College coaches’ influence on student-athlete engagement in sexual violence prevention: promoting readiness to help and awareness of campus resources

Abstract

Increasing one’s readiness to help (Baynard 2010) and awareness of campus resources (Hayes-Smith and Levett 2010) is vital to the success of bystander intervention, which has been identified as a promising strategy for engaging student-athletes in sexual violence prevention (Moynihan et al. 2015). While studies suggest that high school coaches may play an influential role in promoting engagement in sexual violence prevention with their student-athletes (Miller et al. 2013), there is a lack of research on the potential influence of college coaches. This exploratory study examines college coaches’ impact of discussing sexual violence with student-athletes on engaging in sexual violence prevention. Data collected from a Mid-Atlantic Division I university indicate that student-athletes who discussed sexual violence with their coach were more likely to take action to prevent sexual violence and more familiar with campus resources than those who did not. Implications for research and practice will be discussed.

Keywords:

• Student-athletes
• campus sexual assault
• college coaches
• prevention
• bystander intervention

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Julia O’Connor at the Center on Violence Against Women & Children at Rutgers School of Social Work for preparing and transferring the data files for completion of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Sexual violence is a multi-faceted term and we recognise that different terms are used interchangeably to encapsulate this, such as sexual assault, sexual harassment or sexual misconduct. We acknowledge the difference in these terms, and default to the term sexual violence throughout this paper, except where quoting others’ work or statistics that refers to alternative term.