Primary Prevention Is?: A Global Perspective On How Organizations That Partner with Men in Combating Gender-Based Violence Conceptualize and Operationalize Primary Prevention in Their Work

Introduction

Engaging men as partners has been promoted worldwide as an important strategy in the primary prevention of Violence Against Women (VAW). Concurrently, Western public health frameworks have been increasingly utilized to guide violence prevention agendas globally. However there has been limited discussion into how anti-violence organizations charged with implementing prevention-based programming position their work within the broad umbrella of prevention. The purpose of this study is to describe how global anti-VAW organizations that partner with men conceptualize and operationalize primary prevention in their work with the ultimate goal of capturing and learning from these frontline efforts. This is turn will inform the development of more community informed and contextualized primary prevention agendas.

Method

Data & Sample: Representatives from 29 organizations from Africa, Australia, Europe, Asia, North and South America that identified as implementing efforts to engage men in gender-based violence prevention participated in semi-structured interviews. During the interviews, participants were asked how their organizations define preventing domestic violence before it begins. 

Data Analysis: Interview data were analyzed using a conventional thematic content analysis approach. The first author identified and categorized codes and developed primary themes. To promote trustworthiness, the research team discussed, negotiated and reached consensus on codes and themes. Memos were used to promote reflexivity. Atlas.ti was used to organize and analyze the data.

Results

Findings suggest that globally, primary prevention is not a fixed term in the context of VAW and that many organizations blend primary, secondary and tertiary prevention approaches in organizationally specific ways. Across organizations, primary prevention was seen as preventing new incidences of abuse, generating community awareness, fostering skill-building in individual men, redefining masculinity, promoting gender equality, and advocating for institutional changes. While some organizations were working primarily in one of these domains or had difficulty articulating their prevention approaches, many devised innovative strategies to combine approaches at multiple ecological levels in order to satisfy these broad conceptualizations of primary prevention.

Conclusions

Much can be learned across regions from anti-violence organizations’ organizationally specific approaches to primary prevention. Given that organization’s distinctions between primary, secondary and tertiary prevention were found to be more fluid, this research suggests that Western public health prevention frameworks may need to be expanded and tailored in order to accommodate this breadth of approaches to primary prevention. Lessons on forging broad and inclusive prevention agendas at individual, community, societal and policy levels will be discussed.