By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
AP Chief Medical Writer

A program that taught college women ways to prevent sexual assault cut in half the chances they would be raped over the next year, a Canadian study found. It was the first large, scientific test of resistance training, and the strong results should spur more universities to offer it, experts say.

Five percent of freshman women who went through the four-session program said they had been raped during the following year, compared to 10 percent of others who were just given brochures on assault prevention. Attempted rapes also were lower _ about 3 percent in the training group versus more than 9 percent of the others.

The results are “startling,” said a prominent researcher on sex assault with no role in the study, University of Arizona psychologist Mary Koss.

“Universities should move right away to figure out how they can implement a program like this,” she said. “We don’t have to look at women as being so helpless and vulnerable. There are tools to empower women that can dramatically cut their risk of rape.”

The study involved about 900 students, ages 17 to 24, at the universities of Windsor, Guelph and Calgary. It was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the University of Windsor. Results are in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.