New publications summarise what works to prevent violence

The Global Programme to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls project has published five new papers summarising the current state of knowledge on what works to prevent violence. 

The project aims to build knowledge on what works to prevent violence against women and girls. It seeks to identify effective prevention strategies by addressing the root causes or established risk factors for violence. The project specifically addresses intimate partner violence (emotional, economic, physical, sexual), non-partner sexual violence, and child abuse (emotional, physical, sexual).

The project will be funding innovative approaches to preventing violence in UK Department of International Development (DFID) priority countries. To inform priorities for the grants and associated research, the project undertook four rapid evidence reviews by conducting online searches of academic databases, individual programme evaluations and reviews. The findings of the four evidence reviews are summarised in A global programme to prevent violence against women and girls: a summary of the evidence. 

Summaries of the individual evidence reviews :are also available. They are described briefly below:

• What do we know about violence against women and girls and what more do we need to know to prevent it? A summary of the evidence outlines the current knowledge base regarding the scale, scope and drivers of violence against women and girls and identifies where our understanding needs to be expanded in order to deliver the most comprehensive and effective interventions and reduce the prevalence of VAWG globally.
• Effectiveness of interventions to prevent violence against women and girls: A summary of the evidence examines the evidence base for the effectiveness of interventions designed explicitly to prevent violence against women and girls. This includes interventions that engage with boys and men, those designed to empower women and girls and interventions designed to address risk factors such as child abuse.
• Effectiveness of response mechanisms to prevent violence against women and girls: A summary of the evidence reviews interventions that are developed and deployed with a primary goal to strengthen the response of the police and criminal justice system, health system or social sector to violence against women and girls. The paper assesses any evidence that interventions can achieve a secondary goal of prevention of violence against women and girls.
• Approaches to assess value for money and scale up of violence against women and girls prevention: A summary of the evidence provides an overview of the evidence, approaches and economic issues to be considered when designing and assessing violence against women and girls programmes in order to inform future programme scale up.

What Works To Prevent Violence is administered by a consortium led by the Medical Research Council of South Africa, in partnership with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Social Development Direct, on behalf of DFID.

Update:

The full (as well as summary) versions of the papers have now been published. Both the full and summary papers are available through the Clearinghouse library.

Additional resources:

Information on violence prevention studies, ongoing violence prevention research trials and key publications and resources on violence prevention can be found on the Violence Prevention website. This tool provides access to abstracts from published studies that have measured the effectiveness of interventions to prevent violence. To be included in the database, studies must have measured the impact of interventions directly on violence.