When it’s safer to walk away: Urban, low opportunity emerging adults’ willingness to use bystander behaviors in response to community and dating violence

Bystander intervention programs are viewed as innovative community-level responses to sexual and dating violence among adolescents and young adults (Banyard, 2014; McMahon & Farmer, 2009; Moynihan et al., 2015; Storer et al., 2017). At the school and community level, factors such as social cohesion, collective efficacy, and exposure to community violence have been found to influence use of bystander behaviors (Edwards et al., 2014; Lucero et al., 2019; McMahon, 2015; Rothman et al., 2019). Despite the explosion of literature examining the efficacy of bystander interventions, most study populations are on college and high school campuses. There has been limited exploration of the feasibility of such programs among disadvantaged youth in resource-poor communities not affiliated with formal school or work settings (i.e., low opportunity youth). The purpose of this exploratory study is to investigate these emerging adults’ willingness to use bystander behaviors in response to witnessing dating and community violence. Data were collected from six focus groups at three youth-serving agencies in New Orleans. Participants were aged 17–22 (n = 39) and both male- and female-identified; the majority identified as African American. All participants were involved with community-based organizations with missions to positively engage emerging adults. Our exploratory thematic content analysis involved multiple rounds of inductive coding. Once we applied codes to the data, we employed matrices to construct key social processes both within and across the focus groups.