How Can I Prevent Sexual Violence? > Prevention Strategies

Prevention Strategies

To truly prevent sexual violence we need to consider all of the factors that create an environment where sexual violence can occur.

Sexual violence does not occur in a vacuum - it is influenced and informed by history, social values, cultural and individual beliefs and can therefore vary depending on the time and place.

A Comprehensive Approach

While sexual violence is committed by individuals, preventing that behavior requires taking into account multiple domains of influence - family, peers, community, institutions, media, broader society - and their relative impacts on individuals and their behavior.

An ecological approach recognizes that the individual is strongly influenced by domains, systems and norms, and that influencing each of these will reduce violence. It also recognizes that no one group or institution can end sexual violence alone and that change needs to take place across multiple domains to truly impact the problem.

Using a comprehensive model allows individuals and groups to identify where they can participate in prevention efforts given their strengths, resources, and experience.

Preventing sexual violence requires the recognition that conditions within our society and communities perpetuate this type of violence. The beliefs we share, the gender roles we reinforce, and the myths we validate all contribute to a climate in which sexual violence is permitted and condoned.

Challenging the systems, norms and beliefs that enable people to wield power and control over others is among the most promising of approaches to prevent sexual violence before it occurs. Efforts of this nature foster a culture in which everyone takes action to reduce the factors that contribute to sexual violence.

Focus on Primary Prevention

Primary prevention strategies focus on changing the underlying conditions that allow sexual violence to occur. Primary prevention efforts:

• are comprehensive (focused at multiple levels of the ecological model),
• are evidence-based (informed by the best available research/expertise and by providing culturally competent strategies within each community),
• involve leadership from diverse communities,
• incorporate an understanding that without social justice there will always be violence (which includes the elimination of societal inequities), and
• work to create sustainable and lasting change.

Some examples of primary prevention strategies include (but are not limited to) efforts which:

• seek to change knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and norms about the acceptability of sexual violence and which inhibit the occurrence of sexual violence;
• enhance protective factors and promote healthy and safe attitudes and beliefs about sexuality;
• engage youth and strengthen their developmental assets, particularly individuals who show risk factors for becoming perpetrators;
• empower those who witness (bystanders) attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence to speak out or intervene;
• promote the status of women and girls and focus on the issue of male violence; and
• address the root causes of violence in our society.

1 Adapted from Recommendations to Prevent Sexual Violence in Oregon: A Plan of Action