Preventing Sexual Harassment in Schools: A Behavioral Targeting to Change Boys’ Attitudes and Improve Girls’ Outcomes

We propose to evaluate an innovative behavioral intervention designed to improve girls’ socio-emotional well-being, school attachment, and learning outcomes by reducing verbal and sexual harassment by male peers in Bangladeshi middle schools. The program, SAFE in School (Students Advocating for Empathy), takes a novel approach: instead of focusing primarily on girls, it targets the social norms and behaviors of boys who shape the inter-gender environment in schools. SAFE in School recruits socially influential ninth-grade boys as “student advocates” and trains them to deliver a structured anti-harassment curriculum to younger peers. The intervention leverages two key behavioral mechanisms—self-persuasion and perspective-taking—so that advocates internalize the messages they promote and shift peer norms beyond simple compliance. We hypothesize improvements in inter-gender relations and girls’ perceived safety, with spillovers through advocates’ social networks. We expect these changes to reduce harassment and improve both girls’ well-being and educational outcomes. We will measure impacts using administrative records of harassment, inter-gender social support ties, validated socio-emotional survey instruments,and standardized achievement tests. We will evaluate the program through a clustered randomized controlled trial in 150 schools, covering approximately 18,000 students in grades 6–10. The intervention will run throughout the 2027 academic year.