Abstract

Existing research carried out on US college and university students and UK university students shows that sexual violence is prevalent and gendered. To address this, there has been a proliferation of bystander training programmes implemented in US colleges and universities. Evaluations of these training programmes show that they have the potential to disrupt sexual violence. Emerging research on US college and university students shows that non-binary and transgender students experience (in some studies higher rates of) sexual violence, misgendering, harassment, and discrimination, which impact negatively upon their mental health, academic study, safety and perceptions of this, and ultimately their everyday behaviours. Yet bystander training programmes have been predominantly designed to disrupt sexual violence (and other harmful behaviours) experienced by cis women students given the existing research studies that have focused on sexual violence experienced by this population.
Using data from our individual semi-structured interviews with 9 UK university students, who identified as either non-binary or transgender, we explore the theoretical model and application of The Intervention Initiative (see for example University of Exeter, 2024), an active bystander training programme designed to be used in English universities (Fenton et al., 2016; Universities UK, 2016), to take account of the experiences and impact of sexual violence, misgendering, harassment and discrimination experienced by students in our study. We present the preliminary findings and recommendations from our analysis.