Nudging Bystanders to Combat Sexual Harassment in Bangladesh
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The Behavioural Insights Team / Nudging bystanders to combat sexual harassment 1 Nudging bystanders to combat sexual harassment in Bangladesh Project report BRAC project team: Shafqat Aurin, Rakib Avi, Nishath Sultana, Nishat Tasnim BIT project team: Christine Kelly, Laura Litvine, Dilhan Perera The Behavioural Insights Team / Nudging bystanders to combat sexual harassment 2 Contents Executive Summary _______________________________________________________________ 3 1 / Introduction ___________________________________________________________________ 5 2 / Background ___________________________________________________________________ 5 3 / Intervention ___________________________________________________________________ 6 4 / Trial design and implementation ___________________________________________________ 7 5 / Measuring sexual harassment ____________________________________________________ 8 6 / Pre-intervention findings: New facts about sexual harassment __________________________ 10 7 / Post-intervention findings: Estimated effects of the posters _____________________________ 11 8 / Recommendations ____________________________________________________________ 13 9 / BRAC’s team ________________________________________________________________ 13 10 / Conclusion _________________________________________________________________ 14 Annex _________________________________________________________________________ 16 Notes _________________________________________________________________________ 17 The Behavioural Insights Team / Nudging bystanders to combat sexual harassment 3 Executive Summary The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and how to intervene, and the fear of BRAC formed a partnership in February 2018 consequences. to apply behavioural insights to BRAC priorities After several rounds of interviews, observations across Bangladesh. The purpose of this and user-testing, we developed posters, to be partnership, which is supported by the Global stuck inside buses, which aimed to overcome Innovation Fund, is among others to build up these barriers. The posters used simple the capacity of BRAC’s Social Innovation Lab to infographics to encourage people to intervene apply behavioural insights in future work. and provided them with simple steps to take so The first project undertaken under this that they could do so safely and effectively. partnership aimed to reduce sexual harassment on buses running in Dhaka, Figure: Posters designed and stuck on buses Bangladesh’s capital and most populous city. This project was conducted in collaboration with BRTC, the state-owned transport corporation of Bangladesh. Policy objective Sexual harassment on public transport is all too common around the world, causing victims Trial design direct harm and reducing their opportunities to We evaluated the impact of the posters by participate in public life. According to recent installing them on over 50 buses run by the research, close to 95% of women in Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation Bangladesh have been sexually harassed while (BRTC). We trained enumerators to conduct commuting. Active bystanding – where structured observations onboard these buses onlookers intervene in support of victims – and to survey passengers getting off them. We offers a way to reduce the impact of sexual then estimated the impact of the posters by harassment on victims. The expectation of conducting statistical analyses on the data in active bystanding might also encourage victims the weeks immediately before and after the to speak out and deter would-be perpetrators posters were installed. from harassing in the first place. In total we observed more than 50 BRTC Given the potential benefits, and the buses over 12 weekdays, amounting to 790 proliferation of active bystanding campaigns bus trips. On these trips, enumerators globally, we designed and tested a scalable recorded close to 950 incidents of sexual intervention to encourage passengers to harassment. We also conducted 3,518 intervene when sexual harassment occurs. surveys with alighting passengers. Intervention Results During interviews conducted by BIT and BRAC, many people expressed a willingness and New facts about sexual harassment (pre- readiness to intervene. However, several intervention findings) behavioural barriers appeared to prevent them ● Overall, 60 percent of bus trips had at least from following through, including not knowing one incident of harassment noticed by enumerators The Behavioural Insights Team / Nudging bystanders to combat sexual harassment 4 ● Close to one in ten women reported The change in attitudes did not, however, seem experiencing sexual harassment on the to result in an increase in active bystanding. bus trip they had just taken This finding provides a cautionary tale for many ● Almost all victims of observed interventions around the world which have been harassment were women, while virtually said to be effective based on proven changes all perpetrators were men in attitudes. ● Over half of the cases reported by Figure: Estimated impact of posters on likelihood of participants involved physical harassment observed active bystanding ● 90 percent of survey respondents said they would take some form of action if they saw an incident, and around 75 percent agreed that we should reach out to victims ● Unfortunately, we observed active bystanding in only 1 out of every 5 incidents of harassment These numbers hint to the scale of a problem already suggested by more subjective data collection exercises and confirm the existence of a large “intention-action gap”. Finally, we observed a significant decline in the frequency of sexual harassment. Though we Figure: Proportion of observed incidents by form of harassment (incidents could include multiple forms) cannot conclusively attribute this to the posters, this finding strongly invites further study of the promising deterrent effects of low-cost interventions like the posters we designed. Recommendations This project, the first collaboration between BRAC and BIT, demonstrated the feasibility of applying behavioural insights and an adaptive, user-oriented approach to tackle the challenge of sexual harassment in a difficult setting. It led to three key recommendations: Estimated effects of the posters (post- ● Continue measuring sexual intervention findings) harassment and bystander responses The posters seemed to positively impact by refining the methods piloted in this trial. awareness of sexual harassment and attitudes The methods we employed, despite towards victims: issues linked to their novelty, allowed us to collect unique data on harassment ● The fraction of passengers nominating behaviours. Further studies could deepen sexual harassment as their biggest safety the understanding of barriers surrounding concern increased significantly among the fight against gender-based violence. men (from around 3.5 percent to around ● Conduct further testing of the posters 8 percent). to verify their potential to deter harassment ● The proportion of passengers disagreeing from happening in the first place. with statements justifying or dismissing ● Develop and test ways to tackle sexual harassment increased by over 10 additional barriers to active bystanding, percent after the posters were installed. for example by correcting misperceptions about other passengers’ attitudes. The Behavioural Insights Team / Nudging bystanders to combat sexual harassment 5 1 / Introduction 2 / Background The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and Sexual harassment on public BRAC formed a partnership in February 2018 transport to apply behavioural insights to BRAC priorities across Bangladesh. The purpose of this In Bangladesh, there are generally no partnership, which is supported by the Global designated bus stops or ticketing booths for Innovation Fund, is to build up the capacity of buses. Buses pick up and drop off passengers BRAC staff to independently apply behavioural from busy intersection points, often onto approaches and rigorous impact evaluation running traffic. The crowded bus space during through ‘learning-by-doing’. peak hours moreover makes it difficult for women to board the bus let alone to get a seat. This report summarises activities and findings from the first project undertaken under this As a result, according to research conducted by partnership, which aimed to reduce gender- BRAC University in Bangladesh, close to 95% based harassment on buses running in of women surveyed reported having been Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital and most sexually harassed either on the road or on populous city. This project was conducted in public transportation - this was true across collaboration with BRTC, the only state-owned locations, ages, and income brackets.i transport corporation of Bangladesh. When they fall victim to sexual harassment, most respondents however reported not saying anything to the perpetrator, for fear of embarassment, or worse: further violence. Most also reported not saying anything to the authorities. Despite laws against sexual harassment having been in place for many years in Bangladesh, only very few cases make it to the courts. A lack of trust in authorities is partly responsible - news of a student murdered for reporting sexual harassment is a striking example. Inadequacies in the legal framework which do not protect victims and mean they carry the burden of proof also disincentivise reporting. Our project was conducted in three distinct phases, whereby we (i) conducted preliminary research with passengers to identify the