Changing Boys' Attitudes to Improve Girls' Academic and Socioemotional Outcomes

We designed a behavioral intervention, SAFE in School (Students Advocating for Empathy), to improve the behavior and attitudes of adolescent boys and improve girls’ educational outcomes by reducing verbal and sexual harassment, thereby promoting gender equity in educational environment. Our program addresses the critical challenge of low secondary school completion rates for girls in Bangladesh by fostering a safer and more supportive school environment. The intervention enlists socially influential ninth-grade boys (selected when they are grade 8) as advocates to lead educational sessions for junior students, leveraging self-persuasion and perspective-taking techniques. By self-persuading boys to empathize with female peers and recognize the harms of harassment, the program is expected to develop their socioemotional skills, including empathy and sense of responsibility, and improve mental health of both boys and girls. Drawing on Alan and Kubilay’s (2025) model of peer-led program, we anticipate the intervention’s impact to extend beyond the enlisted advocates to their networks, leveraging their social influence to propagate positive attitudes. We will evaluate outcomes across multiple domains, including inter-gender prosocial attitudes, harassment incidents, girls’ dropout rates, early marriage arrangements, and academic achievement. To be implemented as a cluster randomized controlled trial across 150 Bangladeshi schools, the program includes three arms: (1) advocates deliver anti-harassment curriculum to junior students, (2) advocates conduct placebo activities with juniors, and (3) pure control group. We partnered with the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) to implement the intervention and data collection, leveraging their respective expertise in education and research in Bangladesh.