Guiding Principles
The approach is based on the following guiding principles:
1. Prevention
In order to affect long-term, sustainable change, organizations can adopt a proactive rather than a reactive stance. A preventative approach assumes it is not enough to provide services to women experiencing violence or to promote an end to violence without challenging communities to examine the assumptions that perpetuate it. Prevention involves addressing the root causes of violence against women by introducing a gender-based analysis domestic violence. This means recognizing women's low status and rigid gender roles as the root causes of domestic violence. Prevention work involves challenging the widely held belief that women are less valuable as human beings and therefore not worthy of possessing the same inherent rights and dignity as men. Efforts must expose this fundamental injustice and work proactively to challenge these assumptions.
2. Holistic
Preventing domestic violence requires commitment and engagement of the whole community. Ad hoc efforts that engage isolated groups or implement sporadic activities have limited impact. Efforts to prevent domestic violence need to be relevant and recognize the multifaceted and interconnected relationships of community members and institutions. This means it is important for organizations to acknowledge the complex history, culture, and relationships that shape a community and individual's lives within it. Efforts must creatively engage a cross section of community members, not just women, in order to generate sufficient momentum for change. People live in community with others; thus, the whole community needs to be engaged for community wide change to occur.
3. A Process of Social Change
Changing community norms is a process, not a single event. Projects based on an understanding of how individuals naturally go through a process of change can be more effective than haphazard messages thrust into the community. Thus, efforts to try to influence social change must be approached systematically. Organizations that attempt this work can become skilled facilitators of individual and collective change by working with, guiding, facilitating, and supporting the community along a journey of change.
4. Repeated Exposure to Ideas
Community members need to be engaged with regular and mutually reinforcing messages from a variety of sources over a sustained period of time. This contributes to changing the climate in the community and building momentum for change. For example, in one week a man may hear a sermon about family unity in church, see a mural questioning domestic violence on his walk to work, hear a radio program about human rights, and be invited by a neighbour to join a men's group to discuss parenting skills. Repeated exposure to ideas from a variety of sources can significantly influence perception and reinforce practice.
5. Human Rights Framework
A rights-based approach to preventing domestic violence is empowering to women and the community. It uses the broader framework of human rights to create a legitimate channel for discussing women's needs and priorities and holds the community accountable for treating women as valuable and equal human beings. It challenges community members to examine and assess their value system and empowers them to make meaningful and sustainable change. Without this foundation, projects tend to appeal to the goodwill or benevolence of others to keep women safe.
6. Community Ownership
Effective projects aimed at changing harmful beliefs and practices in a community must engage and be lead by members of that community. Organizations can play an important facilitative and supportive role, yet the change must occur in the hearts and minds of the community members themselves. Organizations can work closely with individuals, groups, and institutions to strengthen their capacity to be agents of change in their community. In this way, their activism will live long after specific projects end.
