Personal Traits of the People Who Help: The Case of Bystanders to Violence against Women

Andrés Sánchez-Prada, Carmen Delgado-Alvarez, Esperanza Bosch-Fiol, Virginia Ferreiro-Basurto and Victoria A. Ferrer-Perez
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Andrés Sánchez-Prada: Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, C/Compañía and 1-5, 37002 Salamanca, Spain
Carmen Delgado-Alvarez: Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, C/Compañía and 1-5, 37002 Salamanca, Spain
Esperanza Bosch-Fiol: Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de las Islas Baleares, Ctra. Valldemossa, km. 7′5, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Virginia Ferreiro-Basurto: Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de las Islas Baleares, Ctra. Valldemossa, km. 7′5, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Victoria A. Ferrer-Perez: Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de las Islas Baleares, Ctra. Valldemossa, km. 7′5, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 20, 1-17

Abstract: Within the context of emergency situations, the terms witness or bystander are used to refer to individuals involved in oppressive incidents who are neither the victim nor the perpetrator. Among the different types of emergency situations, our study focuses on violence against women (VAW). In keeping with current efforts in the scientific literature on bystander intervention and the evidence currently available, the main focus of this study is to analyze some personal factors that reflect the characteristics or experiences of bystanders and that could have a bearing on their predisposition to help victims of VAW (i.e., empathy, a just world belief system, and expectations of self-efficacy) and later analyze the possible relationship between these personal characteristics and gender or previous experience as a VAW bystander. An opportunity sample of 546 Spanish participants (73.4% women and 26.6% men) between 18 and 56 years of age took part in this study and fill out a sociodemographic data sheet, a questionnaire to evaluate the experience as violence witness designed ad hoc, and the Characteristics of People who Help Questionnaire scale (CPHQ). The results obtained indicate that CPHQ could constitute an adequate measure for the three dimensions analyzed. Female participants are significantly more empathetic than males, but in the case of a just world belief and expectations of self-efficacy the results showed no gender-related differences. Additionally, only a just world belief was clearly influenced by having been a bystander to some form of VAW. In conclusion, this study contributes a proposal for an evaluating instrument featuring three relevant personal characteristics in the development of helping behaviors, presenting some results of interest regarding empathy, a just world belief, and expectations of self-efficacy and their relationship with gender or previous experiences as VAW bystanders. These results obtained suggest an initial path toward future research in the development of interventions with bystander participation in our environment.

Keywords: violence against women; gender-based violence; violence prevention; intervention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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