their developmental life stage, particularly for the new hall and university environment they were living in
• Feeling that they were helping others
• The possibility of winning a prize or reward (Gibbons, 2024, pp. 52-67, 81).

Choosing or designing programs: This document has identified a range of features of online violence prevention education that will make it more effective. It does not recommend specific programs or specific processes through which to design programs. However, a detailed account of considerations in the development of online programs is given for example by Willard et al. (2024), while general guidance on developing health interventions is given for example by O’Cathain et al.(2019).

Appendix: Evaluations of online violence prevention programs

The following summarises various evaluations of online violence prevention programs. Evaluations are organised by the name of the program, in alphabetical order.

1. Competence in sexual situations (KisS)

Competence in sexual situations (KisS) is an online program intended to reduce rates of sexual aggression perpetration and victimisation, by changing risky sexual scripts for consensual sexual interactions and corresponding risky sexual behavior, and by enhancing sexual self-esteem, refusal assertiveness, and initiation assertiveness (Tomaszewska, Schuster, & Krahé, 2023). The intervention uses scenarios describing a particular situation, in which participants are asked to imagine themselves and reflect on how they would act and feel in that situation. These experiential tasks are complemented by didactic elements providing information on the different topics and other content. Information on the typical time taken to complete the intervention is not provided.

Evaluation:

The evaluation used a combined experimental-longitudinal design, among 1,181 university students in Germany. Participants in the intervention group completed six theory-based modules at weekly intervals, and intervention effects were assessed against a non-treatment control group at three post-intervention data waves covering a total of 21 months.

• Two journal articles report on the evaluation.
• In the first paper (Schuster, Tomaszewska, & Krahé, 2022):
  • Participants in the intervention group showed significant and lasting reductions in risky sexual scripts and increases in sexual self-esteem and assertiveness compared to the control group.
  • These changes in scripts and self-esteem indirectly led to a reduction in risky sexual behaviors.
  • The intervention also improved participants' ability to be sexually assertive over time.
  • No significant effects were found on the acceptance of sexual coercion or the perceived realism of pornography nine months after the program.
• In the second paper (Tomaszewska et al., 2023):
  • Participants in the intervention group did not report lower rates of sexual aggression perpetration and victimisation than participants in the control group.
  • There was a reduction in participants’ risky sexual scripts, which are known to predict and mediate sexual aggression perpetration and victimisation.
  • The intervention’s impact on strengthening sexual self-esteem and sexual assertiveness was more mixed.

1. GlobalConsent

GlobalConsent is an adaptation to the Vietnam context of the US program RealConsent (Salazar et al., 2014), as described below. It comprises six 30-minute modules, self-paced, to be completed within 12 weeks.

Evaluation: 

• GlobalConsent has been subject to an RCT, as described in this study protocol (Yount et al., 2020). This involved 793 heterosexual or bisexual male college students in Vietnam, with a mean age of 18 (Yount et al., 2023).
• Compared with men in the attention-control group, participants in GlobalConsent had lower odds of engaging in sexually violent behavior and higher odds of any prosocial bystander behavior at the endline than at the baseline. (Note that for sexually violent behaviour, this was because while sexually violent behaviour among GlobalConsent participants increased by a factor of 1.3, this was significantly less than the increase among the men in the control condition.)

1. Haven

Haven – Understanding Sexual Assault is a one-hour sexual assault prevention program developed by Everfi and used according to a 2020 article at over 1,300 US institutions (Kimberly & Hardman, 2020).

Evaluation:

• An evaluation published in 2020 involved data collected before and immediately after the program, among 661 university students at four universities in the state of Mississippi, on students’ legal knowledge and attitudes towards sexual force.
  • The program had no impact on students’ legal knowledge of sexual assaults or healthy sexual beliefs and attitudes (Kimberly & Hardman, 2020).
• An evaluation published in 2021 involved a sample of 167,424 students from 80 different institutions in 33 different states in the US (Zapp, Buelow, Soutiea, Berkowitz, & DeJong, 2021). Students completed surveys immediately before the program and one to one-and-a-half months after completion.
  • After the program, students showed:
    • More accurate perceptions of positive social norms
    • Increased empathy and support for victims, and
    • Increased ability and intention to intervene to prevent sexual assault and relationship violence.
  • There was no control or comparison group.

1. Make a Change

Make a Change is a novel digital application for university sexual violence prevention (Orchowski et al., 2023). It “consists of four branching narrative chapters delivered in a graphic novel style, five embedded activities, and a user‐derived “Change Plan.”” The application includes real-time corrective feedback on social norms and a personalised change plan in which individuals establish goals for behaviour change following program completion. (Orchowski et al., 2023, p. 1981). A single play-through of the application takes up to about 30 minutes.

In an evaluation, participants were required to complete at least two play-throughs of the application. 

• Participants reported overall high levels of engagement and enjoyment in the application.
• There were no significant differences in risks for sexual aggression, risks for sexual victimization, or bystander behaviors.
• There were positive changes in heavy drinking and in perceptions of social norms.

Limitations: This was a small open pilot trial, and the small sample (n=40) means it is more difficult to detect significant intervention effects.

1. Online course [no name]

The impact of an online course concerning gender-based violence organised at five European universities was tested by Łyś et al. (2025). The course consists of 15 asynchronous online modules. The time taken to complete these is not stated.

Evaluation:

• Data was collected from 67 students before the course, immediately after the course, and three months later.
• Students’ acceptance of rape myths, sexual harassment myths, and stalking myths dropped, although not across all dimensions of violence-supportive beliefs and myths (Łyś et al., 2025).
• Limitations: There was no control group, there was high dropout from the study, and the sample was largely female: 56 women (83.6%), six men (9%), and five others.

1. PACT: Promoting Affirmative Consent among Teens

PACT is a 20-minute online program designed to teach adolescents information and skills about communicating and interpreting affirmative sexual consent (Javidi et al., 2024).

Evaluation:

• PACT was developed and subjected to a randomized controlled trial with a national sample of 833 U.S. adolescents aged 14-16.
• PACT had positive impacts at immediate posttest on participants’ affirmative consent knowledge, attitudes, and self-efficacy, compared to a control group.
• At three-month follow-up, participants who completed the PACT intervention showed higher levels of affirmative consent knowledge compared to control participants, but there were no significant differences between the intervention and control groups on other outcome variables (affirmative consent attitudes, self-efficacy to practice affirmative consent communication, and ongoing consent behaviors).
• That is, while the program was successful initially as an informational, motivational, and skill-building tool, its effects were not sustained over three months for affirmative consent attitudes, self-efficacy for affirmative consent communication, or ongoing consent behaviors (Javidi et al., 2024).

1. RealConsent

The US program RealConsent is a Web-based bystander approach to sexual violence prevention which comprises six 30-minute media-based and interactive modules. These cover knowledge of informed consent, communication skills regarding sex, the role of alcohol and male socialization in sexual violence, empathy for rape victims, and bystander education. 

Evaluation: In a study among US male undergraduate students, at six-month follow-up participants showed a range of positive attitudinal and behavioural changes compared to a control group (Salazar et al., 2014). 

• Individuals who had taken part in the RealConsent program engaged in less sexual violence perpetration and intervened more often than controls.
• They also reported greater legal knowledge of sexual assault, greater knowledge of effective consent, less rape myths, greater empathy for rape victims, less negative date rape attitudes, less hostility toward women, greater intentions to intervene, less hyper-gender ideology, less positive outcome expectancies for nonconsensual sex, more positive outcome expectancies for intervening, and less comfort with other men’s inappropriate behaviors.

RealConsent has been adapted for Vietnam as GlobalConsent (Yount et al., 2020), as described above.

Further sources: (Graham et al., 2021; Salazar et al., 2014; Salazar, Vivolo-Kantor, & McGroarty-Koon, 2016; Salazar, Vivolo-Kantor, & Schipani-McLaughlin, 2018)

1. Self-persuasion intervention

Wong et al. developed an interactive online intervention that uses a ‘self-persuasion’ approach (Wong, McDermott, Zounlome, Klann, & Peterson, 2020). The self-persuasion intervention involves male students watching two short videos on college social norms, writing about the core values in their life, describing in writing personally relevant reasons for why men should always seek consent before having sexual contact with others, writing rebuttals disapproving three problematic claims about sexual violence, and then drafting and creating a 1- to 2-min, personalised video message offering friendly advice for incoming male students at the university about the importance of consent in sexual activities. The intervention takes about 45 minutes to complete.

Evaluation:

• In a RCT among U.S. male college students who were heterosexual and aged 18-30, students were randomly assigned to three conditions: (a) a self-persuasion intervention, (b) a social norms control condition, and (c) a control condition focusing on sense of belongingness. Data was collected immediately after the interventions and at six-month follow-up.
• Participants in the self-persuasion condition:
  • Reported lower levels of self-perceived likelihood of committing sexual aggression immediately after the intervention but not at six month follow-up
  • Reported higher levels of prosocial bystander behaviors six months later compared with the other two control conditions.
  • Showed no difference in rates of sexual aggression at six month follow-up compared to the other groups.

1. TakeCARE 

TakeCARE is an online video-based program which aims “to promote bystander behaviors by increasing participants’ efficacy for intervening in situations in which a friend might be exposed to or at risk for sexual violence” (Kleinsasser et al. 2015: 228. In other words, it aims to increase bystander efficacy, in this case by giving students examples of what they could say or do to intervene in potentially high-risk situations. The program is 24 minutes long. 

The program targets one outcome (bystander behaviors toward friends) and one key hypothesised process for increasing this (feelings of efficacy for performing bystander behaviours). 

Evaluations: TakeCARE has been the subject of six evaluations:

• In a 2015 evaluation, TakeCARE had no positive impact on university students’ feelings of efficacy in engaging in positive bystander behaviour or their actual engagement (Kleinsasser, Jouriles, McDonald, & Rosenfield, 2015).
  • Ninety-three students, 81% female, at a US university participated in a preliminary evaluation of the program.
  • Compared to the control group, at two-month follow-up, students who viewed Take Care reported greater feelings of efficacy for engaging in bystander behaviors, and they engaged in more bystander behaviors for friends in the two-month period following the intervention than did students in the control condition.
  • However, this did not involve any increase in Take Care participants’ engagement in bystander behaviours, but only a decrease in the comparison group’s engagement. The same was true of bystander efficacy. The program did not influence students’ involvement in other forms of bystander behaviour which do not concern friends, such as speaking out against social norms that support sexual violence (Kleinsasser et al., 2015).
• Another evaluation involved two RCTs.
  • In both studies, students who viewed TakeCARE, compared with students who viewed the control video, reported engaging in more bystander behavior toward friends and greater feelings of efficacy for performing such behaviour (Jouriles et al., 2016).
  • However, in the first study, there was no change in the level of bystander behavior from baseline to follow-up for students in the TakeCARE condition, but a decrease in the control group. In the second study, this was reversedm, with an increase in the level of bystander behavior increased from baseline to follow-up for students in the TakeCARE condition but no change for those in the control condition.
  • Follow-up periods for assessing impact were short, of one to two months.
• In another evaluation, high school students who viewed TakeCARE reported more helpful bystander behaviour at the follow-up assessment than students in the control condition. (Sargent, Jouriles, Rosenfield, & McDonald, 2016).
  • In an RCT evaluation, compared to students who viewed a control video, students who viewed TakeCARE:
  • Self-reported more bystander behaviour at 6-month follow-up
  • Engaged in greater levels of bystander behavior in the virtual reality simulations at post-intervention and 6-month follow-up (Jouriles, McDonald, Rosenfield, & Sargent, 2019).
• In a further evaluation among students at four universities,
  • Students who viewed TakeCARE, whether in a monitored computer lab or viewing TakeCARE at their own convenience after receiving an email link to the video, reported more bystander behaviour at one-month followup, compared with participants in the control condition (Jouriles et al., 2020).

TakeCARE also has been integrated into a service-learning course in psychology at a US university (Cavanaugh, 2019).

1. Teen Choices

Teen Choices is a three-session online program intended to prevent dating violence and foster healthy relationships (Deborah A Levesque, Johnson, & Prochaska, 2017; Deborah A. Levesque, Johnson, Welch, Prochaska, & Paiva, 2016). The program delivers assessments and individualised guidance matched to dating history, dating violence experiences, and stage of readiness for using healthy relationship skills.

Evaluation: 

• In a cluster-randomised trial, 20 US high schools were randomly assigned to the Teen Choices condition or a comparison condition. Emotional and physical dating violence victimisation and perpetration were assessed at six and 12 months in the subset of participants who reported a past-year history of dating violence at baseline and/or who dated during the study.
• The Teen Choices program was associated with significant reductions in dating violence at six and 12 months follow-up. There were reductions in all four types of dating violence: emotional victimisation, emotional perpetration, physical victimisation, and physical perpetration.
• Intervention effects were larger for participants with a past-year history of that type of dating violence benefited more from the intervention than participants without a past-year history.
• Teen Choices also was associated with:
  • Higher odds of consistently using healthy relationship skills at six and 12 months.
  • Rejection of attitudes supporting dating violence attitudes at six months follow-up, although these were not significant at 12 months follow-up

1. Te Herenga Waka: Victoria University of Wellington’s Respectful Relationships Modules

The Respectful Relationships Modules at Victoria University of Wellington involve a voluntary and self-paced online program aimed at students. The program consists of six sections focusing on healthy relationships, consent, unacceptable behaviours, being an active bystander, responding safely to the disclosure of harm, and reporting, disclosing, and accessing support.

Evaluations:

• A qualitative process evaluation of the Te Herenga Waka Respectful Relationships Modules involved a qaualitative survey among 104 students, of whom two thirds had undertaken the modules, with 63.5% female (Gibbons, 2024). The evaluation focused on students’ perceptions and experiences of the program: what students report they learned, if the modules meet their needs, and factors that act as barriers or facilitators to completing the module.
• Also see an earlier evaluation of this program, based on focus groups (Wilson, 2024).

1. UQ module

An online sexual violence prevention and response education module was designed for students and implemented in a large Australian university, the University of Queensland (Heard et al., 2023). The module is about 45 minutes long, and voluntary.

Evaluation:

• In a small exploratory evaluation, data was collected from 113 students (70.8% women) among 5,589 who had completed the module, involving pre- and immediate post-surveys, as well as semi-structured interviews with 13 of the students.
• There was an increase in participants’ willingness to report sexual misconduct they may experience, no increase in willingness to encourage a friend to report sexual misconduct to the university, increased awareness of the resources and services available at the institution to support sexual misconduct survivors, and greater confidence responding to a peer who discloses an experience of sexual misconduct
• There was an increase in favourable attitudes towards intervening as a bystander and increased self-reported capability to intervene as a bystander to protect others from physical or sexual violence
• Students showed greater rejection of subtle rape myths after completing the module. Students showed increased positive attitudes towards obtaining sexual consent in their personal relationships, increasing openness to thinking about how they discuss sexual consent, and a greater willingness to think about and discuss sexual consent with friends.
• Note that these impacts were immediately post-intervention, and there was no longer-term follow-up.

1. Video program [no name]

This intervention in Spain consists of an online training pro­gram aimed at the prevention of dating violence, comprising educational short videos (number not given). The videos are each between 5 and 10 minutes long, and participants view them indepen­dently over five weeks (Barroso-Corroto et al., 2025).

Evaluation:

• 26 participants completed questionnaires before and two weeks after the intervention.
• There were no significant differences in their pre- and post-test scores on attitudes toward and knowledge of violence 

1. + Change

+ Change is a brief online intervention that targets alcohol misuse, sexual assault perpetration, bystander behavior, and sexual assault risk reduction (Gilmore et al., 2022). In a pilot study, participants took 17.5 minutes on average to complete the program. 

Evaluation:

• A small pilot evaluation involved a sample of 24 undergraduate students aged between 18 and 25 years who engaged in heavy episodic drinking in the past month.
• Pre-intervention and immediate post-intervention surveys showed that after the program:
  • Participants were more conscious of the problem of sexual assault on their campus and had greater intentions to make changes to prevent sexual assault perpetration
  • Participants reported significant reductions in endorsement of rape myths, decreased estimates of how many sexual assault reports are false reports, and increases in unwillingness to have sex with someone who was drunk.
  • Participants reported an increase in the likelihood to intervene when witnessing sexual assault (Gilmore et al., 2022).
• There was no longer-term follow-up.

1. Further programs

Other online violence prevention education programs that have not been evaluated include Dating SOS in Brazil (Murta et al., 2020).

In addition, there are prevention initiatives that use online strategies in combination with other methods. For example:

• Project DOT involves an “Educational and Leadership Curriculum” in group sessions on Zoom, development of a social media campaign, and a community mobilisation practicum (Segura, Henkhaus, Banyard, Obara, & Jefferson, 2023).

There is at also at least one experimental study that tested the impact of social media content on sexual violence on viewers’ attitudes. For example,

• In an experiment among males aged 15-19, adolescent men who viewed Tik Toks (short videos on a social media platform) showing first-person stories about sexual violence victimisation had higher knowledge of the consequences of SV and higher perceived severity of SV, compared to a control group (Nicolla et al., 2023).

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