Effects Of Health Education on Knowledge of Sexual Coercion Among Secondary School Students in Rivers East Senatorial District, Rivers State

Sexual coercion is widespread around the world, although it is especially prevalent in underdeveloped nations. This study examined how health education affected secondary school pupils in Rivers State's South East Senatorial District's understanding of sexual coercion. With a population of sixty-five thousand eight hundred and eighty-one (65,881) secondary school pupils in the Rivers East Senatorial District, a pre-test and post-test design was used. The "Prevention of Sexual Coercion Instrument (PoSEI)," a structured test instrument with a reliability index of 0.89, was used to gather data. Version 27.0 of the Statistical Product for Service Solution (SPSS) was used to enter and code the obtained data. To address study issues, descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation (SD) were used to analyse the data. The impact of the health education was determined by comparing the mean score of the pretest and posttest. One-Way Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test each hypothesis at the 0.05 level of significance. The ANCOVA result demonstrated that the intervention significantly impacted knowledge of online sexual coercion F(1,190) = 8.88, p<0.05, as it accounted for 4.5% (ω2 = 0.043) of the variation in the post-test score. Additionally, knowledge of commercial sexual coercion was significantly impacted by the intervention F(1,190) = 31.37, p<0.05. It was determined that health education is an effective technique for influencing secondary school students' behaviour in the Rivers South East Senatorial District, Rivers State, with relation to their understanding of how to prevent commercial and online sexual coercion. Among other things, it was suggested that secondary school principals work with the ministry of education's ICT unit to regularly instruct students on how to use online resources responsibly in order to stop online sexual harassment. This will help to maintain the impact of the intervention on the students.