Abstract
Since 2018, in Spain, victims or witnesses of situations of violence against women can report to social services instead of the police without having to identify and denounce the aggressor, an option known as soft reporting. Soft reporting enables victims to access legal, economic, and psychological support services. It is expected that the availability of soft reporting will help reduce costs and overcome barriers to reporting, but there is not administrative data that enables to evaluate this.
In a previous RCT (AEARCTR-0011814), participants in one of the treatments had to decide whether they would intervene in a situation of violence against women under conditions simulating the hard reporting option that witnesses commonly face in real settings: reporting to the police, identifying themselves, and identifying the aggressor to process a formal complaint. In the current experiment, we present the participants with the same hypothetical situation used in the previous RCT, but we change the intervention option from hard to soft reporting. By comparing participants' decisions in the two groups, we can test if soft reporting actually increases witness intervention.