The United States Marine Corps Prevention of Child and Spouse Abuse project (1995) is funded by a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (CSREES) and the U. S. Marine Corps to provide research based prevention strategies for all forms of family violence and conduct training on spouse abuse prevention. 2004-2005 activities include the continuing implementation and evaluation of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP - Marines) at Marine installations world wide.
MVP is a gender violence and sexual assault prevention program whose overall goal is to create a climate in which disrespect, harassment, and violence toward women are not tolerated. MVP utilizes a bystander approach and focuses on developing male leadership around gender violence issues in conjunction with the traditional Marine Corps values of Honor, Courage and Commitment. MVP is based on a sports leadership model and uses playbooks that contain scenarios about different gender violence situations. Each scenario presents the bystander’s train of thought as the scenario unfolds and elicits a series of response options that might be available to the bystander. The only response option that is unacceptable is to take no action. MVP takes the position that just having the conversation is a success since most men spend little time thinking about or discussing these issues and how they affect the women in their lives. When incidents occur, they may be unsure of their own feelings, the feelings of others, or how to respond. If they have had discussions with other males about incidents that involve disrespect, harassment, and violence toward women and know that there are strong male figures in leadership positions who find this behavior unacceptable, they are more likely to speak out against such behavior or to intervene in other ways. In addition, this broadening of the discussion sends a strong message to any men who are or who might be abusive toward women that real men and real Marines do not behave in this manner.
Principal Investigator/Project Director: Brian Leidy, bl15@cornell.edu
