Experimental Design Details
We plan to conduct a scoping field experiment (Randomized Control Trial) among adolescent girls enrolled in standards 9 – 12 in Kanpur, in collaboration with different school authorities. The different treatment arms will be as follows:
Treatment Group-1:
600 girl students of this age group randomly selected from 20 schools will receive the awareness drive (via information workshops) only. The students will be shown a presentation with information on the various laws governing women safety, mentioning examples of various scenarios of sexual harassment, followed by citing the punishment for each crime. Various helpline numbers shall be shared with the students and the students shall be encouraged to stand up for themselves and not blame themselves for the wrong doing of the perpetrators.
Treatment Group-2:
600 girl students of this age group randomly selected from 20 schools will receive both the awareness drive as well as a self-defense class. Thus, in addition to the presentation (as in Treatment Group-1), the students shall be given a self-defense training by a well-trained Taekwondo female instructor, where they shall be taught tricks on how to safeguard themselves from the perpetrator. We are particularly interested in understanding if there will be a difference in outcomes between treatments 1 & 2. If there is no difference, then making girl students just aware may be a cost-effective policy treatment.
Control group: 300 girls from another 10 schools will receive no treatment of any kind.
Using detailed baseline, post-training and end-line surveys, we plan to explore whether the proposed self-defense program and awareness drive can be an effective tool to help deter crimes against women, captured via feelings of safety, questions on self-esteem, locus of control, personality, mental health, subjective well-being, willingness to continue studies, get employed and expected age to get married using the standard questionnaires and questions also used in our IGC India and Bangladesh projects, following Goldberg (1985), Gosling et al. (2003), Doiron and Mendolia (2012), Stump (2013), Mendolia (2014), Mendolia and Walker (2014) and Frijters et al. (2019). These students however do not belong to a homogeneous group. They come from varied socioeconomic backgrounds. Hence we will do a heterogeneity analysis to see how the impact of self-defense on various outcomes of these girls differs by income groups, educational background and caste of parents. Identifying such heterogeneous impacts will lead to useful policy prescriptions. We will also conduct face to face detailed interviews with both school authorities as well as the male and female household members, friends and other classmates of a selected sub-sample of the students in the treatment groups to understand the extent of spillover effects and whether such a policy will be acceptable to the households of these students and school authorities if such a training program is phased out on a large scale.