ABSTRACT
Although the effort to prevent men’s violence against women is still a relatively recent phenomenon, committed individuals and organizations have developed a variety of innovative approaches. In this chapter, we describe some of the best programs currently in practice. Some introductory considerations are warranted. First, primary prevention strategies focus on men and boys. Since males perpetrate the vast majority of gender-based violence, reducing its incidence requires their participation. Second, most of the programs we describe focus on sexual assault. Since a large number of prevention programs originated in colleges and universities, and since sexual assault is epidemic in these settings, the tendency of programming experts is to focus on this problem more than on other forms of gendered violence, although there is increasing attention to stalking and dating violence. Awareness of these latter forms of violence is more recent than for sexual assault, hence programming that addresses them is less well-developed. Third, the amount of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of these efforts differs among programs, but is scant in most cases. There is a strong need for extensive research into the effects of prevention efforts on behavior change. Finally, most programming takes place in higher
researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (discussed in chapter 7) identified, 19 were located on college campuses, and many of the remaining programs had affiliations with higher education (Clinton-Sherrod et al., 2003).
