Background
Gender-based violence (GBV) primary prevention programs seek to facilitate change by addressing the underlying causes and drivers of violence against women and girls at a population level. Social norms are contextually and socially derived collective expectations of appropriate behaviors. Harmful social norms that sustain GBV include women’s sexual purity, protecting family honor over women’s safety, and men’s authority to discipline women and children. To evaluate the impact of GBV prevention programs, our team sought to develop a brief, valid, and reliable measure to examine change over time in harmful social norms and personal beliefs that maintain and tolerate sexual violence and other forms of GBV against women and girls in low resource and complex humanitarian settings.
Methods
The development and testing of the scale was conducted in two phases: 1) formative phase of qualitative inquiry to identify social norms and personal beliefs that sustain and justify GBV perpetration against women and girls; and 2) testing phase using quantitative methods to conduct a psychometric evaluation of the new scale in targeted areas of Somalia and South Sudan.
Results
The
Social Norms and Beliefs about GBV Scale
was administered to 602 randomly selected men (
N
= 301) and women (N = 301) community members age 15 years and older across Mogadishu, Somalia and Yei and Warrup, South Sudan. The psychometric properties of the 30-item scale are strong. Each of the three subscales, “Response to Sexual Violence,” “Protecting Family Honor,” and “Husband’s Right to Use Violence” within the two domains, personal beliefs and injunctive social norms, illustrate good factor structure, acceptable internal consistency, reliability, and are supported by the significance of the hypothesized group differences.
Conclusions
We encourage and recommend that researchers and practitioners apply the
Social Norms and Beliefs about GBV Scale
in different humanitarian and global LMIC settings and collect parallel data on a range of GBV outcomes. This will allow us to further validate the scale by triangulating its findings with GBV experiences and perpetration and assess its generalizability across diverse settings.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.1186/s13031-019-0189-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Sexual violence is a by-product of conflict commonly seen, but poorly addressed, in humanitarian emergencies. Reports reveal that extraordinary numbers of women and girls suffer physical, psychological, and social consequences of sexual violence during conflict, when fleeing conflict, and during displacement. All sectors of the humanitarian community have a role to play in the prevention of and response to sexual violence. Improvements are needed: in the short-term to meet the needs of survivors of sexual violence; in collecting data related to sexual violence in humanitarian emergencies; and, perhaps most importantly, to address the widespread tolerance for high rates of sexual violence in humanitarian settings.
ObjectiveDetermine the effectiveness of the Communities Care programme (CCP) on change in harmful social norms associated with gender-based violence (GBV) and confidence in provision of services with residents in intervention compared with control district. We hypothesised that residents in the intervention district would report a decrease in support for harmful social norms and increase in confidence in services in comparison with control district.SettingThe study was conducted in Mogadishu, Somalia.ParticipantsIn the intervention district, 192 community members (50% women) completed baseline surveys with 163 (84.9%) retained at endline. In the control district, 195 community members (50% women) completed baseline surveys with 167 (85.6%) retained at endline.InterventionCCP uses facilitated dialogues with community members to catalyse GBV prevention actions and provides training to diverse sectors to strengthen response services for GBV survivors.ResultsResidents in the intervention district had significantly greater improvement in change in social norms: (1) response to sexual violence (b=−0.214, p=0.041); (2) protecting family honour (b=−0.558, p<0.001); and (3) husband’s right to use violence (b=−0.309, p=0.003) compared with control district participants. The greatest change was seen in the norm of ‘protecting family honour’ with a Cohen’s d effect size (ES) of 0.70, followed by the norm ‘husband’s right to use violence’ (ES=0.38), and then the norm of ‘response to sexual violence’ (ES=0.28). Residents in intervention district had a significantly greater increase in confidence in provision of GBV services across diverse sectors than the control district (b=0.318, p<0.001) with an associated effect size of 0.67. There were no significant differences between residents in intervention and control districts on change in personal beliefs on the norms.ConclusionThe evaluation showed the promise of CCP in changing harmful social norms associated with GBV and increasing confidence in provision of services in a complex humanitarian setting.
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