WITHDRAWN: The Design and Initial Testing of a Parenting Programme in Uganda for Early Prevention of Gender Based Violence

Background: Gender based violence (GBV) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality throughout the world. Many factors contribute to GBV, some of which originate in the early years of a child’s life. Parents in rural East Africa are particularly concerned about children’s good behavior and respect, a hallmark of family respectability, and initiatives around Children’s Rights are resisted because perceived to undermine children’s good behavior. We developed a community based parenting program in central Uganda to prevent GBV called Parenting for Good Behavior and Respectability (PGBR). It addresses four familial processes associated with GBV: poor parental bonding and child attachment; harsh parenting; differential socialization by gender and parental conflict.

Program design: The program is being developed in three stages: 1) designing the program and drafting the manual; 2) formative evaluation with six groups in semi-rural Uganda; 3) a large scale before and after outcome evaluation currently underway. This paper will present findings from Stages 1 and 2. Two underlying principles of the 21 session program are to harness the target group’s existing motivation and build on their skills and experience. It emphasizes that responsive, non-harsh parenting improves child development and does not undermine children’s good behavior or respect for their parents.

The intervention is facilitated by two local parents who receive 2 weeks’ training. The first 10 sessions are for mothers and fathers separately. Then two sexes are brought together for sessions 11-21 and encouraged to address conflicting gendered perceptions of parenting and couple relationship problems.

Results: We found widespread endorsement of the program because it appealed to parents’ pressing concerns to raise respectable children and improve the quality of family relationships. The structure of single sex then mixed sex sessions was welcomed and the recruitment and retention of parents, especially men, has been a great success. The initial process evaluation suggests that PGBR improves understanding of child development and upbringing, reduction in corporal punishment, and appreciation of alternative positive discipline strategies. To some extent the program, particularly the single sex sessions, seemed to allow men to explore non-conventional masculinity without the risk of being ridiculed.

Challenges: Despite training many local facilitators found PGBR too complex to deliver. Furthermore, it seems that encouraging fathers to be more involved as parents exacerbates gendered power imbalance by promoting new expressions of masculinity. Fathers thought they were more receptive than mothers to the program and tended to criticize their partners’ parenting practices.