Sexual Harassment is not Cool!

In my attitude change project, I will be targeting young boys between the ages of 8-12 to try to alter their attitudes towards sexual harassment.  I will mainly use the central route to persuasion as it has a more lasting effect in terms of attitude and behavioral change. The program includes a lot of different activities, videos and movies that create an engaging setting for children to grasp their attention. Each video and activity is aimed to target a particular set of attitudes, either cognitively based attitudes, affectively based attitudes or cognitively based attitudes. For example, the movie La Mo’akhza will be screened to target the children’s affectively based attitudes as they empathize with the teacher being sexually harassed. Consequently, according to the empathy-altruism hypothesis, they will learn to help women or girls who are being sexually harassed. This particular video is self produced and it focuses on changing children’s cognitively based attitudes towards sexual harassment. It depicts a group of friends in which the “cool” kid sexually harasses, and although his friends think it is wrong, they do nothing about it. However, on a given day, their friend Beethoven is present and he stands up for the girl being harassed, and explains to Chris that what he is doing is wrong. The video ends with Beethoven’s name being chanted, while “Say No to Sexual Harassment” appears on the screen. The video itself is self explanatory but the attitude change is more dependent upon the discussion that ensues. Simplistic explanations of the bystander effect and conformity will follow, guiding the students on how they should act in certain situations where sexual harassment takes place. Furthermore, the video highlights how the children’s descriptive norms are not true. The video is one part of a complex program that will hopefully change children’s cognition and construal of harassment and decrease sexual harassment rates in Egypt in the near future.