Jess Hill and Michael Salter recently have released a commentary paper, “Rethinking Primary Prevention”, available on Jess Hill’s substack here. The following are some comments on this paper. While I see some valuable discussion in the paper, I also think that it:
- Misrepresents aspects of primary prevention in Australia
- Criticises an approach that has yet to be fully tried, and then
- Endorses strategies that fit with that same approach.
Critique of existing primary prevention approaches
The paper offers a critique of the existing primary prevention approach or approaches in Australia. However, at various points the paper misrepresents these. While I am sympathetic to some of the later arguments in the piece, I think that the piece relies far too much on a ‘straw’ version of primary prevention approaches in Australia to make its case. To give five examples:
-- The paper makes repeated emphasis on social norms, as if this were the only or primary target e.g. of Our Watch’s “Change the Story” framework. They’re not, and the Our Watch framework emphasises social structures as much as social norms.
-- Similarly, later this is described as a “liberal feminist approach to prevention”, but in fact it does not have liberal feminism’s defining focus on women’s individual achievement within taken-for-granted corporate and political structures. Instead, Our Watch’s framework draws more on radical feminist emphases on patriarchal social structures and patriarchal ideologies.
-- The paper reads as if dominant approaches to prevention in Australia have been oblivious to questions of racism, colonialism, and intersectionality more broadly. That’s absurd. There seems no acknowledgement of Our Watch’s prevention framework focused on indigenous contexts and Our Watch’s consistent emphases on an intersectional approach. Nor of excellent work e.g. by the Equality Institute and other organisations. Yes, there is much more work to do here, but it is misleading to write as if there is a dominant, “liberal” approach to prevention that is oblivious to Indigenous critique.
-- The paper suggests that dominant approaches to prevention are based only on the ‘ameliorative’ approach. That’s false, and there is explicit acknowledgement e.g. in Change the Story of backlash, including collective backlash in response to progress towards gender equality (p. 54). (And this cites scholarship supporting a ‘backlash’ theory.)
The paper reads as if the ‘backlash’ thesis – that men’s violence against women may increase as women’s status raises, both at a community level and in individual households and relationships – is novel, but this thesis is well documented and well known at least in scholarship on violence prevention.
-- The paper suggests that primary prevention approaches in Australia are consistently focused on a ‘universal’ approach, with no targeting to populations or settings at particular risk. That’s putting it too strongly, as there are certainly examples of more selective targeting include interventions aimed at boys and men already using violence, at violence-supportive settings such as in schools or workplaces, and increasingly e.g. at adolescent perpetrators of family violence.
A gender-transformative approach
One of the paper’s key claims is that primary prevention approaches focused on addressing gender and gender inequalities have failed because there have not been substantial declines in levels of violence against women and the community attitudes associated with these.
There are two key problems with this claim.
First, there has been more progress than this paper allows. Second and more fundamentally, prevention approaches in Australia have so far *done relatively little* to tackle gender inequalities. That is, the paper is criticising an approach that has not been implemented in a systematic way. And ironically, the paper goes on to recommend strategies for addressing structural gender inequalities that ideally are part of the gender-transformative approach it has been criticising. I comment further on each point below.
Progress
The paper states, “According to multiple metrics, the gender equality approach has not only failed to actually reduce and/or prevent violence, it has achieved only marginal improvements to community attitudes over the past decade.”
This account is misleading. Earlier in the piece, the paper does acknowledge that some forms of VAW have declined in Australia, but that seems pushed aside here. Instead:
-- Overall rates of intimate partner homicide have declined.
-- Rates of partner violence, including both physical and sexual violence by partners, have declined.
-- Rates of sexual harassment also have declined.
However, sexual assault rates have *not* declined. The 12-month rate shows no change in sexual assault or threatened sexual assault. (This summary comes from Anastasia Powell’s Conversation piece, here.)
With regard to attitudes, the paper refers to “only marginal improvements to community attitudes”. Yet there have in fact been significant improvements in community attitudes, as successive rounds of the National Community Attitudes Survey show. (And yes, there are also areas where community attitudes have not shifted or have even worsened.) The paper later acknowledges positive shifts, although emphasising that they are small.
Addressing gender inequalities
Primary prevention efforts in Australia, thus far, have fallen far short of a systematic effort to transform gender inequalities. As I wrote in a recent QUT Briefing Paper,
“Despite an emphasis in the field on the need to address community-wide and society-wide forces and factors which shape domestic, family, and sexual violence (Our Watch, 2021), many interventions instead address individual and relationship level factors. Prevention efforts generally have focused on the smallest levels of the ecological framework, addressing people’s personal histories and the contexts in which violence take place such as family dynamics and intimate partner or acquaintance relationships. Only rarely have prevention efforts addressed the levels of preventable risk factors which are larger in scope, to do with the social structures and institutions in which relationships and families are embedded: neighbourhoods, workplaces, social networks and communities, and the larger society and culture.” (Flood, 2023)
In other words, Hill and Salter’s paper is in part criticising the failings of a prevention approach that has not yet been tried in Australia. There has been little effort, for example, to address structural features of gender inequality in the name of violence prevention.
I agree with the paper that there has been too much focus in prevention on one strategy, education, and not enough on other strategies, including community development and community mobilisation. This is not a new point, and in prevention scholarship there is increasing emphasis on precisely this:
“There is growing encouragement for the prevention field to move away from the use only of strategies at the smallest scales of the ecological model (Casey & Lindhorst, 2009; DeGue et al., 2012; Tharp et al., 2011). This requires a paradigm shift, away from low-dose education-only programming and toward investment in the development and rigorous evaluation of more comprehensive, multi-level strategies aimed at a wider range of populations (DeGue et al., 2014). It also requires a shift in policy-making and funding, in that community-level strategies are near impossible without formal political will and financial support.” (Flood, 2023)
I find myself agreeing much more with the paper later on, e.g. when it emphasises the need to change the structural factors that shape domestic and sexual violence, such as the availability of pornography, and later on, patterns of women’s economic dependency and poverty.
Again, ironically, the paper here emphases strategies that should be part of a robustly gender-transformative approach to prevention, an approach that the first half of the paper rejects as having failed in Australia (although it hasn’t actually been fully tried).
The Nordic paradox
In critiquing dominant approaches to prevention, the paper highlights the ‘Nordic paradox’, the finding that in Nordic countries high levels of gender equality co-exist with high levels of violence against women, counter to the general claim that gender equality and violence against women have an inverse relationship.
However, the paper’s account of the Nordic paradox is simplistic and partial. It neglects various explanations in the scholarship of this seeming paradox and recent empirical studies that do not support it.
First, the paper does not canvas various explanations offered in the literature. This seeming paradox may reflect e.g. limited measures of gender equality that focus only on public political and economic equality and not other measures of inequality, greater willingness to report violence in these countries, broader and more inclusive community and legal definitions of violence, and/or backlash among some men (including the use of violence) to progress towards gender equality.
There is also a methodological issue here, with evidence that information on country-level gender inequality does not discriminate well in relation to individual-level experiences of intimate partner violence in cross-national comparisons (Ivert, Gracia, Lila, Wemrell, & Merlo, 2020).
More importantly, more recent analyses *do not* find a ‘Nordic paradox’ among European countries. This includes studies that draw on a wider range of data, e.g. by Humbert et al. (2021) and Gómez-Casillas (2023). The second study concludes, for example,
“we found that higher country-level status of women and men go together with less IPVAW, with a larger effect of women’s status in economic domains compared to the impact of men’s economic status, and a larger effect of men’s overall status. […] women’s absolute status in the economic and labor domain is critical in lessening IPVAW, as women’s real and potential access to resources is key for leaving a violent relationship.”
The paper cites statistics on rising cases of coercive control in New Zealand, a country characterised by relative gender equality. But this point risks the same fallacy the paper earlier acknowledges, that this may simply reflect greater community awareness and greater reporting rather than any lack of relationship between levels of coercive control and gender inequality.
In addition, the paper neglects a large body of other scholarship showing associations between gender inequality and VAW (and between gender equality and declines in or lower VAW). This includes both cross-national and intra-country studies. For example:
To highlight a cross-national example, analysis of data from 44 countries finds that factors related to women’s status, gender norms, & gender inequality predict the prevalence of partner violence within the past 12 months (Heise & Kotsadam, 2015). At the population level:
-- Macro-level factors related to women’s status, gender-related norms, and gender inequality predict the population prevalence of physical and sexual partner violence within the past 12 months.
-- Norms that justify wife beating and male authority over female behaviour are especially predictive of partner violence levels by country. Gender-related discrimination in family law, including differential rights to child custody, to inherit land and money, and to marry and divorces, also predicts levels of partner violence across settings.
To highlight three intra-country examples;
-- An analysis of state-level gender inequalities in the USA finds associations with seven types of homicide victimization. Gender inequality is associated with higher levels of homicide – against women, against men, and between intimate partners (Campbell, Rothman, Shareef, & Siegel, 2019).
-- A second analysis of state-level gender inequalities in the USA finds that gender inequalities are associated with the prevalence of any form of IPV (Willie & Kershaw, 2019). As the abstract concludes, “Structural changes to gender inequality may help to reduce occurrences of IPV and improve the wellbeing and livelihood of women and girls” (Willie & Kershaw, 2019, p. 257).
-- An ecological study in Spain found that the prevalence of IPV was higher in communities with greater gender inequality (Redding, Ruiz-Cantero, Fernández-Sáez, & Guijarro-Garvi, 2017).
Approaches to education
I agree with the paper that approaches to education cannot be based in simplistic, deterministic models of personal change. This is a well-established point in scholarship on effective strategies of violence prevention education and respectful relationships education.
I also agree that our work with boys and men should address trauma. Again, this is something that receives increasing emphasis, whether in international reports by Equimundo, scholarly accounts of men’s anti-violence work, or principles for best practice in violence prevention work with men and boys from Canada. (I’m glad to see that the NZ program She Is Not Your Rehab gets a brief mention.)
Too much of this paper is written as if the authors are the first to think of these issues or as if no one else is writing about or addressing them. Maybe that’s fine in a position piece rather than a scholarly discussion, but the lack of acknowledgement of existing work is dismaying.
The paper paints existing violence prevention efforts as singlemindedly focused on the cognitive domain, as treating participants as blank slates with trouble-free lives, and so on. Yes, there’s a critique to be made, but it’s overdrawn here.
The paper also reads as if educators and practitioners working with men and boys are blissfully unaware of the resistance and backlash that some feel, and have no interest in ‘meeting them where they are’. Again, this is inaccurate, and does a disservice to the good work underway in Australia. And to the fact of regular discussions about issues of backlash and resistance and dedicated guides to preventing and reducing these in work with men and boys. (And yes, there is poor, simplistic, or even harmful work out there too.)
Measuring progress
The paper states that “We cannot rely on the National Community Attitudes Survey to measure the progress of our National Plan”. The NCAS is a key benchmark of progress, alongside another, the Personal Safety Survey (a national survey of violence victimisation).
I agree that these two are insufficient. Above all, we should be directly measuring *the problem*, the use of violence. Lula Dembele, colleagues at the Equality Institute, and I have been calling for some time for a national survey on violence perpetration, as a third key benchmark of Australia’s progress. See our Briefing Paper and subsequent report on who uses violence, how, and why.
Accountability
The paper emphases offender accountability. I agree with this principle. But given that perhaps only 1% of perpetrators will have contact with the criminal legal system, measures to hold perpetrators accountable that are confined to this system are doomed to fail. The paper offers some valuable thinking on measures that are outside the police and courts.
(A more minor point: The paper claims that “a small group of sexual violence perpetrators are responsible for multiple rapes”, but this data is contested, and other studies find that substantial minorities of men have used sexual violence.)
Note
I have artificially adjusted the year of publication of this piece on XY so that this is not on the front page of XY.
These notes may be circulated.
References
Campbell, J. K., Rothman, E. F., Shareef, F., & Siegel, M. B. (2019). The Relative Risk of Intimate Partner and Other Homicide Victimization by State-Level Gender Inequity in the United States, 2000–2017. Violence and Gender, 6(4), 211-218. doi:10.1089/vio.2019.0023
Casey, E. A., & Lindhorst, T. P. (2009). Toward a Multi-Level, Ecological Approach to the Primary Prevention of Sexual Assault: Prevention in Peer and Community Contexts. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 10(2), 91-114. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838009334129
DeGue, S., Holt, M. K., Massetti, G. M., Matjasko, J. L., Tharp, A. T., & Valle, L. A. (2012). Looking ahead toward community-level strategies to prevent sexual violence. Journal of Women’s Health, 21(1), 1-3. doi:10.1089/jwh.2011.3263
DeGue, S., Valle, L. A., Holt, M. K., Massetti, G. M., Matjasko, J. L., & Tharp, A. T. (2014). A systematic review of primary prevention strategies for sexual violence perpetration. Aggression and violent behavior, 19(4), 346-362. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2014.05.004
Flood, M. (2023). Community-level prevention: A vital next step in ending domestic, family and sexual violence. Centre for Justice Briefing Papers, 37.
Gómez-Casillas, A., Van Damme, M., & Permanyer, I. (2023). Women’s and men’s status: Revisiting the relationship between gender equality and intimate partner violence against women in Europe. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(15-16), 8755-8784.
Heise, L. L., & Kotsadam, A. (2015). Cross-national and multilevel correlates of partner violence: an analysis of data from population-based surveys. The Lancet Global Health, 3(6), e332-e340.
Humbert, A. L., Strid, S., Hearn, J., & Balkmar, D. (2021). Undoing the ‘Nordic Paradox’: Factors affecting rates of disclosed violence against women across the EU. PLoS ONE, 16(5).
Ivert, A.-K., Gracia, E., Lila, M., Wemrell, M., & Merlo, J. (2020). Does country-level gender equality explain individual risk of intimate partner violence against women? A multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA) in the European Union. European Journal of Public Health, 30(2), 293-299.
Our Watch. (2021). Change the Story: A shared framework for the primary prevention of violence against women in Australia. Retrieved from Melbourne:
Redding, E. M., Ruiz-Cantero, M. T., Fernández-Sáez, J., & Guijarro-Garvi, M. (2017). Gender inequality and violence against women in Spain, 2006-2014: towards a civilized society. Gaceta sanitaria, 31, 82-88.
Tharp, A. T., DeGue, S., Lang, K., Valle, L. A., Massetti, G., Holt, M., & Matjasko, J. (2011). Commentary on Foubert, Godin, & Tatum (2010): The evolution of sexual violence prevention and the urgency for effectiveness. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 26(16), 3383-3392.
Willie, T. C., & Kershaw, T. S. (2019). An ecological analysis of gender inequality and intimate partner violence in the United States. Preventive Medicine, 118, 257-263.