Engaging men as prosocial bystanders in nightlife settings: Behavioural insights for sexual harassment prevention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual harassment in nightlife settings remains a serious concern for public health and law enforcement; however, opportunities for primary prevention approaches, including the intervention of prosocial bystanders, show potential. Nevertheless, little is known about the nuanced barriers and facilitators to intervene which groups of nightlife users experience, particularly men. This mixed-methods study examines behavioural determinants of prosocial bystander intervention in sexual harassment situations within South Wales’ nighttime economy. Research combined interviews (n = 30) and focus groups (n = 3) with men aged 18–54 years, to develop five distinct personas representing different psychological profiles of potential male bystanders. The research applies the COM-B (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation-Behaviour) model to understand barriers and facilitators to intervention. Results reveal that while motivational factors vary across personas, psychological capability barriers, particularly lack of knowledge about safe intervention methods and legal implications, are universal. The study highlights the multidimensional nature of motivation, capability, and opportunity influencing intervention, revealing that unwillingness to intervene is not simply one of ignorance or apathy, but of complex trade-offs between personal safety, social cohesion, and ethical responsibility. The persona-based approach reveals significant heterogeneityin the psychological processes underlying intervention decisions. Rather than treating potential bystanders as a homogeneous group, the study demonstrates that different individuals require different types of support and messaging to overcome their specific barriers and provides evidence-based recommendations for tailored communication strategies essential for effective behaviour change in sexual harassment prevention. These findings contribute to the growing literature on bystander intervention theory and offer practical insights for violence prevention practitioners and campaigns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".