Middlebury College
Live and Lead
When undergraduate students matriculate at Middlebury College they pledge to “[cultivate] respect and responsibility for self, others, and our shared environment” through their Community Standards. As a community violence prevention strategy, Green Dot gives students, faculty, and staff the language, tools, and confidence to live into their shared standards. Twenty five Middlebury College staff and faculty are Green Dot facilitators and have been working to bring Green Dot to the teams, offices, programs, and classrooms where they work.
From awareness to culture change
We selected Green Dot as our primary prevention program for its proactive, solution-based approach that empowers every member of the community to play a role in violence reduction. Our campus community, like many others, has significantly increased its awareness of power-based personal violence over the last 10 years. The work now that folks are aware, is to act and empower. We have a communal opportunity and responsibility to reduce violence in the short term by developing skills, confidence, and connection to the issue while also addressing long-term culture change so that violence is not tolerated on our campus and everyone does their part to prevent it.” Barbara McCall, Director of Health and Wellness Education
Effective Adaptation: Study Abroad
In 2017, funding from Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women enabled Middlebury College and their Vermont undergraduate campus to partner to adapt the Green Dot Prevention Strategy for their students traveling abroad. Research for the adaptation included surveying, interviewing, and conducting focus groups with more 200 students and professionals to better understand the reality of interpersonal violence while studying abroad. Recently, professionals from Middlebury were trained on the first Green Dot Prevention Strategy Study Abroad Program and the new curriculum has been implemented in a dozen sites worldwide.
Continued Improvement
It’s something that is really important to me and a really important issue on campus. It’s big enough of an issue that it makes me want to improve on this program and keep the work going, keep moving forward.” Matt St. Amour ’17. Matt focused his senior thesis in Economics on replicating the evaluation measures used by the University of Kentucky to show efficacy in violence prevention. Additionally, he developed a dating violence myth scale to dive deeper into whether Green Dot helped to change beliefs around safety, responsibility, and bystander intervention around dating violence they way is has been proven to do so with rape/sexual assault (and it does!).
Research
American Journal of Preventative Medicine
This study evaluated the Green Dot bystander intervention to reduce sexual violence and related forms of interpersonal violence in 26 high schools over 5 years and showed a significant decrease in sexual violence perpetration and also in other forms of interpersonal violence perpetration and victimization.
Read more ↗This article explores the methodology of a 5-year, CDC funded study of the Green Dot bystander program as it is implemented in high schools across Kentucky. It is the first of several articles in this special issue of the Violence Against Women journal which discusses the evaluation of Green Dot in high schools.
Read more ↗This study compared rates of violence by type among undergraduate students attending a college campus with the GreenDot bystander intervention with students at two colleges without bystander programs and explains that victimization rates were significantly lower among students attending the campus with Green Dot relative to the two other campuses.
Read more ↗